One of my pet peeves is disorder. It doesn’t always get to me—sometimes my desk is in disarray, and my screen desktop is usually nuts—but certain things have always been (and always will be) an annoyance. One of those annoyances is my email inbox. I use Outlook, and I hate that it gets cluttered. Even when I organize it everything isn’t ideal. Windows’ folder system just isn’t attractive to me.

Then, one day not so long ago, I found a solution.

Highrise is a web based application created by 37signals, and it specializes in collecting your email and contact information in a central location, off of your computer. Information is fully exportable either as CSV and as Vcards, depending on whether you want your emails or your contact information.

Highrise also allows you to attach notes and all sorts of information about your contacts, keeping them in one place. You can add to-do items ranging from tomorrow morning to next year sometime. Makes it harder to forget birthdays that way.

The free version of Highrise is intense—allows for over 200 contacts and up to two users. Right now I have 4 versions of Highrise running:

1. My business account (for Aspiring Indie)
2. My other business account (for the NIIC)
3. The church (Aboite Lutheran)
4. and finally, myself (Ryan Imel)

I would encourage you to check it out. Using OpenID it’s easy to switch between different versions of the same application, which is a great help and encourages you to only use each for what it should be used for. For instance, I am now beginning to use Highrise for my personal email, so it doesn’t get all tangled up anywhere else.