Getting the e-mail through in hurricane season

The American Red Cross of Central Florida has adopted an emergency messaging service from MessageOne that will allow it to send simultaneous messages to 1,500 emergency volunteers at once. Sort of an important thing after the recovery fiasco of Hurricane Katrina last year.

AlertFind essentially takes an e-mail message from a sender and blasts it out to hundreds or thousands of individuals at once. The system also gathers responses. If no response comes, it then tries alternative methods--cell phones, pagers, home numbers--to reach recipients who didn't reply.

Other companies, such as the appropriately named Send Word Now, offer similar services. MessageOne specializes in communications disasters. Its best-known product is an e-mail continuity service. It was founded by Adam Dell, brother of a guy who started a computer company.