My greatest sin? Taking two weeks to reply to even the most mundane of emails. Let's face it, some of us get more email than we can cope with some days and it takes a while to respond to everything promptly. It can even be hard to acknowledge that an email has been received at all: At least manually...

Robomagic's Auto-Reply can help—it's easy enough for a complete novice to configure, and yet it's powerful enough to tackle either a broad range of emails or to only respond to specific topics.

You'll need a constant dedicated connection to the Internet’s mail server to get Auto-Reply to work. Once you've entered in the settings, you provide the program with the content of what you'd like to send back to anyone who emails you.

But don't think you have to let this outgoing message respond to every single message that comes into your account. You can set up Auto-Reply to check multiple accounts...and only respond to specific messages. You can set up specific rules so that messages are only sent to specific incoming addresses or with specific subject lines.

Best of all, Auto-Reply leaves the mail it responds to on the server, so that you can check it remotely, and it still shows up as unread mail in your inbox when you check your mail. Just consider it your email answering machine! "Leave an email after the beep!"

Send a Voice Message Via Email
If you want to send an email with an extra special touch, or you know someone who’s dying to hear your oh-so-manly voice, why not send a voice message in an email? Using BigVoiceEmail, you can. It uses a recording format that allows you to send a small file size, yet retain a high quality recording, through your standard microphone setup. No special hardware is required, just a soundcard with a microphone jack. Even better, it uses Windows Media Format, which means that all the recipient needs to play the messages is a Windows based computer. So instead of emailing birthday greetings... sing them!

Send a Text Message Via Email
Text messages are the current "big thing" in wireless technology, but don't restrict yourself to a klunky mobile keypad. Want to send text messages from your computer? Go ahead! Fab It offers an SMS add-in for Outlook so that you can send text messages as easily as email. At the very least it will save you thumb cramps when you try to spell antidisestablishmentarianism on your mobile.

Get Your Computer To Read To You
Some people learn by reading. Others find verbal communication a more effective way of processing information. Why not convert text into voice? Using TextAloud, you can get your news, email or any text source converted into audio so you can listen at your computer. Even better, convert it into MP3 and burn it to CD - in one of 7 different voices!

Editor’s Note: Managing the often insane amounts of email that many of us receive on a daily basis can be a tedious chore. Hopefully, the tools discussed above, as well as the many other email management options that are currently available will help you to regain control over your inbox. Stay Organized ~ Stephen