"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible. For many people, email contains valuable information that can be difficult to retrieve. We believe we can help with that." So says Google in its FAQs about Gmail, the coming free email service it announced last week.
Unless you know someone at Google well enough to be invited into the current testing phase, Gmail won't be available for a while. But the description of its features - a full Gigabyte of storage, full search functionality, and automated grouping and labeling - makes it intriguing as a partial answer to the personal KM questions raised by Dennis Kennedy and discussed in a recent post here.
You can sign up to receive updates on Gmail and its availability. I know I’m anxiously awaiting word on when I can try it out.
While waiting for Gmail to be available, I've been using a product called Nelson Email Organizer (http://www.caelo.com/a/rl.php3?i=P98RB ). Unlike Google, it's not web-based. Instead, it's been built as a companion product to MS Outlook. But, like Google, it has "full search functionality, and automated grouping and labeling". Further, it takes a unique approach to the handling of incoming messages with the use of a staging area where you can decide what (if anything) to do with each new message.
Anyway, IMHO it is a very clever tool for quickly storing and retrieving email.
Regards, Andrew Davis
Posted by: Andrew Davis | April 05, 2004 at 07:57 PM