SOMEWHAT FRANK

AOL Launches Slick Web Mail Beta

Sporting a French gray color palette, AOL recently released a new AOL Mail Beta (codename: Cayman) to update the current web-based email product. It offers a clean Ajax interface extending a users usable space and making it easier to manage and organize large quantities of email. It is pretty slick. The biggest notable improvement is that messages can be read inline rather than via a pop-up window. However, if pop-up windows are your thing, than you can also opt to open messages in new windows. Users can now access email more quickly as the AOL Mail Beta has removed a click from the process. There are a number of additional interesting features including a right pane that give users quick access to "to do lists", "contacts" and even "celebrity gossip" via TMZ.com. Just remember, this is beta so there are some known issues that will be corrected before the product is ready for prime time.

AOL offers free email accounts and 2GB of storage space and you can even select your own personal email domain. I am extremely pleased with the new web mail product and would urge you to give it a try. I'd love to hear what you think.

Disclosure: I am an AOL employee. I do not work on AOL Mail but I am the product manager for two other AOL products.

Email Management: Liberate Your Inbox

Is your email inbox so full you cannot find what you are looking for? My corporate Outlook account was, until just recently. Tribune Interactive's new Product Development Manager, Carlos Pero, recommended a paper he had read a few months prior about managing your email account. He mentioned it was on the 37 Signals weblog, so I did a quick archive search and found this article by Mark Hurst titled Managing Incoming Email: What Every User Needs To Know. I read through it and was able to clean up my inbox from over 1000 emails to just 2.