Founder of ClearContext, Deva's been pushing the boundaries of email productivity for years with his Outlook plugin. There's too many clever ideas in there to list, and who can argue with a guy who got his seed-funding playing online poker?
T.A.'s behind Gist. Along with Steve Newman, they're building a startup focused on linking external information to email contacts, breaking down the silo that surrounds email, a cause dear to my own heart. I'm jealous of the name too, very appropriate and memorable.
Former Engineering VP of Xobni, Gabor's now beavering away on a new email startup. Not many details have emerged yet, but I know it will be worth watching.
Co-founder of Postbox with Scott MacGregor, Sherman's building an entirely new email client, with a radically new interface for working with all the information we've accumulated in our inboxes. The dominant UI we have at the moment for mail messages is essentially a DOS directory listing, Postbox (and Xoopit with some similar ideas) gives you a truly graphical user interface for mail.
Joshua is the founder of OtherInbox, another company trying to move email away from being a flat list. Rather than reimagining the core interface, they're using multiple email addresses and automated-email recognition to present all the information that Facebook and other services send via email in a much simpler form. And by removing that bacn from your messages, they return email to its roots as a person-to-person medium, one of the big reasons that Facebook mail is so pleasant to use.
CEO of Inboxer, Roger's one of the few people I know innovating in email on the server side. Since administrators make the purchase decisions there, not end users, a lot of the product is driven by regulatory and security concerns, but they also manage to offer some interesting options for searching and recovering attachments.
Who am I missing? Let me know…
Pete Warden's blog 