In 1978, Shiva Ayyadurai was asked if he could create a system like the inter-office mail that some companies used, but one that could be used outside of the office. He was at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey at the time. He not only could solve that problem but he got a copyright on his creation in 1982.

CompuServe and MCI Mail were the first formally-sanctioned email carriers. They arrived on the scene in 1989. Bob used CompuServe in those days and Joy started a little later with Prodigy. AOL didn’t come along until 1993. Hotmail, which is now the world’s most popular online email service, was born in 1996.

One way to go is Gmail Organizer. It’s $7 from PCmag.com, or free if you pay $20 a year for a subscription to all the downloads they offer. Click on “downloads” at PCmag.com to find it, or click here.

In the next few weeks Google is coming out with a new way to organize your Gmail. Their “Priority Inbox” feature has been a hit and they’re adding others. Joy uses Priority Inbox so everything that’s not pertinent goes into a bulk mail folder. This takes care of the “Don’t miss this important offer” kind of mail. The new feature will let you put starred mail or important mail at the top of that box, so you can save the mail you’d like to look at later. Click the “Labs” link under “Options” to turn on new features.

It’s a good idea, and good luck trying to get it to catch on. If everyone on our list of 9,331 email contacts used it, we could easily zip through the mail. The problem, of course, will be getting people to get their message across in 100 words or less. (Abraham Lincoln once apologized to a follower after a long speech, saying: “I would have made it shorter but I didn’t have enough time.”)

Shortmail messages can be public or private. If public, they’re more like tweets. In fact, signing up requires a Twitter account. If you don’t have one, it takes about a minute to get an account and it’s free.

If someone sends an email longer than 500 characters, Shortmail sends them a message saying: “Hey, your message is too long for Shortmail” and tells them to edit it. This may be insulting to your boss or future customer, so our approach is to use the Shortmail “compose” window to see how long our emails are, and get in the habit of writing shorter ones. At least that’s what Joy’s doing. Bob never writes long emails. Doesn’t read them either. If someone sends a long email to your new Shortmail address, you still get it, but it goes directly into an archive folder.

Shortmail is a great idea, but for a really concise message, put the whole thing in the subject line and end it with “EOM,” for “end of message.” If you do that, people don’t even have to open the mail. More info at shortmail.com

In this $10 program, the backspace key is the most heavily used. It sends email to your favorite folder. Other shortcut keys move mail to other folders. If you forget what’s where, you can look at the top of the screen, where each folder has its own button. You can also change the names of those buttons and folders. Get more info about this utility at www.singlefileclicking.com.

If you’re primarily a Gmail user like us, there are all kinds of similar shortcuts for filing email. Google the words: “Gmail shortcuts” to find a list of choices. If you use Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail, do a Google search for their shortcuts.

The game is made by Baydin, which also has plug-ins for Outlook and Gmail to let you schedule the time an email will be sent off, or “boomerang” the email so that it comes back to you at a later time. (Hard to figure the use of that.) They exhort you to get to “Inbox Zero” in 15 minutes. See it at emailga.me.

Privacy watchdogs went on the alert recently when a new version of Yahoo! mail included targeted ads. How can they target you if they don’t read your email?

Well they do. Sort of. Just as with Gmail and AOL, computerized “bots” (short for software robots) scan emails looking for keywords. If they see words like football and baseball, they send that person ads for team memorabilia, sports channels, etc. They’re called “targeted ads” ads aimed at specific customers. Google has been doing this for years.

We prefer targeted ads to untargeted — who wants to see ads for pianos if you’re not a musician? And, the Yahoo ads are really colorful, instead of the plain text ads from Google. So far we’ve seen ads for laptops, credit scores and of all things, wrinkle cream. None of these were of the slightest interest. If you just hate the idea of receiving targeted ads, you can opt out by going to www.tinyurl.com/offYahooAds.  To opt out of all ads, install a free extension, such as Adblock Plus.

A neat thing about the new Yahoo! mail is the free apps that come with it. You get unlimited storage on your personal online drive, the ability to interact with Facebook friends, nice photo editing, a calendar, some fun fonts to use for your email, the ability to attach large files (100 megabytes) and an automatic email organizer.

Here’s another reason you might want to try it: Yahoo lays claim to being the number one spam blocker, blocking 550 billion spam messages a month. And the new version is said to be twice as fast. Unfortunately, we have no way of checking that.

Google the words “yahoo beta” to or go www.overview.mail.yahoo.com to get more info or sign up.

