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How many email accounts do you have? Home, work, clubs. POP accounts, webmail accounts like Yahoo and Gmail. The list goes on and on. How can you possibly keep track of all this?

POP Peeper is a tool that sits in your Windows System Tray and helps you keep track of all your comings and goings in the land of email. Sitting unobtrusively in your task bar, it'll let you know when new messages come in for your accounts. It's compatible with POP3, IMAP, and most webmail services.

An account creation wizard makes it easy to configure POP Peeper for your accounts. You can enter account information manually, or import it from your current email client.

You can configure it to play a sound for new arrivals with your choice of either one sound for all new messages, or select a different sound for each account. Once new email has arrived, you can choose to read it and respond through POP Peeper, or it can open your regular email client for you.

POP Peeper is a Windows application and should run on most systems.

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The saying goes "it must be true because I saw it on the Internet." While the veracity of that claim is suspect, there is no denying that if you look on the Web for any topic, you will probably find a lot of information.

Back in the day, most of what you found out there was textual—stuff you could read. Over time, it's come to depend more and more on images, movies, and other visual content. That's great, until you need to track down some piece of information and happen to be visually impaired. If this is your story, there are tools out there to help you out.

WebbIE is a fully accessible web browser for users with visual difficulties. With large, high-contrast buttons, sighted users will find it easy to use a mouse to get around. All commands are keyboard accessible, so folks who can't use a pointing device can still get where they need to go. The pages that you visit are presented as straight text, so screen reader tools have an easy time of it.

WebbIE also has an integrated RSS reader, making it easy to stay on top of news feeds. It includes dedicated access to Open Directory Project pages, which can help make it easier to find just the piece of information that users are looking for.

WebbIE is a Windows application. There are two separate installers, one for Win98/ME and another for Win2k/XP/Vista.

Download WebbIE

You spend a fair amount of time tooling around the Web. You see things; you want to remember them. You flag the good stuff so you can come back. It would be nice if there were an easy way to get back there.

Delicious Tray is a tool that sits in your System Tray and gives you immediate access to your del.icio.us links and tags. When you set it up, it goes out and grabs all your tags and creates a context (right click) menu that includes all your bookmarks. To cut down on clutter, you get flyout lists for each letter (e.g. click on "A" to list all your "A" entries, etc.).

If you're busy adding tags, you can force Delicious Tray to update your list; otherwise, the default is every ten minutes, so you'll always be working with a current list.

Delicious Tray is a Windows app and runs under WinXP. It requires the .NET framework.

Download Delicious Tray

Printer sharing is a cool thing. You can make the most of your resources by having everybody print to one machine, rather than putting a printer on everybody's desktop. If only it weren't so complicated to configure and set-up that sharing.

PrinterAnywhere lowers the bar on printer sharing. Rather than relying on your expertise in networking, all you do is install the app and let it figure everything out. It detects your local printer and any network printers to which you're connected. Use is simple: you just print the way you normally do from your applications, you just choose the remote printer instead of the one sitting on your desk. And doing regular printer sharing one better, with PrinterAnywhere you can print beyond your network as well.

Your print job is encrypted, so you're safe printing around the block or around the world. And unlike e-mailing documents to other folks for them to print, with PrinterAnywhere the recipient can't keep an electronic copy or accidentally forward it to their whole email address book.

PrinterAnywhere is a Windows application. You need to be running Win2k or later to use it.

Download PrinterAnywhere

For your website's pages to show up in search results in Google, Yahoo!, and the other search engines, their "robots" have to be able to find your site's pages. That stands to reason: how can they report on what they haven't seen? The "seeing" part, however, isn't always so easy.

Search engines run on a numbers game. They want to be able to report the greatest number of relevant results to their visitors while expending the least amount of effort on their part. Generally search engines find your site by following links from other sites; then find other pages by navigating through your site. There are some types of navigation that work well for your human visitors that just don't work for search engine robots.

Search engines can't click buttons, they can't follow JavaScript links, and they don't like big, long, nasty URLs like

   http://www.example.com/somepage?arg1=one&arg2=two&arg3=three…..

So how do you get those pages indexed?

The major search engines support what they call "site maps", a way that you can submit a list of your pages to Google, in effect telling them "these are the pages on my site that you should crawl." This site map file is a specially-formatted XML file that adheres to specific standards. While Google makes available a tool to help you do this, it is written in the Python language. That's nice, but if Python makes you think of an English comedy troupe rather than a computer program, it may not the solution for you.

GSiteCrawler is a Windows tool that generates site map files that can be used by Google and Yahoo!. You can load it onto your Microsoft web server, or presumably grab the log files from your Apache server, turn the crank, and generate that standards-compliant site map file. Much easier than learning Python.

