The main job of this excellent little program is to monitor any number of Gmail inboxes and labels.  You can customize each account with individual colors and sounds too.  You can also instantly rely to emails, without even having to open your web browser.  It is also fully compatible with Google Apps and the standard free Gmail e-mail accounts too.

The features do not stop there.  You can also use it to monitor multiple Google Talk accounts, receive desktop alerts for calendar events, get the latest Google news feeds or stay up to date with the current weather conditions.  Any RSS feed can also be directly plugged into Scott’s Gmail Alert, for easy access to your favorite website stories.

Your registration (which is only $3) will unlock support for monitoring an unlimited number of Gmail accounts, the Calendar functions and RSS feed monitoring.

Go give it a shot – I can promise you that you will not find another Gmail monitoring program that does so much.

Here are three great services that can help you market to your audience via email:

Campaigner – The Campaigner service really focuses on making email marketing easy.  You can pick from predesign templates for your email messages, get statistics on who is reading your email announcements you send out and save some money too.  While the service is not 100% free, you do get a 30 day free trial and the average cost after that is only $10 per month.

MailChimp – I am a big fan of what MailChimp does, because they seem to be a company that is really staying up to date with all the latest and greatest ways you can reach your customers and they provide you with great tools to do so.  They give you all the same basic email marketing tools Campaigner does, but you can also sign up for a free account.  The free account is limited to 1,000 subscribers a month and 6,000 emails per month – but that should be enough room to help you decide if it is the right tool for you to use in your own business.

RatePoint – The RatePoint service takes the cake when it comes to providing you both free and premium email marketing services.  It does not just stop at email marketing though.  They also give you business review tools, online survey tools, and social marketing tools too.  Using the free service, you can send emails out to 550 contacts and the premium services start at $25 per month.

Which One is the Best E-mail Marketing Tool?

That is a hard call to make, but I think the fight would be between MailChimp and RatePoint.  Where MailChimp gives you more bang for your buck when it comes to the number of people you can contact, RatePoint gives you more tools to use to grow your business. 

Well I guess it finally happened sometime last night. The nice sleek and clean interface of Yahoo! Mail became ad-tastic. As an AT&T DSL customer I was getting the “plus” E-mail pack with my Web mail from Yahoo. I have been over this story before though.

I don’t mind ads on Web sites that are more “general” – that isn’t what bugs me. I just don’t like ads in my applications – such as Web mail, feed readers, ect.

Here is some feedback from others who don’t like being in the same boat:

I am on the phone with Yahoo At&T right now and they maintain that this is a part of their world class service. They are actually telling me that over the phone! It does get better, they are trying to give me a case ID that….you guessed it….they cannot send via email! I am a mail plus customer as well, no way I am sticking around and paying for something like this. Off to Google and GMail.

I’m a paid AT&T/Yahoo Mail, and first the very fist time I’ve found it being “decorated” and “laced” with all sorts of ads. I suppose I’d just have live with them now.

The ads hit my inbox tonight. Unacceptably obtrusive and annoying. I cannot believe paying DSL customers are being treated this way. No way I’m gonna send AT&T/Yahoo more money for an ad-free “plus” account. That is part of what I’ve been paying for the past several years. Time to change my homepage to Google and set-up a G-mail account.

So looks like I have two options that I’d consider going with. Go out and find a Greasemonkey script to take ‘em out or go give my money to Google for their apps service. I’m starting to lean towards the Gmail option – just got to find the time to give Yahoo a swift kick in the rear and a wave goodbye.

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Need more? have another resource listed there that might not be right now? Let me know! I’ll be happy to add more of those cool little badges as long as I don’t have to put them on every single Web page.

I’ll work with you if you work with me!

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