Computer technicians have uncovered 22 million messages believed lost by the George W. Bush administration. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) and George Washington University's National Security Archive "...reached a final settlement of their long-running lawsuits challenging the failure of the Bush White House and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to take any action after confronted with evidence that millions of emails had gone missing from Bush White House servers over a two and one-half year period." "Documents produced so far show the Bush White House was lying when officials claimed no emails were ever missing. The record now proves incontrovertibly that Bush administration officials deliberately ignored the problem and, in fact, knowingly allowed it to worsen."* "We may never discover the full story of what happened here," said Melanie Sloan, CREW's executive director. "It seems like they just didn't want the e-mails preserved." [more inside]
posted by ericb on Dec 14, 2009 - 86 comments

The University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit suffered a security breach this week. Hackers made off with thousands of email correspondences between some of the world's top climate scientists, and posted them to the Internet¹.

Tony Hake has posted an article at The Examiner, highlighting what he feels are the most egregious examples of scientists manipulating and hiding data to support the established theories about Climate Change. Some of the scientists involved counter that the quotes are taken out of context, and that "People are using language used in science and interpreting it in a completely different way".

¹ I'm not going to link to them, but the Examiner article mentions where to get them.
posted by Who_Am_I on Nov 20, 2009 - 146 comments

Google began inviting volunteers to a public preview test of their new Wave web-based collaborative email and document communications platform yesterday, which enables users to "communicate and work together in real time." Initial reviews this past May seemed positive. (Previously) [more inside]
posted by zarq on Oct 1, 2009 - 75 comments

email etiquette: ALL CAPS CAN GET YOU FIRED. [more inside]
posted by tamarack on Sep 2, 2009 - 124 comments

Email patterns can predict impending doom. [more inside]
posted by WPW on Jun 25, 2009 - 18 comments

NSA E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress. "Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation." [Via]
posted by homunculus on Jun 17, 2009 - 44 comments

Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication? Introducing Google Wave. [more inside]
posted by CunningLinguist on May 28, 2009 - 139 comments

This week, American diplomats took down the State Department's email system by using reply-to-all. They're not the only ones to make this gaffe. Spirit Airlines' CEO hit reply-to-all in response to a customer complaint. A corporate attorney sent a note intended for a client to a NY Times reporter. A Minnesota judicial candidate replies to an email claiming Barack Obama is a Muslim. Maybe they should read this guide to knowing when not to reply-to-all. Or their admins should prevent them from using reply-to-all or forward in Outlook. Also, don't put everyone's addresses in the TO: field - Seagate Software, AT&T, and Nissan found this out the hard way.
posted by desjardins on Jan 11, 2009 - 100 comments

As those of you on the wrong email lists can probably guess, Snopes is overflowing with gang initiation rumors. What you may not know is that the New Jersey police recently arrested someone spreading those stories for "causing false public alarm." [more inside]
posted by tkolar on Dec 7, 2008 - 23 comments

U.S. Presidents have had an uneven relationship with technology. The Clinton Presidential Library has more than 40 million White House emails on record (but only two are from the man himself). The Bush Administration, on the other hand, junked the Clinton archival process and replaced it with a comically inept alternative that has lost more than five million messages, many concerning official government business. (President Bush, for his part, gave up his longtime address -- G94b@aol.com -- just before his inauguration). Even the Reagan White House had its share of problems with the digital age. Now, as tech-savvy Barack Obama prepares to implement his technology plans, does he have a shot at dragging the Oval Office into the 21st century? Or will he have to surrender his laptop, his email account, and his beloved Blackberry?
posted by Rhaomi on Nov 15, 2008 - 38 comments

The latest paper-based video from the folks at Common Craft. This video explains the ins and outs of phishing scams. Show it to your less web-savvy brethren.
posted by dbarefoot on Oct 21, 2008 - 5 comments

A dress code at the polls? Many states have 'electioneering' laws in place that can be broadly interpreted to mean that clothing with political messages is not allowed. Snopes put a page up advising voters to check with their board of elections. Some election officials have released statements attempting to clarify [pdf] the enforcement of their state's electioneering laws, though those statements aren't legally binding. Other election officials are suing to keep the broad definition of electioneering in place. If rules are interpreted to include campaign shirts and buttons, you will likely need to cover the item up, remove it, or otherwise conceal it. [more inside]
posted by cashman on Oct 6, 2008 - 55 comments

Happy Bicentenemail. Strongbad answers his 200th email in this installment of the long-running Homestarrunner.com web site. Featuring a musical intro by They Might Be Giants.
posted by justkevin on Sep 23, 2008 - 43 comments

