Pogue’s Posts Blog: An App That Sorts Your E-mail Shopping Offers

Everybody loves to hate e-mail. It eats up too much time, it’s used improperly, it’s filled up with junk. Entire careers have been launched around the premise of getting your in-box to zero.

I don’t agree. E-mail is the hub of life. It’s correspondence, collaboration, ideas, news, warnings and congratulations. It’s a to-do list, Rolodex and record of past projects. Sure, I try to keep the roar of junk mail to a minimum (I use a program called SpamSieve, and I never, ever enter my primary e-mail address into a form on the Web). But otherwise, e-mail is a pretty great medium.

Maybe, instead of killing it off, the world should be working on making it more useful. A new, free app for iPad and iPhone, bizarrely called PeeqPeeq, is a good start.

It works only with big-name IMAP-style e-mail accounts like Gmail, Yahoo Mail and AOL. Not Hotmail, not Exchange, not POP accounts.

And what it does is extremely clever. It analyzes your mail, on a quest to identify promotional shopping messages. Not general spam â€" no herbal Viagra or Nigerian millionaires â€" but marketing stuff you’ve actually signed up for: clothing stores, airlines, department stores. It’s Newegg, L.L. Bean, Groupon, Think Geek, Gap, Macy’s, Zappos, REI and so on.

These, it puts into a dedicated folder.

But that’s behind the scenes. What the app does is convert the contents of that folder â€" all of the promotional e-mail â€" into a lovely, full-screen catalog. Each message becomes an attractively designed, uniform “page,” six of them per iPad screen. You flip through them as you would the pages of an actual catalog, tapping one to enlarge it if it piques your interest. You can bookmark one or send it on to friends by e-mail or text message.

Behind the scenes, the company (called RokketLaunch) has subscribed to every such promotional mailing under the sun. So within the app, you can also summon mini-catalogs of e-mailed offers you haven’t subscribed to, in categories like Post Labor Day (sales), Clothing, Deals, Electronics & Gadgets, Sports and so on.

Now, particularly if you’re a guy, you might be aghast at the whole concept. It’s an app that elevates junk mail?

And yes, there’s a difference between the way men and woman think about promotional shopping e-mail. Lee Ott, the company’s founder, has done a lot of research.

Women, he says, tend to look at this kind of e-mail as entertainment, during “I’m bored” moments: standing in line, waiting for an appointment. Men tend to check them, if at all, only when they’re already on the way to the store to buy something, wondering if there’s a discount.

In both cases, PeeqPeeq makes the job easier and more attractive. For example, you can search the company’s entire stash of up-to-date offering messages to see if there’s a sale somewhere on whatever it is you’re about to buy.

That’s one of the software’s coolest features, actually. It performs character recognition on the images in these messages, so that it knows what they say. Some store might send you an e-mail with a picture of a starburst that says, “40% off â€" ends tomorrow!” You wouldn’t find that text by searching within your e-mail program, but this app does.

In fact, the app conveniently puts diagonal banners across the corners of pages that announce time-limited offers. “Ends today,” one might say, or “Ends soon.”

Weirdly, it even puts an “Expired” banner on deals that you’ve already missed. Why? Why not just hide those messages, instead of tormenting you? (The company says an option to hide them will come in an updated version.)

You know, as a guy, I’m not sure I’d rely on PeeqPeeq to check for sales as I head out the door. I’m a huge devotee of RetailMeNot.com, which rounds up discount codes and sales for just about every online retailer in existence. I search that when I’m about to buy something: tickets, electronics, books, whatever.

But as much as I detest junk mail, I realize that many people deliberately subscribe to their favorite stores’ mailing lists. If you’re among them, then PeeqPeeq’s presentation of each day’s deals is certainly a better way to peruse them.