One of the very first of my blog posts in early 2007 used to be “Take back your Inbox“. I had just learned about Xobni (which was under stealth mode by then), and i tried to ponder upon what possibly can be done to improve the email experience. A lot has changedby then. We have seen xobni launch and turn out to be a big success. Another startup, that i like personally is xoopit. It amazes me every now and then with all the information about photos, videos and attachments sitting in my gmail inbox. I can’t imagine my gmail without xoopit now. The guys are too fast to absorb, and they keep on pouring a good feature or other pretty soon and pretty fast.

With storge limits dissolved altogether, folks use gmail (and other mailers) in never used ways. I store lot of links and songs. A lot of snaps are somewhere buried. I receive my bank statements, financial accounts, salary slips etc. Many of my friends use gmail etc in some or other unique fashion.

What is common in all of the above? Email is increasingly being used to store content instead of plain old messages and letters. It has calenders, todos, reminders, documents, presentations, pdf’s, pictures, youtube urls, blog recommendations and must reads sent by friends, announcements, music, entertainment, subscriptions and a many other things which are there at back of my head, but my rhetoric skills cannot connect to those.

Xoopit is one of the pioneers in improving the visibility of your mail(content?)box. I am sure they are working on a couple of other features as part of their roadmap, to further strengthen and hence, improve this visibility. The walled garden always had some secret doors leading to the forest. It only matter of time that people will first discover, and then open them precisely.

Email has always been your personal social network (in fact his was one of the points in take back your inbox). There are rumours that yahoo is developing something nice on top of its email infrastructure to fight facebook (click one of the links at the bottom of this page to know more).

Thunderbird, which was spawned as a separate company mozillamessaging, is also consistently growing and eveolving. They released 3.0 beta 1 yesterday. The changeset was too tempting to try it out. You can read more about that on David Ascher’s blog. Conversations and lightening finally make their way in it. Multi tabbed interface is in. It will also be speaking to facebook and twitter soon (by next milestone i believe). It will not be speaking to facebook and twitter in next milestone. These will be entertained once email is fixed (as pointed out in David’s comment on below)

Next year might be seeing more startups in this particular realm. There is still a plenty of opportunity left. Gmail has been releasing a lot of addons lately. It might be a hint that we will be seeing a gmail api soon.

These are also busy speaking email

• Yahoo Plans to Launch a Mail App Platform
• Xobni: Social Network in Your Inbox
• Xobni Outlook plug-in gets more social, integrated
• Xobni Adds Facebook, Hoover’s, Yahoo! Mail Functionality