This week I tested Postbox 1.0, a program designed to handle your email in a smart, helpful manner. Starting Wednesday, this program is available at www.Postbox-Inc.com. Postbox sorts through your email and detects its contents so you can see Web links, photos, contacts and other items themselves with one button click—whether Microsoft Word (MSFT) documents, PDFs or spreadsheets—without digging through messages. Since its inbox is constantly being indexed, all search queries return near-instant results.

Postbox uses an Inspector Pane on the right side of each email to extract and display elements like images, attachments and contact information.

Postbox’s founders come from Mozilla Corp., maker of the popular Firefox browser, so Postbox is based on Mozilla technology and its security standards. Email is indexed locally on your computer, so none of it is sent back across the Web to Postbox. It uses Content Tabs (tabs are another feature borrowed from Firefox) to help visually organize folders, messages and content extracted from those messages. It displays the most important elements of each message in a right-side panel. Received emails can even be edited so they aren’t sitting in your inbox with subject lines like, “Fw: Re: Re: Sept.” Instead, you can rewrite the subject to something like “Flight times.”

But this program isn’t free like Gmail, Hotmail or other Web-based email programs, nor does it come preloaded on a computer the way Apple Mail (AAPL) is on every Mac. Users can try Postbox for a free 30-day trial period after which each license costs $40, allowing one person to use their license on multiple computers (i.e. at work, at home, on a laptop). For another $20, a Family Pack option will give up to five family members use of Postbox. An additional $25 buys a Lifetime Upgrades plan that entitles you to receive free of charge any major version of Postbox that’s released; other nonmajor releases are free upgrades.

I used Postbox on a Mac and a Windows Vista computer, filling it up with thousands of emails from Gmail, Hotmail and .Mac accounts. It didn’t run properly on my company-issued computer, which is plugged into a network firewall. Postbox says it supports open protocols like IMPAP, POP and SMTP, and that it would work with Microsoft Exchange if Exchange were set to use those open protocols.

For all of Postbox’s terrific features, it can be hard to suddenly see your email in a different way since most of our email programs haven’t changed much in years. Outlook, for example, has plenty of hidden features that many people never learn how to use. Postbox seems to know how slow users are to adapt to change and so it reveals many of its features whenever it gets the chance.

For example, Postbox pops up an alert that shows you how to connect this email program to Facebook and Twitter so that you can post status updates or tweets without leaving your email. These connections also let Postbox try to pull one representative photo for each of your email contacts by matching a name in an email with someone’s Facebook or Twitter name—if you follow the person. It also uses photos assigned to contacts in the Mac OS X address book, which is used by Apple Mail.

Or take a feature in Postbox called Topics. This is a way of auto-organizing messages into different groups after you label them as being part of a certain topic, say “Mom’s Birthday.” All messages in an email conversation are grouped into “Mom’s Birthday,” as are any future responses to the same conversation. Postbox gives you three ways to label an email conversation as being part of a certain topic: from the toolbar, using a Topics button in the message header or by pressing “T” from within a message. You can also select a topic as you’re composing an email, pre-sorting that conversation into a designated topic.

Not everyone will like Topics because, however helpful the feature is, it makes the user do more work when he or she just want to get through a huge pile of unread emails. Labeling each email with a certain topic doesn’t take long, but it’s still an extra step. I would like Postbox to create automatic topics for sorting emails. For example, I recently sent and received at least 50 emails related to rescheduling tennis matches. Even though all the messages had the word “tennis” in them, not all of them were related to the same email, so they wouldn’t sort into the topic I created, “Tennis Make-Up.” Postbox says it has considered automatic options like these and may try to incorporate something similar in future versions of the product.

If my 30-day trial ran out tomorrow, I’d miss Postbox’s Inspector Bar the most. This feature works like a filter, instantly sucking out the most important parts in each email—including messages, attachments, images or links—and displaying them in a blue, right-side panel.

Another useful tool in Postbox is the Compose Sidebar. This also appears as a right-side panel but it shows up when someone is writing an email. This panel can display attachments, images, links or contacts found in all emails so you can simply drag and drop that item into your email as you’re composing it. This took me a while to get comfortable using because I’m so used to hunting through emails for things that I need to find. But once it became a habit, I found myself using the Compose Sidebar often.

If you have Postbox running in the background and you get an email, small notifications appear in the bottom left of your screen telling you which email account received the message and who sent it.

In the Content Tabs, which fill up with all attachments, images, links or contacts found in your indexed email, a feature called the Action Bar lets you save, send, or instantly glance at a document. This saves you from opening each email and its attachment, a process that sometimes requires opening a slow-to-open program to see the document. A slider in this Action Bar lets you adjust the size of images from small to large.

