Yahoo's new Zimbra Desktop puts all your e-mail in order

SAN FRANCISCO -- Yahoo is expanding its popular e-mail service to the desktop in a bid to help consumers manage their e-mail accounts when they aren't online.

At a conference for developers in Portland, Ore., Zimbra, a Yahoo yhoo company, is set to release a beta version of Yahoo Zimbra Desktop, an e-mail program that organizes Yahoo Mail, AOL, Google's Gmail and work and business e-mail accounts in one place — and lets you read, compose and organize messages off-line.

The program is a major addition to Yahoo Mail, now used by more than 250 million people. The free service can be accessed even when users are not logged onto the Internet and is "mashed up" to work with online applications. When viewing an e-mail, users can mouse over text to launch digital maps, currency conversion services and more.

Zimbra co-founder Satish Dharmaraj calls the gee-whiz features "Zimbra goodness." The 5-year-old company — named after a Talking Heads song — was started at a coffee shop in Palo Alto, Calif., on the premise that e-mail is broken. Yahoo plunked down $350 million to acquire Zimbra in 2007.

Zimbra is the latest entrant in a field of e-mail programs — which include Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird — and a small group of e-mail-organizing services — such as ClearContext and Xobni. Zimbra is different because it combines both services while the user is off-line.

"E-mail overload and in-box inefficiency is running rampant," says Matt Cain, an analyst at Gartner. "This will popularize the notion of off-line e-mail."

Not only is e-mail volume up, but messages have evolved from simple notes to project-oriented tasks, says the non-profit Information Overload Research Group, a group of individuals from about 30 companies including IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Xerox.

E-mail management is a key part of Yahoo's strategy. At the giant Consumer Electronics Show in January, CEO Jerry Yang showed off a prototype version of Yahoo Mail that would transform it into an über communications tool. The newfangled mail software would tap into social networks, giving higher priority to messages from senders who are friends, for instance.

The demo highlighted how Yahoo services could be overhauled to open them to the rest of the Web — a strategy successfully undertaken by Facebook and others.

The goal is to turn Yahoo into a primary online "starting point" for consumers, Yang said.