IBM will soon launch a new online email service called Verse, and it puts a new spin on this very old idea.

Set to go live next week, Verse overturns the way emails are viewed and prioritized. It zeroes in on who sent them rather than when they were sent. The online client—pictured above—uses images of your most frequent contacts to provide a rather visual representation of where emails are coming from and where they're going.

For Carolyn Pampino, IBM's director of design who helps oversee the service, Verse is an answer to a long-running problem. "Email clients have been around since the '70s and they haven't changed much," she says. "You get a flat list of emails that you have to triage, with no sense of where you need to focus."

But the tool is just the latest in a long, long line of new ideas that aim to right the wrongs of that ancient thing called email. Some companies are trying to replace it with newer tools, including everyone from Evernote to Asana and Slack. And many others are hoping to improve email itself, including not only IBM but also companies such as Acompli, Baydin, and one of the biggest names on the net: Google.

With its tool, Inbox, Google focuses on automatically sorting your email into different categories based on what type of message it is. Newsletters from retailers go in "promotions," flight conformations go under "travel," and so on. With Verse, IBM is also hoping to rejig the old organizational structures. But it takes a different approach.

Picture Your Contacts

A bar at the top of the Verse service includes a picture of each of your most important contacts. When you have a new message from one of them, a little red dot appears on their icon. You can then click their face to see their latest messages.

It feels a bit like an instant message app. Who sent a message is what's important, not the date or subject line. Verse tries to algorithmically determine who the most important contacts are based on your correspondence history, but you can also add them manually.

IBM is banking that this more people-centric approach to email organization will help it stand out from the pack—though it still provides a flat list of messages, for those who want a more traditional email experience—and it aims to turn the service into more than just an email tool. Unlike other new email clients, IBM wants Verse to be a kind of collaboration platform that solves many of the same problems that companies like Asana and other "email killers" are trying to solve.

More Than Email

To that end, IBM has also included a file sharing service. Much like Box or Dropbox, you can upload your files to the service and then share links to the files instead of sending attachments. And as with would-be email killers, you can also add notes to the files from within Verse to eliminate a lot of e-mail back-and-forth.

What's more, Verse includes a calendar and task management system. Like so many newer apps and older clients such as Microsoft Outlook, it aims to merge email with a vast range of tools that help you juggle your online life. The question is whether it's too late for IBM to compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft, who now dominates the marker for internet email. But there just might be room for Big Blue. After all, email is an enormous problem.

Update 11/19/2014 1:10 PM EST: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the IBM executive quoted as Catherine Gillespie. It was actually Carolyn Pampino.