Salesforce is good, but might be overkill. Highrise is simple and easy, once you have a contact in highrise you can BCC your Highrise account directly from you

Salesforce is good, but might be overkill. Highrise is simple and easy, once you have a contact in highrise you can BCC your Highrise account directly from your email client and it will add the messages to the person in the emails contact history. The custom tagging you can set up in Highrise is great too. For instance you could use a custom tag scheme of: "not very interested" = NVI "annoyed" = AN "Excited" = EX and then add those tags to people as you work through them, then you have the ability to filter by those.