E-mail management service

MOST OF us start our digital life by opening the e-mailbox. Though many of us enjoy reading mails, most of the time we may find it difficult to properly respond to the same as the number and requirements of the senders go on increasing. Failing to respond to a friend or a professional client may not damage the interests of ordinary people, but the organisations cannot afford to do so. They need some mechanism to automate the mail management process.

It is long time since e-mail has become a major business communication tool. The penetration of this technology among the masses coupled with the ease and swiftness with which the technology can be deployed has definitely improved the communication process of an organisation. One aspect of the e- mail service is that anybody who uses the same expects you to send a reply immediately- sending a belated reply is absolutely futile in this dispensation.

This aspect presents formidable challenges to a company that receives tens of thousands of e-mails daily from various quarters. Failure to send a mail may result in losing a valuable customer or trusted client in the supply chain. But it will definitely be a difficult task to send proper replies manually to each and every message that comes to an active company's mailbox. So the question boils down to finding a service that helps a firm automate the process of reading, analysing and responding to the received e-mails. There are some services that try to satisfy this e-mail management need and 'Echomail' is one such company.

Echomail

Echomail is an e-mail management service that once deployed, automatically receives, analyses, responds and routes all mails addressed to a company. The service's business intelligence engine, analyses each of the messages and categorises them according to the features of the mail such as attitude, issue, sender type and the like. Once the mail is analysed this way the system automatically composes a response tuned to the content of the e-mail and sends it across to the relevant departments. They can just look at the 'Echomail' generated response, examine it and send it to the addressee after making necessary changes if any, required. So each client will get an immediate reply that is tailored to his/her needs and mental makeup. For further details on this service visit the link at: http://echomail.com

Innovative search engine

Though we already have numerous search engines and other search tools, which let us spot the Net locations that host the content we look for, to tame the ever-growing Net resource-base there is still space for more search tools and search engines with innovative features. When we try to collect links that are of relevance to our subject through the popular search engines by typing in our search string in the appropriate box, most of them simply list out the links of the sites that contain the string. The onus of sifting out the links that are relevant to his/her subject rests with the user. If the search string contains a word that takes different meanings depending on the context, the search service might dish out many irrelevant links. For example, if you type the word 'virus' in an engine of this type, the service may list sites related to computer viruses as well as those that infect humans. What we need in situation of this kind is a categorised list of site links where the search results are presented under appropriate categories- like computer virus, AIDS and virus vaccine. The search service Vivisimo available at: http://www.vivisimo.com attempts to present its search results this way. The service collects the links, analyses them, generates categories and then presents them through a very user- friendly interface. The categories are placed in the left Window and the links related to a selected category are placed in the right Window.

In this context I think it will be appropriate to introduce another meta-search tool that helps you automatically deploy the services of more than one search engine. The utility, available at firststopwebsearch.com, `First Stop WebSearch' ropes in the service of many search engines such as Google, Excite and Yahoo once you type the search string in its interface and presents a combined result list. Before presenting the result it removes duplicate links and verifies the validity of them.

Browser tuner

What would be the favourite tool of an ordinary Netizen? What else other than the web browser that lets him/her access the resources that spread across the web! Would you like to measure the performance of your browser? Do you want to know whether the several browser functions such as multimedia, Java, ActiveX, scripting and security operate in your browser? If you are eager to learn more about these and other issues related to your browser, tune in to the service 'BrowserTune' and start the test available at: http://browsertune.com.

It conducts the test in three stages. The first level tests tell whether your browser supports simple features such as scripting and cookies. In the second level the service runs a series of diagnostic tests that help you determine whether your browser's major functions are operational or not. At the end of the analysis, the service will e-mail you a detailed report on the test results. In level three, the service examines almost all other functions of the browser, your Net connection speed and the like. This free service, apart from helping you understand the performance of your favourite browser and allowing you to compare it with other browsers, also provides valuable information on various browser features. This way the service has an educational component also.

J. Murali

(The author can be contacted at: murali27@satyam.net.in)

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Section  : Science & Tech
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