Powerful tools for managing your online life

In 1998, I bought an Internet domain name, primarily because it came with a unique e-mail address. Back then, using a free Web-based e-mail service marked you as a spammer or worse, an Internet amateur. But when Google’s Gmail service came along, I found it irresistible. Early this year, when my old personal domain lapsed, I didn’t renew it. Gmail was just too good.

Gmail’s chief rivals, Microsoft Corp.’s Hotmail and Yahoo Inc.’s Yahoo Mail, are mighty good as well, thanks to a host of features that make today’s Web-based e-mail services powerful tools for managing your online life.

Microsoft has given me preview access to the latest version of Hotmail, due for public release later this summer. There’s some smart stuff here for speeding up access to your most important messages. The service will instantly spot certain incoming messages and sort them into separate folders. Messages from people in your contacts list get their own folder, so do messages from social networking sites like Facebook. And a new “sweep’’ feature lets you permanently banish unwelcome messages with a couple of mouse clicks.

Hotmail is well integrated into the new, Web-based version of Microsoft Office. All e-mails with attached Office files get a folder of their own, so you can instantly find them. Click the attached document, and it opens inside the online version of Word, OneNote, PowerPoint, or Excel. You can edit the document on the spot and share the changes with your colleagues.

Photo sharing is better, too, thanks to SkyDrive, a Microsoft service that provides 25 gigabytes of free Internet storage. Say you want to send 200 digital photos to a friend. No e-mail system can handle that many file attachments. Hotmail doesn’t even try. Instead, it stores the photos on SkyDrive as a unified photo album, then adds a link to the e-mail. Your friend just clicks the link to download the pictures. The same feature works with Microsoft Office documents, too.

Meanwhile, Yahoo Mail found a clever way to get better fast, by letting others do much of the work. This e-mail service lets outside companies plug their online services directly into the Yahoo mailbox, with impressive results.

Where Microsoft built its own software for sorting incoming messages, Yahoo Mail offers an optional link to a service called OtherInbox. Once installed, OtherInbox sets aside mail from financial companies like banks and credit card issuers, as well as social networking sites. You can also add new sorting categories of your own.

Yahoo Mail transmits large files with help from Drop.io, a service that stores up to 100 megabytes of photos or documents, then mails a download link to your friends. Another good Yahoo Mail plug-in, Picnik, lets you edit and send digital photos, and there’s a built-in PayPal app for sending and receiving money.

Google’s Gmail service is also swarming with innovation. Some comes from OtherInbox, which has created versions for Gmail as well as Hotmail. Just visit OtherInbox.com to sign up.

But Google itself has come up with dozens of useful tweaks. They’re posted at Google Labs, where the company stashes programs that are too buggy for the big time. One add-on, for sending SMS text messages to cellphones via Gmail’s instant message service, kept telling me it couldn’t make a connection, but the messages got through.

I had no problems with another feature that lets you access documents created with Google Docs, the company’s Web-based competitor to Microsoft Office. And thumbs-up for a feature that adds Google Calendar to the Gmail page. It makes the site more of a personal information manager, like Microsoft Outlook.

Google also takes a stab at geek humor with Mail Goggles, an app to prevent you from sending messages you might regret later. Hit send, and Mail Goggles gives you 60 seconds to solve several arithmetic problems. Get them wrong — because you’re sleepy or drunk, perhaps — and the message won’t go.

With their deep pockets and powerful online computers, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail can keep dreaming up more advanced features, providing them to millions at no charge. My old e-mail service had only one advanced feature: an excellent automatic billing program, which reliably extracted money from my bank account for years. But not any more.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.