The good news is that as with progression of Internet over last 30 years, new technological breakthroughs are always improving our lives. In last few years, email notification systems have come into being. Email Notification software enables you to check multiple email accounts through one handy little application.

In early days of email notification software, interfaces were clumsy and difficult to use. This may explain why less than one half of one percent of net population has ever downloaded one of these applications. If you were to total up number of downloads for email notification software on CNET, ZDNet, and TUCOWS combined, it would not be surprising if total did not exceed 500,000 downloads in last five years.

Most people do not even realize that applications like this exist. What is more, people who have heard about them often assume that only a computer guru would be knowledgeable enough to set it up. Maybe that was case... in old days, but certainly not today.

Today, we have available to us a program called ePrompter (http://www.eprompter.com?ep2) which is a Free email retrieval and notification utility that automatically checks up to eight password protected email accounts for AOL, AltaVista, Earthlink, Email.com, Hotmail, Juno, Lycos, Mail.com, Mindspring, Netscape, POP3, Rediffmail, USA, Yahoo, ZDNetOneBox and hundreds of other email domains --- all at same time.

ePrompter is great. I do not have to let my wife or kids have computer to check their email anymore. I can keep my ePrompter open and show them that there is nothing there for them to check. I do not even have to log off of my primary AOL account to check email inside of another AOL account. ePrompter painlessly handles details for me.

What is more, I can watch rotating tray icon down by my clock, which keeps me appraised of how many emails are in each account by their individual color coded icons. The icon rotates every few seconds telling me how many emails sit in each account I have programmed into my system. ePrompter even has a screen saver that keeps tabs on my email accounts with color coded images that tell me how many emails are waiting for me to view them in each account. Now I can sit in front of television and watch my favorite show and glance at screen saver to see if that important mail I have been waiting for has arrived.

ePrompter even has its very own notification sound which is equivalent of "You've Got Mail."

"EMAIL","FIRST NAME","LAST NAME" "EMAIL","FIRST NAME","LAST NAME" . . . "EMAIL","FIRST NAME","LAST NAME"

That's it! If someone asks you what you need this information for, tell them it's for your "preferred customer list" to tell them about specials being offered at your establishment before general public hears about them.

Don't say "mailing list." No one wants to be on some old, impersonal, stuffy "mailing list." But a "preferred customer list" sounds more valuable. Which would you rather be on? I think it's pretty obvious.

Do this for EVERY customer that comes through and leaves your doors. What you'll notice is that after doing this for a month, you should have a few hundred or a few thousand email addresses of customers. Now that you have their email address and name, you can contact these people as often as you like by email for FREE. Instead of sending postcards, letters or paying someone to call past customers about new products/services or specials that you offer.

You can simply send them a small email notice FREE!

This is NOT spamming. These people have given you permission to email them. After all, they voluntarily gave you their email address. They have used products or services of your shop. They love what you sell. Yes, they will be happy to hear from you by email. They will consider this EXCELLENT customer service interaction.

So what you do next is whenever you have a new product, service or special you want to announce - first hit your "preferred customer" list with and email announcement. This should help you generate some quick cash for your business.