(An End Note or what academics would call a “Nota Bene:” If you are concerned about all the invasions of privacy going on today, and want to do something to stop it you’re too late. There are so many ways to find our who you are, what you’re doing and your preference in breakfast cereal, that you are shouting into a wind storm.

Every car you rent and almost every truck on the road, has a GPS monitor that tells the owner where that vehicle is at every moment, how it got there and how long it’s been there. Even Caterpillar, the country’s largest maker of earth moving equipment, has sensors that tell the equipment owner how it’s being used and whether the operator leaves it running on their lunch hour.

This is simply business. Everybody wants to cut costs and sell products. Waste costs money. Thirty years ago at the Chicago Tribune, back when everyone used “dumb terminals” instead of PCs, the publisher wondered what the reporters and editors were really doing as they tapped away at their keyboards. So the main frame computer analyzed this and found that thirty percent of their time was spent playing a text game called “Adventure.” That was promptly removed.

There are a number of situations where this could save your bacon, so to speak, even if you’re a vegetarian. Employees and executives are sometimes loose with the information they send. Kids (and sometimes not just kids) have been known to send embarrassing photos that get forwarded or printed and then widely distributed. We’re sure you can think of more.

The founder of JumbleMe is a doctor who wanted to email his patients but knew he could run afoul of federal privacy laws. These can carry a fine of a million dollars. (Which is why doctors shy away from email.) Other encryption solutions get expensive, so Greg Hill invented his own, which is fully compliant with the law.

The free version lets you send 100 encrypted emails a year. It also lets you know when your emails are read, and has an add-in for Outlook and anti-virus screening. For $10 a year, you can send 500 encrypted emails.

This Xobni window is to the right of your Gmail or Outlook.

“Xobni” is inbox spelled backwards. It’s pronounced “zobnee,” and what it does is add the sender’s photo and contact information to one side of incoming email. We’ve tried it and have now seen scores of photos of people we’re not sure we wanted to see.  But now when they pitch us a story, we can look at it and say, “Nice hairdo.”

It used to be available only for Microsoft Outlook and Blackberry but a new version is in the “alpha” testing phase, as they say, and works with Gmail. If you want to try it, they gave us 100 invitations to hand out for free So if you go to xobni.com/gmailbeta/, put in your email address and then type “XOBNI-ONCOMP” (without the quotes) for the password you might get in to the “beta” or next phase.

Besides seeing your correspondent’s Facebook or LinkedIn photo on the side of your screen, you also get interesting statistics. Joy discovered that Margie, her most frequent correspondent, has traded 933 messages with her over the last four years (Margie always has a lot to say). She also saw a list of subject lines in the most recent 30 messages, and the most recent comments on Margie’s Facebook page.  Xobni said Margie and Joy have 87 contacts in common. When Joy went to answer the most recent note,  Xobni made suggestions as to others who might want to be included in the email.

Xobni also does search. Type in “Larry” and you’ll see all the Larrys you correspond with, along with their photos. You can do this in Gmail anyway, but it’s handy to see all the different Larry photos, in case you’re not sure who’s who. (If your correspondent never posted a photo of themselves – and quite a few people don’t – well then, you don’t see what they look like.)

Coming in the next few months are Xobni apps for iPhone and Android phones and tablets. You can already get these on the Blackberry. More info at xobni.com.

Sorting your email is a big step toward taming it. If you use Gmail, which about 100 million people do, there’s a new mail organizer. To get it, click the “Labs” button under “options.”

The new feature is called “Smart Labels” and it can automatically sort email into “bulk mail,” “notifications,” and “forums.” Notifications tend to be receipts for things and statements like “Your package has been shipped.” Bulk mail includes notices and often newsletters you signed up for. “Forums” are typically emails from groups you probably signed up for.

You can tweak these labels by clicking the “filters” link in Gmail. Create you own filters and labels. For example, all mail to Joy from one of her PEO woman’s organization members goes into a single folder.

Tip on how to stop spam that just won’t quit: If you keep getting spam, even after labeling it spam, you can choose a word or two from the subject line or sender, such as “credit scores” and have that mail automatically deleted.

Choose a new one at bouncr.com and any email sent to that address will pass on to your regular email account, but the sender won’t know your true address. The new address you choose will end in “bouncr.com,” which isn’t that short but it has its advantages. Because if someone is sending you spam or otherwise unwanted messages, you can easily change or delete that address. If the bouncr address you select is already taken, try another. Joy tried to get joy@bouncr.com but it was taken, so she settled for joyschwab@bouncr.com. )