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Jive Software, the company that has been one of the leaders in collaboration software, has acquired OffiSync, the company that makes social media add-ons to Microsoft Outlook. You gotta love a company that starts out its corporate overview by saying "old business processes and technologies suck" right on its website.

SendGrid, a popular e-mail sending service, revamped its pricing plans today. Facing competition from services like Amazon SES and the forthcoming Message Bus, SendGrid is bringing its pricing more in-line with Amazon.com's.

Each of these services is designed to enable companies to send large numbers of e-mail, such as account confirmations and password resets, without being snared by spam filters.

If you find yourself tethered to your inbox, you're about two years late to the party that is AwayFind. The service, since its launch back in 2008, has given users a way to set up specific filters so they can receive notifications and make sure only the truly important messages disrupt their day. Last year, the company added notifications by Twitter, Phone and IM and today, it has added to simple features that should truly keep email at bay.

If you've ever found yourself consistently checking your email in case that one important message comes in, check no more - AwayFind will let you know. And even better, you can set up the alert from the AwayFind iPhone app, while you're out and about.

The fact that the British Library purchased the archive of poet Wendy Cope (yes, that Wendy Cope) is not all that unusual. Keeping a record of the development of its poets is part of its mission. (I saw a draft of Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" with Siegfried Sasson's notes on it at the BL!) The unusual aspect is the predominance of email.

"'Retrieved from the cloud,' the collection of approximately 40,000 emails dating from 2004 to the present," the Library said in a statement, "is the most substantial in a literary archive acquired by the British Library to date, affording among other things a fascinating and extensive insight into writerly networks."

When the team at Wufoo sent out a mass email announcing their company's acquisition by SurveyMonkey earlier today, they were able to watch the campaign's results in real-time. Each time somebody opened, clicked, forwarded or shared the email, a pin landed on the map displaying their name, photo and city.

This rather neat visualization was made possible by Worldview, a feature recently launched by email marketing provider Campaign Monitor.

While much of the focus in online marketing has been on social media over the last few years, there's still something to be said for the value of good, old fashioned email. Marketing via email can be highly effective, but smaller companies don't necessarily need all the bells and whistles offered by most email marketing service providers.

In an effort to attract more small business and nonprofit customers, email and social marketing platform iContact is now offering a free version of their service.

• What's the most effective way to spread false political rumors? Not blogs. Not Twitter. Email. http://bit.ly/e674zt via @millermccune
• GoDaddy.com CEO kills elephant, poses with carcass, is "not ashamed". Outrage ensues. http://lat.ms/dOPADN via @latimesoutposts
• The worst jobs in the world matrix. Yep, World of Warcraft gold farmer makes the list: http://bit.ly/fSrskX via @LaphamsQuart
• The iPad isn't a product, it's a badge - a way to identify ourselves in a world in which the traditional ways of classifying ourselves by social class and mainstream religion are losing their purchase: http://ind.pn/ed9EZG via @StevenParrott
• Online 3D fire ants! http://bit.ly/evXdd5 via @BeeSpotter

Whenever I'm checking my email, one of two things can happen. I get an email, click on a link, and 20 minutes later I'm not sure how I ended up on Facebook but yes, I would love to attend a dinner party next Thursday. If I'm truly task-focused, however, I'll at the very least end up with a screen full of so many new tabs that I forget which tab I'm on in the first place. Either way, email can set me off on a confusing and messy adventure and Microsoft has an answer I'd love to see become a standard.

Today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Microsoft is announcing a new type of interactive email that keeps you focused on getting through your email while still being able to look at pictures, watch videos, accept friend requests and more.

Forrester released two reports on cloud-based e-mail this week: one on selecting a provider, and another on migrating to the cloud.

Although Forrester doesn't recommend any specific providers, the firm does cite three areas to consider when comparing providers.

For the migration report, Forrester looked at the lessons learned by major companies that have moved to the cloud. For example, GlaxoSmithKline moved about 90,000 users to Microsoft Online.

The apps that get pitched to us cover granularities you never really thought of before. It puts you into a certain state of mind, constantly asking yourself:

Is this useful? Am I missing something?

To be fair, a lot of these apps have specific use cases in the enterprise. But the great apps we see are used across the organization. They have a universal appeal.