Google.com/dashboard lets you manage your Google accounts, documents, personal information and “alerts.” Alerts are emails you can receive on a given subject. Bob gets alerts on Ned Davis, the investment guru, which brings tidbits of the latest research to his inbox. Oddly enough, you can even list yourself as an “alert” to be followed, and then receive notices whenever your name is mentioned on the web. The Dashboard has lots of information.

Sometimes you search on a subject simply because you’re thinking of a present for someone, fishing equipment for a relative who likes to fish, for example. You, yourself have no interest in fishing, nonetheless the literal minded computers think you do and will show you ads and other information aimed at fishing. To stop seeing display ads you don’t want, go to Google.com/ads/preferences.

Buzz is a social networking site that lives in your Gmail account. If you’re not a Gmail user, you can sign up for free at gmail.com and have all your email forwarded there forever. If you are a Gmail user, you will have an “inbox” and a “buzz” box. Click on “buzz” to see photos, twitters, blog posts, etc. from any of the contacts you’re following. You don’t have to go to Facebook, Twitter, or some other site. It’s will all appear in you new buzz box.  You can comment on your friends’ posts or photos just as in Facebook, or just say you like them, without leaving Gmail. If you decide someone is boring, just “unfollow” them. There’s also a mobile version for your iPhone or Android phone, which posts your location as well as your message.  Other platforms are coming soon.

We tried it and loved it. The layout is a lot clearer and easier to use than FaceBook’s. It’s always tough entering a race after the others have left the gate, but this looks like a good one and should capture a big chunk of the social networking market.

If all your email is organized by the name of the sender – which is the most common way, you can click on a name and see everything they ever wrote to you or you wrote to them, no matter how long ago. A $50 program called NEO Pro, from Caelo Software, does this sort of organizing and many other styles automatically. It uses Microsoft Outlook as a mail manager but you don’t have to be an Outlook user, it simply has to be there on your system.

The usefulness for a business shouldn’t be under-estimated, especially in these days of email messages being subpoenaed as evidence in court cases. We would think any business might want a quick look at emails sent or received by key people, or anyone who might be even remotely related to a complaint or legal problem. Nice to have such messages all come up in one long list. That list can then be searched by subject. This could be attorney heaven.

NEO works with Microsoft Outlook, running in a separate window. However, you can minimize Outlook and work in NEO alone. That’s the way we used it. Unlike Outlook, NEO provides tabs across the top of the screen: “hot,” “correspondents,” “bulk mail,” “categories,” “date,” and so on. You can move everything out of your inbox and it still exists in an archive, neatly categorized by person, category, date and so on.

The new version of NEO adds search boxes everywhere. No matter what folder you’re in, there is a search box where you can enter key search terms. So if you’re in “Joe Smith’s” folder, you can search by keyword, attachment, name, etc. You can search by the type of attachment: PDF, JPEG, Word document or any of a dozen other categories.

The first time you let NEO go to work may be a bit of a shock. Joy’s inbox quickly filled with 22,000 messages, all the email she had archived for the past several years.  She was able to classify and organize them with two clicks of her mouse. Most were neatly categorized, but 800 had gone into a junk folder by mistake. Not being an Outlook user, she also had to configure it so that when she started to type in a few letters of a name, the program would fill in the rest of the email address.

There were several things we wished NEO had: In Gmail, if you use the word “attach” when you’re sending an email, but then forget to include the attachment, you get a reminder message. Gmail also shows you thumbnail images of any attachments in an email, so you don’t have to open them to get a good idea of what’s there. Gmail has an “undo” feature, so if you suddenly regret having just sent off that angry or insulting note (and who doesn’t sometimes?), you have several seconds to cancel it.  Gmail lets you search the web from within an email and paste the results. By the way, you can activate this feature and others by clicking the “labs” setting. It’s at the top of the Gmail screen and looks like a little green bottle.

Overall, NEO made email fun again, and many of those missing Gmail features can be had through free Outlook add-ins. Lots more info on NEO at emailorganizer.com. A basic version of the program costs $15, and there’s a free trial. If you just want your email categorized by sender, you might also look at the free Xobni.com.

Picture pasted with "PicturePaste"

If cloud computing is so easy, why can’t you copy and paste images from Microsoft Word or Excel into your Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, or any other web-based application? We’re not sure of the answer but we have a free solution.

PicturePaste from picturepaste.com is a free Windows program that lets you copy and paste just about any image into a web-based application like email, Google docs, WordPress or Blogger. Start up the program and right-click an image. Choose “copy.”   Click “convert” and drag the image into your email.

One can argue that it’s easy to put an image into an email message anyway. With Gmail, you just click the picture icon and browse to its location. Or just attach it. But the nice thing about Picture Paste is that you don’t have to save the images first, you just copy and paste. It doesn’t matter where you’re copying a picture from. You can also paste screen captures. The regular version is free, but power users might want the $30 advanced version. You can view feature comparisons at the web site.

The best description we’ve seen comes from Spain. Techies there say it’s a high-powered email program that lets people jump into the middle of conversations at any point. As one user put it, “It allows adding more people to an email ping-pong thread.” The ping-pong part means there’s a multi-person conversation already going on. A tech expert at a school in Murcia, Spain (a lovely town, by the way, known for silk weaving), says it has saved hours of call-backs and resending emails. He thinks it will kill Facebook and Twitter within six months.