Postbox shines a unique light on email and the way we work with it every day. Not all of its features will come naturally for long-time users of the same email program. But for someone who wants a fast search option built into email, Postbox is a winner.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

This week, I tested a free Web site called Mint.com that serves as a Web home base for account information from credit cards, credit unions and bank accounts. The site securely and automatically logs into those accounts, fetches the latest data and presents the information in easy-to-read and useful ways.

Mint.com lets users track their expenses via pie charts (top) and offers alternative savings options (bottom).

Mint hopes to help users get a better handle on where their money is going, how much is in each account, and what can be done to budget that money more efficiently. It sends automatic alerts about account data or when you exceed your budget. It can even translate a bank’s often odd rendering of merchants’ names into plain-English versions of your financial transactions.

Starting May 6, the site will let users add investments, such as individual retirement accounts and 401(k) plans, to their accounts, though Mint isn’t designed for serious investors. Today, readers can get sneak peak access to this Investments feature via www.mint.com/wsj. In June, Mint will add auto loans, student loans and mortgages.

Mint won’t work offline because it’s completely Web-based, and can’t be used to pay bills or move any money around, meaning people will still need to visit separate sites for bill payments and money transfers.

Talk of money-related software programs often brings to mind the old reliables: Intuit Inc.’s (INTU) Quicken and Microsoft (MSFT) Money. But some of these programs can cost close to $100 and require intense bookkeeping. Stripped-down versions of these products are available, but these still include fees. Geezeo.com is a Web service that’s more comparable to Mint.com, but it incorporates social-networking tools like introducing users with like interests.

Mint was created for 20-somethings like me who want to pay more attention to their finances but aren’t interested in taking hours each week to do so. This Web site worked ideally for me, and its clean interface integrates Web 2.0 features in a way that makes it a pleasure to use. I think it will appeal to a broad range of people who want to feel more in control of their money, but don’t want to spend a lot of time updating their information.

I set up my information on Mint in minutes, not hours, and used it to track five accounts. In seconds, Mint used data from my accounts to automatically generate colorful pie charts that illustrated where my money was spent — and most expenses were accurately labeled. I was pleased to find my local bank in a list of Mint-supported companies. And the site even encouraged me to look at my 401(k)’s progress online for the first time in a while because I didn’t need to dig into an out-of-the-way, unfamiliar Web site.

Security is important for a site like Mint.com, so it teamed up with online banking-service provider Yodlee to make secure connections to banks. This involves using encryption that the company claims is the same as what banks use. Mint also says that because it requires nothing more than an email address, password and ZIP Code from each person, registration is anonymous. And the company claims that it never sees or stores password information, nor does it ever see account numbers.

When setting up an account, Mint acknowledges nicknames for companies, like Amex for American Express (AXP), making it easy to find specific banks and credit-card companies. If you’d like to sign up on Mint, but don’t already have online accounts set up, Mint will give step-by-step directions on how to do this — whether via a company’s site or by phone.

The site suggests alternative companies that will save you more money than those you’re currently using. Some, but not all, of these companies are sponsors of the site. After entering my savings-account information, I learned about a high-yield savings account that would potentially allow me to earn hundreds more in interest each year. Some of these suggested alternatives were familiar, while others — like Bank of the Internet USA — weren’t.

I found Mint’s automatic alerts to be especially helpful. Each alert can be personalized to notify you via email or an SMS message on your mobile phone when something happens in an account. Account summaries, for example, can be sent via email and text message every Friday, the first of every month or never. Alerts can be adjusted to tell people that their credit-card bill is due within a certain number of days; if a pre-set budget is exceeded; or if a bank charges extra fees.

Mint’s new Investments section showed me details about two investments. A handy graph showed the status of my account earnings and compared them with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Nasdaq and the S&P 500. Individual stocks can be added into your account, though I could see only the balance of a trust holding one of my stocks.

In the Trends section, I learned what my most frequent expenditures were, as well as the total amount of money spent per month, which was interesting to see since I don’t usually add up all of my expenses. Trends can show you how your spending stacks up with everyone else — that is, people in the U.S. who use Mint. My account showed I ate at a Chipotle (CMG) chain restaurant once in February and once in April, spending the exact amount each time. (I like their barbacoa fajita burrito.) But I spent about $4 to $5 less than the average Chipotle customer.

If certain expenses are mislabeled, they can easily be renamed and reassigned to different categories. Pie charts and graphs can be altered with one mouse click to become more or less specific, and budgets can be set after looking at spending history on an easy-to-understand bar graph.

Digital conveniences like online bill payments and Web transactions can lead to people putting less thought into their finances. But the value of knowing specifically where money is and how it is spent is a tool that will likely encourage better financial planning and habits. I only wish Mint had a way to incorporate online bill payments so I could do all of my financial work in one place on this site. Otherwise, Mint is a real boon to people who want to tell their dads that they’re on top of their finances — and mean it.

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com.