E-mail catching up to technology

Each year new models of cars hit the market with new bells and whistles that automakers think that car drivers want.

Technology, specifically e-mailing, is no different.

It seem that e-mails are as dynamic as the currents in the Santa Cruz River during the monsoon season. No self-respecting e-mail service offers less than 100MB of space to e-mail account holders, but most free Web-based e-mail services offer at least 1GB of space.

E-mail providers also offer services to protect users from incoming threats such as spyware and viruses. In addition, account holders were given more customization options to personalize their correspondences.

One area that was not previously emphasized was sender features.

Sender features are among the most sought after features in technology, and plenty of companies are stepping up to fill that need. Has there ever been a time when you sent an e-mail and you were unsure if you should have sent it, after you have clicked send?

Services like those offered on kablooeymail.com and echoworx.com claim to not only retrieve sent e-mail messages, but also both offer a self-destruct feature. The self-destruct feature allows the sender to set a window of time that the e-mail can be read. Once that time has elapsed, the e-mail is deleted. Very James Bondish.

Other features of note are the ability to not only be notified when a sent e-mail is opened, but on which machine it was opened and how long the message was opened.

Senders also have the right to prevent the e-mail from being forwarded or saved to hard drives. Not surprisingly, Microsoft has incorporated many of these features into the latest edition of Outlook.

E-mails are a major vertebra in the communication backbone of many businesses large and small. Rpost.com has developed an e-mail service that targets the specific needs of commerce. It offers registered e-mail, which is an e-mail that has been verified by a series of access questions. The registered e-mails also have a digital seal to ensure that the e-mail was not tampered with or altered.

The rationale behind these services is that it will make it easier for firms to confidentially negotiate via e-mail or if they need to use the e-mails in court.

Mutt.org made sure that Linux users weren't left out of the e-mail retrieval revolution, but their features are more subdued and primarily consist of deleting the text from sent e-mails that have not been read.

Needless to say, I imagine that all of these new features will become the new standard for all e-mail accounts.

I think that features like these will have a greater impact than what can be superficially seen. They'll preserve marriages, careers, and friendships.