Sarah Palin's email gets hacked by Anonymous (right, that Anonymous). And given the legal controversy surrounding her email, one wonders if the fact that her yahoo email accounts are now deleted constitutes destruction of evidence or violations of public-records laws. Its hit Wikileaks too, but, I'm not sure they have more then what's already released (rapidshare).
posted by yeoz on Sep 17, 2008 - 416 comments

Please do not forward chain letters, urban myths presented as truth, potentially offensive jokes, videos or photos without being asked or first receiving permission.
posted by signal on Sep 14, 2008 - 62 comments

"Analysis of traffic logs (PDF) of email received by a large UK ISP shows considerable disparity between the proportions of spam received by addresses with different first characters." [more inside]
posted by Knappster on Sep 3, 2008 - 7 comments

"Room With A Screw: My 45-day quest to convince a craigslist scammer to write me a poem-- and how she lost her mind and tried to become my friend"
posted by not_the_water on Aug 16, 2008 - 44 comments

Kristin's List. There are plenty of events guides in Los Angeles, but none has as personal a voice, as finely honed an aesthetic (the Neutra font is an inspired touch) or as discerning an eye as Kristin's. Her weekly emails and web listings are one woman's recommended sampling of the most interesting music, film, architecture, food, fashion, literary and unquantifiable events across the megalopolis. And so far, it's completely ad-free.
posted by Scram on Jul 21, 2008 - 30 comments

Snail mail isn't that slow, unless you use real snails.... As part of a "slow art" project, Vicki Isley and Paul Smith of Bournemouth University have attached radio frequency identification chips (RFID's) to three gastropods, Austin, Cecil and Muriel. The RFID's will pick up your mail as the carriers amble past an electronic reader and deliver it when (in just a few days! ...or weeks ...or months....) they slip past a second reader.... RealSnailMail! [more inside]
posted by Kronos_to_Earth on Jun 21, 2008 - 15 comments

Vanity Fair has a typically excellent article out -- "How the Web Was Won," an oral history of the Web. Even if you're familiar with ARPANet, Metcalfe's Law, Pearl Harbor Day, the VC rush, whatever -- the story told by the often-animated people at the center of the whirlwind is an enlightening and entertaining experience. And for those of you don't know the history of the Internet, learn it! This is part of your heritage now. [more inside]
posted by spiderwire on Jun 4, 2008 - 19 comments

Ars Technica has a fascinating account of the IT "planning" which lead to the loss of 5 million+ emails. Via /.
posted by butterstick on Apr 30, 2008 - 45 comments

The owners of the domain donotreply.com get a lot of mail. [via]
posted by Armitage Shanks on Mar 19, 2008 - 68 comments

G-Archiver is a windows shareware app that backs up your gmail account to your local harddrive. it also does something far more sinister: it emails your username and password to the creator of the program. (via)
posted by krautland on Mar 9, 2008 - 57 comments

"It's amazing how we rely on them." BlackBerry email service went down this afternoon in "The Americas Network." That's bad. But is over-reliance on a network the worst of it? Or is it the thumb-ache? or the back-ache? or the work-life imbalance? or the shakes?
posted by jbickers on Feb 11, 2008 - 60 comments

Fuzzmail records your email as you type it and provides the actual composition for the person, or people on the receiving end. [via]
posted by cashman on Dec 14, 2007 - 40 comments

Worried about government eavesdropping on your e-mails? Hushmail allows you to communicate securely with other Hush users. Unless the government is involved. The guy who created PGP said the company only undoes encryption when given a court order and is not turning over customer records wholesale to government agencies. But who needs a court order?
posted by Smedleyman on Nov 21, 2007 - 33 comments

It's not a bug, it's a feature: Carolin Horn has designed Anymails, which represents your email messages and folders as micro-organisms. The morphology of the individual organisms and their behaviour within colonies imparts information about the state of your email. You can view QT movies of the application in action (1, 2), download her thesis, and download the Anymails code itself. See some of her other work here (predominantly in German). via Madame Martin, the "French Metafilter".
posted by Rumple on Aug 31, 2007 - 22 comments

My Right Wing Dad is a new-ish and rather informal blog that aims to provide "a chance for folks to examine the unrestrained rhetoric that is quietly passed from in-box to in-box in America," by hosting a collection of the emails that form an often untraceable and unacknowledged part of public discourse in the U.S., especially on the Right. Tagged by category (for example: God, college, flag, liberal, and World War II), the amateur archive presents a range of colorful opinion, not all of it strikingly accurate, and some of it offensive. In efforts to understand liberal and conservative habits of communication, it may be worth considering the role of forwarded email in the electoral process, and the reasons that the forwarding of email is popular among some people, and whether this behavior tends to correlate with particular political opinions. The emails hosted on MyRightWingDad may in any case be enlightening, unless you're already on the forward list of someone in the know.
posted by washburn on Aug 15, 2007 - 105 comments

