Yes, yes, we all know not to send zany emails to prospects, but what about your past clients with whom you've become good acquaintances, or even friends? Or what about your close friends and relatives who are always bugging you to stay better in touch with them? Or those goofy friends who are always sending funny and elaborate email messages and jokes -- some of them punctuated with timely, apropos smiling, moving, cute little characters -- often called "emoticons."

For these "close-to-us" people, we use an entirely different email approach than we do with business contacts. We use a fun little email program called Incredimail, which, happily, is free to download from the Incredimail site.

Using Incredimail, you can select from hundreds of email backgrounds that fit any mood or occasion. The people you send Incredimail emails to, don't need to download anything in order to see these backgrounds, either. You can insert emotion icons (emoticons) and dancing letters into the text and body of your email message for extra punctuation.

We have fun adding goofy animations to our emails, and not as attachments, either. It even works in sending AOL mail.

A few of our less web-evolved business friends are still using that "toy" called AOL and as we all know, AOL people have trouble opening attachments. Odd, isn't it? You SCREAM at them to get off AOL and into a grown up ISP, and they just don't get it! My crusade is to get all business people off AOL.

Incredimail lets you use your mouse to draw, and use your handwritten signature in your emails, add various sounds and sayings to your emails at the click of a button, and personalize your emails even more by adding your own voice.

Some other easy fun features include, unique fonts, old typewriter typing sounds, a multimedia attachments preview, the ability to capture animations from the web, a flash window indicating time and email status, easy placement of your pictures inside an email, an on-the-fly spell checker, a really simple exchange of graphical content between users, and more.

Even our more web-challenged friends learn to use it almost immediately, and now try to outdo us with ultra-cleverly-composed emails with art, punctuating each point that they make in their funny emails to us.

American home users average more than 20 hours per month online and the numbers are growing per Mediascope.org. During the busy month of December 2003, the average home surfer conducted 31 sessions online, visited 55 different domains, clocked just over 27 hours, and viewed each web page for a duration of 55 seconds (Nielsen//NatRatings "December 2003, Home").

According to US Census estimates, there were 290.3 million US residents in 2003, (the last year for which comprehensive data is available) a full 80 percent of the population ages 12 and older accessed the Internet at some point in the year from any location, compared with 69 percent in 2002, Arbitron reports.

Despite this tidal wave of acceptance, I still hear a few older, curmudgeonly Realtors saying that they have no use for the Internet, but I think that they are being ostriches and burying their heads in the sand.

Our involvement with the Internet must increase if we want to stay relevant, and vital, in our business and personal lives. Thankfully, new software tools like the ones above not only save us web time, but can make it a more fun sandbox in which to play, learn and make money.