GSiteCrawler is a Windows app, and will run on any 32-bit Windows platform—Win95 or later. It also requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or better.

Download GSiteCrawler

If you're responsible for the care and feeding of a website, you know that creating the site is only part of the job. After you're up and running, you need to see who comes to visit, and tweak the verbiage and pictures to make sure that folks are getting to the pages you want them to visit, and hopefully signing-up for those newsletters and buying your products. In order to do this, you need to look at your server's access logs.

Raw logs contain all of the information about who came calling, but not in the most friendly or intuitive format. Website statistics programs can help make sense out of all that data. SmarterStats Free Edition is one such tool, at a price you can't beat.

Who came to visit? Which pages did they see? Where did they come from? If they came via a search engine, which terms did they search on? This kind of data and more is yours with SmarterStats. While the publisher offers "Pro" and "Enterprise" editions of this tool for reasonable prices, this free edition gives you much of the same functionality as the Enterprise Edition—at a greatly reduced price—although you can only monitor one site with the free product.

SmarterStats is a Windows tool. It requires Window 2000 or later, and version 1.1 of the .NET framework.

Download SmarterStats Free Edition

Collaboration can be a real challenge, especially if your team is scattered around the office or the world. Keeping in touch with everybody can be a challenge, and running a handful of apps just to stay in contact can quickly exhaust your screen space, to say nothing of your system resources.

Spicebird is a collaboration tool that helps people work smarter together. It integrates all the tools necessary to make sure that everybody's on the same page: calendar, tasks, contacts, email, and chat are all represented. Built on top of Mozilla's Thunderbird (email), Sunbird (calendar), and SamePlace (chat) platforms, you have access to all these tools in a single application.

Individual tools are accessed via applets that sit on the desktop. You can choose which applets to activate, and customize their content, adding, for example, your favorite news feeds to the RSS applet.

Each of the individual tools boasts the standard functionality you would expect: the calendar allows you daily, weekly, or monthly views, for example. The email tool will examine incoming messages and if it spots time information, it will ask you whether you want to schedule an event that corresponds with that time. The email and chat tools let you know in real time whether your contacts are online, making it easier to ping them right now if you need to communicate with them.

Spicebird is a free download, and is available for Windows and Linux.

Download Spicebird

Virtual Private Networks (VPN) allow you to use a public network as if it were a private one. Imagine being able to send your sensitive data across the Internet, for example, without fear that your privacy will be compromised.

While there are a number of VPN applications available, Hamachi is different in that it allows you to create a tunnel even between hosts that are behind firewalls or NAT routers. Unlike other VPN setups, Hamachi's servers help to facilitate communication between machines that use non-routable private IP addresses. Once the connection is made, the server steps out of the way, so none of your data actually flows through their network, guaranteeing you the privacy and security you're looking for.

With the ability to create up to 64 networks with 16 nodes each (or 256 networks with 256 hosts each on the paid version), you can connect a sizable number of machines even though they're spread all over the world.

Hamachi is available for Windows systems running Win 2000 or later. A console version (no bells and whistles) for Mac OS X and Linux can be downloaded also.

Download Hamachi

Get up, run through the shower, and then it's off to your favorite caffeinated beverage dispensary for a cup of Joe and a quick read of the morning's news. Hey, with any luck, maybe your system isn't being compromised, losing passwords, credit card numbers, and important company information. But why count on luck?

Hotspot Shield is a free Wi-Fi security app that you can load onto your laptop that will keep the uninvited out of your system. It creates a virtual private network (VPN) between your machine and the Wi-Fi router, making your communications—a least the portion between your machine and that local gateway—as secure as can be.

Hotspot Shield is available for both Windows (Win2k or later) and Mac (OS X 10.4 or later).

Download Hotspot Shield

Did you ever want—or need—to be in two places at once? Hey, you could get twice as much work done, or at least only be half as far behind. But seriously, multitasking is rapidly becoming a way of life: so much to do, so little time.

We can't promise to give you the secret behind bi-location, but we can suggest the next best thing: LogMeIn Free. A "remote control" tool, LogMeIn Free allows you to run one computer from another one. Need to check email at work, but you're at home? No problem. Need grandma's email address from your home system, but you're at work? It's done.

Installation is simple; you just install the software on the machine you want to control from afar, and leave that box running. Now you can access it from anywhere in the world. On a business trip and need that file you left at the office? Just go grab it.

LogMeIn Free is available for both Windows and Mac systems.

Download LogMeIn Free