Besides opening a Google wave to let others jump in, a message with calendars, video, photos, music, etc., can be sent to everyone onboard. There’s a “playback” button to rewind the wave for people who jumped in the pool after the party started.

Yahoo! has a couple of things Gmail doesn’t, and vice versa. For instance, Yahoo! has new built-in apps that let you send super large files or edit photos without leaving your email window (see New Yahoo Apps) . And we like how it lets you get rid of all spam by clicking “empty” next to your spam folder.

Gmail gives you over 7 gigabytes of storage space, great keyboard shortcuts,  and an “undo” function if you change your mind about the nasty letter you just sent. (See Top Ten Reasons).

If you want to give Gmail a try, and still keep your current email address, you can have mail that’s sent to you automatically forwarded to your new Gmail account.

Here are the steps:

Create your new Gmail account at Gmail.com.

Click “settings” at the top of your screen.

Click “accounts” and when you see “get mail from other accounts,”  click the “add account you own” link.

From then on, you can use your Gmail account for all mail. Mail coming to your other accounts will be forwarded there.

• Onlinefamily.norton.com. No parental control system is perfect, but at least this one is free until Jan.

• Plumchoice.com now offers tech support service for the Mac as well as the PC.

• Nextworth.com will take your old iPhone as a trade-in. You may earn enough for the new iPhone 3G S.

• Handmark.com‘s free Pocket Express provides directory assistance, maps, news and travel info for smart phones, without the hassle of using a mobile browser.
• Bitripper.com transfers the contents of a DVD to your hard drive or memory stick. That way you can watch the movie on regular computers or netbooks that don’t have DVD drives.   

A reader wrote to say he was fed up with his email program and was waving the white flag. We advised him to try Google’s Gmail. We made this switch four years ago and have been happy with it ever since.

The one great fear that people have about switching email hosts is that they will lose the old mail and lose touch with everyone who wrote them at that old address. This doesn’t happen. You can keep the old email addresses, just as we did, and check off the box to have that mail automatically forwarded to the new Gmail account. This fear of being cut off is so strong, by the way, that we have a friend of many years who refuses to make the shift despite our assurances. Believe us, there’s no danger.

Bob has over 5,000 emails in his Gmail inbox. Rather than delete old ones, he uses the search function to find messages. Joy, who is much more organized than Bob, likes to use the “archive” button to get the mail neatly put away each day. The emails are all still there and can be searched, they just aren’t in her inbox.

Joy uses labels to categorize her emails. For example, one group is labeled “Mary Schmitendorf” If a new note from Mary comes in, it is automatically labeled and archived, so she can reply on the weekend when she has more time. If you want to just label an email, without archiving it, you can tap the “v” key on your keyboard or click “move,” to move an email to one of your folders. To reply to a message, you can just tap “r,” and to reply to everyone involved, you tap “a.” You can even have more than one email account visible on the same screen. There are dozens of shortcuts. You can find them by — what else? — Googling “Gmail shortcuts.”

There are a ton of advantages to using Gmail, including an excellent spam filter and the ability to check your mail from any computer that can connect to the Internet.

Gmail has a great spam filter, so Greg transferred all his incoming email to a Gmail account (they’re free). Almost immediately, his incoming spam dropped to near zero. Unfortunately, his outgoing mail also dropped to near zero. Greg is in the furniture business and he started getting phone calls from angry customers saying how come he hadn’t emailed them the information they requested.

Here’s what happened: It turned out his inability to send email had nothing to do with his Gmail account or its spam filter but was caused by his Internet service provider. Because he’s in business, Greg maintains his own email server. That’s a computer dedicated in whole or part to handling his email. When he transferred the enormous amount of incoming mail from his server to his Gmail account, the watchdog software maintained by the service provider identified him as a spammer. After all, from the software’s point of view, he was sending almost a thousand emails a day, and he must be a spammer. So they cut off his outgoing email — to protect us.

We talked to someone at Google, the creators of Gmail, about this problem and got some helpful information. Our contact said that unfortunately Google has no control over the email server (which was Greg’s own computer) or his Internet service provider. What they do have, however, is a service that lets companies run their web domain and email accounts on “Google Apps,” at Google.com/a. (Click on the blue box, to find the business stuff.) This has several benefits, among them industrial strength spam and email control.

Businesses that use Microsoft Outlook can continue to do so. Their email address can be their company name.  If it’s a small business, like Greg’s, there is no charge by Google and they can use up to seven gigabytes of email storage and filtering; they don’t count spam as part of that. Larger businesses can use up to 25 gigabytes for mail for $50 per user per year. They also get free tech support.

We are Gmail users ourselves, and even though we get a lot of mail, and save more than half of it,  we still use only two gigabytes of email storage. Incoming spam is moved to a special storage area at Google, and is automatically dumped every 30 days. If it were not dumped regularly, spam would accumulate like a city’s garbage and completely overwhelm the system. If you suspect something useful recently came in and was mistakenly identified as spam, you have 30 days to rummage through the trash and try and find it. If you think you know the subject, you can simply do a key word search.