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.

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.

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.

As usual, we were very fortunate: Our email address won several lotteries and we only had to pay the requisite taxes in advance to collect the winnings. In addition, several remarkably wealthy relatives we had never heard of had died and left us enough money to pay off the national debt of Bhutan. We didn’t even have to attend a reading of the will, but could simply show our acknowledgement by depositing some “good faith” money in a bank account that the writer could access. It certainly was a heart-warming month – except for the loss of the relatives, of course.

Spam filters aren’t new, but Gmail’s “Priority Inbox” feature is; Joy just started using it. Google says Priority Inbox users are more productive. They spend 43 percent more time on important mail as opposed to unimportant mail. (Who are they to say what mail is unimportant? They miss a lot of contest winnings.) Priority Inbox users spend 15 percent less time on email, they say.

Joy’s inbox is divided into “Important,” “Starred” and “Everything Else.” She tries to answer most of the priority mail each day, and then archives the rest in a designated “priority” folder she created. After a quick glance over the mail in the “Everything Else” category, she puts a check mark next to anything that looks interesting and clicks “move to” to move it to her priority folder. Then she clicks “all” to mark the remaining mail and clicks “delete.” (Poof!)

Bob isn’t using Priority Inbox. He likes to see a unified inbox and decide for himself just what’s priority and what isn’t.  Despite this rather cavalier attitude, the program learns from his actions by noticing what he deletes without reading or answering.

Ah, but one man’s (or woman’s) junk mail may be another’s path to fame and riches. If you hover over the yellow “priority” icon, you can read Google’s explanation of why some mail was marked priority. In some cases, it’s because of people’s names, in others because of key words. Often the mail is designated as priority because you corresponded with the sender in the past. Spam, alas, is slightly more difficult to define. You may be enchanted by constant offers to buy muskrat pelts or salami scented candles. If so, that mail can be saved.

The new AOL will have a “quick bar” that lets you send email, instant messages, go to Facebook and send Twitter updates without leaving your inbox. You can bring in mail from other services, such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. “SmartView” highlights your most important info. Single-click searching lets you search across all your email accounts and folders and keeps refining the search as you go.  You also get unlimited storage. Email attachments can be as big as 25 megabytes. (That’s big.)

You won’t even have to have an AOL address. Your email address can be YourName, followed by @love.com, wow.com or games.com, among others.

If you’ve ever wondered whether someone looked at your email or not, you could use an email tracker. Gmail users can use Email Oracle, a free program from EmailOracle.com.

The old style was to ask an email recipient to click on a built-in receipt to show they got it. But EmailOracle embeds a tiny image in the email. When the recipient opens the email, that image is sent to EmailOracle’s computers. A little tracking window at the top of your Gmail screen then lets you know it’s been opened.

A similar service that works with Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Gmail and other online email systems is SpyPig, which is also free.  It has some drawbacks: The chief one is that you have to manually load it every time you want to track an email. The nice thing is that the tracking image you add to an email can be invisible. Go to spypig.com for more info.

Why use Gmail at all? Having your email automatically forwarded to a Gmail account is a great way to save your sanity. Gmail uses Google’s powerful search engine to make messages easy to find months after you’ve stored them.  You can set up filters to have some types of email skip the inbox and go right into a folder or trash box. A new feature is “canned messages.” You can set up a filter so that a certain type of email always gets a canned response. Our favorite is the one used by the late Senator Metzenbaum of Ohio. It’ started out: “We think we should let you know someone is ending out crank messages under your name.” They also have “vacation response” messages.

We use Google Gears to get our email offline. Offline mail is faster and easier to deal with because you don’t have to wait for web pages to load.  You can set it up to work with Microsoft Outlook, or use it on its own.  Go to Gears.Google.com to set it up.

The calls are free to any other U.S. phone, whether landline or cell phone until the end of 2010. Calls to other countries are not free, but just a few cents. All you need is a microphone plugged into your computer; most laptops have one built in.  We tried making calls and they were clear.

Start by clicking “call phone” on the left of the Gmail screen. You don’t have to know the phone number to call it from Gmail. As long as you’ve kept your contact list up to date, you can simply type their name into the call box and Gmail will automatically retrieve the number and dial it for you. Often, just the first few letters are enough. If your contact has more than one number, click the one you want.

If the person you call has Caller ID, they will think you are calling from California. That’s because Google has a single phone number dedicated to outbound calls, and it’s a Northern California number. If you have a “Google Voice” account, however, Caller ID will display your own Google dedicated number.  Google Voice is very handy. Anyone who calls your Google Voice number will ring all of your phones. You can choose a keyword to make that Voice number memorable. Ours ends in “bob-joy.”

Voice is free from Google.com/Voice but requires that you have a Gmail account. Those accounts are also free. If you want one, you can sign up at Gmail.com. About 300 million people have already done so. You can see the phone call rates for other countries at google.com/voice/rates.

This is heavy competition for Skype, the leader in free Internet phone calling, which by the way has announced plans for its initial public stock offering soon. Skype keeps getting better, however, so we’re not counting them out. Besides using Skype on any computer, you can use it for free calling on any Verizon smart phone, iPhone, and a dozen Nokia models.

We would. We’re at 70 percent of our Gmail storage capacity. That would be 100 percent if we hadn’t evolved a system for handing inbox bloat. Here are our favorite tips.

1. Click “create a filter.” Then choose the kind of message that can skip the inbox and go right into a folder, which in Gmail is called a label. Later, if you “remove label,” you can also remove all the conversations associated with that label, which is akin to emptying a folder in Microsoft Outlook. In our inboxes, all email from Mary Schmidt goes right into the Mary Schmidt folder. When we no longer needs those messages, we can delete them in one fell swoop by choosing “remove label.”

2. Do a search on words like “Plaxo” or “Amazon” that are likely to contain notifications you no longer need to save. Then delete all.

3. Do a search by date and delete all messages from three years ago.