Outbox Take a message, Neo.

A lot of electronic mailing is rote. You're sending standard messages to people - sometimes more than one people. What do you do if you want to pluck out a message and send it?

Apple Mail lets you keep messages in the Drafts folder (if you can find it). As soon as you fire off a draft it disappears - to the Sent folder. You can get it back to send it again. Bit of a bother.

Click, drag, double-click; click, drag, double-click; click, drag... Drag.

What if you could just go to your desktop, pick out an appropriate message, double-click it, and send it? What if that message came with a prefab list of hundreds of recipients - all set and ready to go?

What about being able to compose any message anywhere - and then saving it to your desktop for future use? What about being able to send direct mail to everyone on your list - so no one but you sees the other recipients?

What about being able to set the priority of the message, a special address for receipts, a separate 'reply-to' address? What about being able to use any sender address at any time for any message at all?

Outbox 'distribution': send a message to recipients without compromising their privacy.

Outbox doesn't make you chase your messages around. It saves complete messages as files, with their recipients, priorities, sender address, list of unsent copies, and so forth and so on. No more chasing. The composition window stays put after you send your message. You can use it again. And again. And again.

Compose your message: fill in the recipients, the subject line, the body, select your sender address, set the priority, the 'reply-to', the receipt. Save the message to disk and it's there when you need it.

Current versions of Apple's 'Unix' leave the messaging framework incomplete.

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