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Message Bus is a new company that will offer an API for sending e-mail. It sounds like SendGrid or Amazon SES (see our coverage of SES for more competitors in this area). According to the blog post announcing the project, the team is focusing on an agnostic messaging architecture, "at the plumbing level, Twitter's road not taken."

Message Bus was founded by CTO Jeremy LaTrasse, former operations manager at Twitter and President Narendra Rocherolle and CEO Nick Wilder, both formerly of Webshots and 30Box.

Microsoft just announced the next version of Hotmail, which will bring a large number of new features to the world's most popular email service. Hotmail's 360 million users will soon get enhanced security features, a Gmail-like conversation view, automatic filters for status updates from social networks, integration with the new Microsoft Office Web Apps and numerous other new features that are meant to make using Hotmail safer and reduce the amount of clutter in Hotmail users' inboxes.

While most conversation aggregators are concerned with harnessing your river of data, Mozilla is breaking it down into manageable raindrops. According to a morning blog post on the Mozilla Labs site the company is launching the prototype for Raindrop 0.1, a product that they're calling "open messaging for the open web". While Mozilla's Snowl Firefox Add-On made it possible to follow streams and rivers of messages in your existing browser, Raindrop offers what appears to be a much cleaner interface and an API to hack on your own personal conversation dashboard.

The problem with most contact management tools is that only a portion of your acquaintances are considered useful. Meanwhile, unconventional contacts like PTA parents, yoga partners and softball teammates remain invisible. Social graphing software PeopleMaps aims to change that. Similar to LinkedIn, the tool allows users to leverage their networks to gain access to new leads. In addition to importing professional connections from LinkedIn, PeopleMaps also provides a visual map of connections imported from Facebook, Gmail and Outlook.

Early this morning Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz rang the NASDAQ opening bell in honor of her efforts at New York's Advertising week. Said Bartz, "Yahoo is where half a billion people come every month. They come to be entertained, they come to be informed, they come to talk to their friends and their business associates. In other words, Yahoo is the center of people's lives. That is what we are." Bartz's words are significant as the company is expected to unveil a $100 million dollar "It's You!" campaign tomorrow morning.

Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System blog found an interesting reference to a "magic inbox" in Gmail's code this morning. In addition, there are also references to an "icebox-inbox" and the ability to sort mail by priority. Google has been relatively tepid with regards to adding features that exploit a user's social graph, but these references seem to point towards a system where Google could organize a user's mail based on the strength of this user's connection with the sender and not just based on the time a message arrived.

Google added a new feature to Gmail Labs today: Multiple Inboxes. Created as a 20% time project by Google's Octavian Costache, this new feature allows you to expand your standard Gmail inbox with additional panes. The name 'Multiple Inboxes' is misleading, however. In reality, this new feature gives you something akin to multi-pane viewing, with your main inbox on the left and up to five other 'inboxes' on the right. These additional inboxes can display anything from searches, to mail with a specific label or from a certain sender.

Yahoo today announced a closed beta of a major update to its online calendaring application that will feature a tighter integration with Yahoo Mail and other Yahoo properties. The new calendar is based on the Zimbra platform, which Yahoo acquired in 2007, and will support both the iCalendar and CalDAV standards for exchanging information with other calendaring services.

Among the new features are the ability to enhance your calendar with photos from Flickr, a built-in to-do list, and support for drag and drop. Yahoo Calendar can now also send out reminders for important events by email, IM, or SMS.