I am an e-mail snob. I spend so much time using e-mail that I want the best e-mail tools I can buy -- and I expect to wring the most productivity out of them. In the early '90s, I experimented with a lot of e-mail software packages and found some great products for the time, including the popular Eudora, corporate favorite Lotus Notes and the now defunct Z-mail.

But, like many other business users, I ended up standardizing on Microsoft Outlook. It was good. It was easy. And I didn't have to spend continuous hours experimenting with e-mail software without significant new benefits. Each time a new version of Outlook was released, I quickly obtained it and learned its new features as quickly as possible.

With the enhancements in Outlook 2003, you'd think I'd be satisfied. I was -- until I saw Nelson E-mail Organizer from Caelo Software, a small software company based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Now, I can't imagine using Outlook as a stand-alone product.

NEO isn't another e-mail package. It is an add-in for Outlook that makes it particularly easy to manage your e-mail communications. NEO automatically indexes every e-mail message in your Outlook file, so it understands who sent what to whom, and which words are in which messages. Then it gives you an interface -- separate from Outlook -- that puts your most critical e-mail within a mouse-click or two.

Outlook 2003 does offer the ability to create search folders, which is like what NEO does. But the older versions of Outlook can't come close -- and NEO's interface is vastly superior to the way Outlook 2003 offers its similar functions, in part because Outlook treats e-mail management as an afterthought instead of as a mission critical part of your work day.

One of the most endearing aspects of NEO is its interface. It opens as a separate window from Outlook, and has much of the same layout as a standard Outlook window. But NEO has tabs that allow you to view various types of mail, based on who was in the message, no matter which Outlook folder you placed it in. All of your friends, family and associates have folders on the "Correspondents" tab. Your subscriptions are listed individually on the "Bulk Mail" tab. Most importantly, there's the HOT tab, where you can place the people with whom you correspond most. So whenever you need to look up an e-mail you simply click on the name of the person. Since one message might be sent to multiple people, it shows up in separate listings for each one of them.

My HOT tab lists the five people and three companies with whom I trade most of my e-mails. I've also included my three favorite e-mail subscriptions. My HOT tab also shows listings for mail sent or received today, yesterday, this week and last week, making it easy to find recent messages based on when they were sent.

While NEO does a good job providing a quick install and start, I found that I spent several hours setting it up the way I want it. But the time was worth it, because it saves me hours weekly. If you are the type of person who creates multiple copies of messages to help you find them in various Outlook folders, you'll find NEO will let you get the same organization without the extra copies.

The bottom line is that NEO -- especially the business oriented NEO Pro version -- is now on my short list of must-have software applications.