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Cool Tools for Enhanced E-Mail

You don't have to dump your favorite e-mail program to gain a raft of new features. These utilities and plug-ins can spiff up your in-box in a jiffy.

All the feed you can eat: Want to read the New York Times alongside your e-mail? An integrated RSS aggregator, such as the $29 Newsgator, shuttles news headlines directly to folders in Microsoft Outlook. You can subscribe to a wide range of news feeds, including PC World (natch). If you're not an Outlook fan, try the Genecast News Service ($18 for 6 months), which works inside Outlook Express, Netscape Mail, and Thunderbird.

Back that thang up: E-mail is too important to leave unbacked up. The Genie-Soft $30 Outlook Express Backup 6.5 and the $30 Outlook Backup 6.0 (both from www.genie-soft.com) are a snap to use: Just click along with the wizard to back up your mail files, address book, and browser favorites. You can save each of your identities separately, split huge backups across multiple discs, and schedule regular automated backups.

Get organized: Like a housekeeper for Outlook, the Nelson Email Organizer from Caelo Software ($29) grabs your mail and organizes it by sender, status, date, and more. Copies of messages appear in more than one place, so you don't have to remember where NEO stashed them.

Prompt attention: Got more e-mail accounts than you can keep track of? The free EPrompter utility checks up to 16 accounts--including AOL, Hotmail, MSN, POP3, and Yahoo Mail--and displays all your new messages in a single user interface.

PC World Contributing Editor Dan Tynan checks his e-mail obsessively.