E-motional breakdown: The state of e-mail misery. Is email finally at the breaking point? My inbox is so oversaturated I need professional advice to avoid bankrupcy. Or maybe I'll just wait it out -- the kids might know best.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot on Jul 23, 2007 - 32 comments

Network Hosting Attorney Scandal E-Mails Also Hosted Ohio's 2004 Election Results --...more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website -- which gave the world the presidential election results -- was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's firing of eight federal prosecutors. ...
posted by amberglow on Apr 23, 2007 - 66 comments

"So take that to your next rain dance and STFU" vs. "YOU GO BACK TO AFRICA AND DO YOUR GAY VOODOO LIMBO TANGO AND WANGO DANCE AND JUMP AROUND AND PRANCE AND ALL OVER THE PLACE HALF NAKED..." Emails between a gay black man and a Native American army recruiter. Copy of the email exchange here. (Quote at the bottom format, so read from the last page up.)
posted by Snyder on Mar 26, 2007 - 73 comments

BC cabinet minister flames out.
posted by russilwvong on Feb 7, 2007 - 54 comments

The Anonymous Message Server - leave a message, get a message. (or a URL, if you want.)
posted by divabat on Jan 22, 2007 - 28 comments

Teleflip is a free service for sending SMS (text messages) via email to any cell phone, all you need to do is send to xxx-xxx-xxxx@teleflip.com. Try it out. Replies will automatically be sent back to your email.
posted by onalark on Dec 2, 2006 - 60 comments

The Enron Explorer from Trampoline Systems "lets you investigate the actions and reactions of Enron's senior management team as the noose began to tighten" (through some 200,000 public domain corporate emails) using Trampoline's SONAR social network mapping platform. (via FutureFeeder)
posted by tpl1212 on Oct 31, 2006 - 1 comment

From Hammacher Schlemmer, "America's Longest Running Catalog", comes the most unlikely invention of this holiday season: the Computerless Email Printer. It dials up to the Internet, downloads and prints emails, all without one of those pesky computers. If only someone could have invented this in, say, 1843.
posted by GuyZero on Oct 26, 2006 - 47 comments

The ultimate in passive communication. A time capsule doesn't say I love you like a time-delayed email.
posted by whimsicalnymph on Oct 23, 2006 - 14 comments

Email used to be the ultimate application of the Internet, and there are still some interesting artifacts of that left behind today: As a source of randomness Email Roulette (which we've seen before) is my favorite application of email. TPC Remote Printing Service, a free mail-to-fax gateway, is pretty useful in a pinch and is something of an Old Internet institution with a history predating the web. Nearly as venerable is the more frivolous Internet Pizza Server from the days when the very idea of making a purchase over the Internet was funny, and the idea of browsing the web via email didn't seem so peculiar as it does today.
posted by majick on May 18, 2006 - 12 comments

Fitchburg State College in Fitchburg, MA, has announced that it will do away with traditional acceptance letters and will instead email accepted students a link to an acceptance podcast on iTunes.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow on Mar 20, 2006 - 40 comments

Monk-e-mail If you want to send a message, this is....unique.
posted by konolia on Feb 17, 2006 - 47 comments

"Thank you for the refresher course on contracts. This is not a bar exam question."
'bla bla bla."
posted by orthogonality on Feb 16, 2006 - 85 comments

Find offensive content! The people at Inboxer allow you register for a free account to use their antispam software on approximately 500,000 Enron emails in a database. According to a Wired article, the appliance has found 71,268 inappropriate messages.

And just to add to the fun, they're offering to give away 3 Ipod Shuffles for people who submit the best emails in the "I'd fire him/her" the "Funniest Joke", and the "What were they thinking?" categories. Just to give you an idea of what we're talking about here, check out this lovely Booty Call contract. Also, check out the whitepaper they've written, Monsters in your mailbox (.pdf), and get worried if you're using your business email account for personal messages!
posted by jasper411 on Feb 7, 2006 - 25 comments

When you really, really want your email to arrive at its destination: now you gotta pay postage. Another brilliant, forward-looking idea for monetizing-the-Internet^TM from the wizards at AOL and Yahoo.
posted by digaman on Feb 4, 2006 - 46 comments

"The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny." What's the article about? The NSA, and you, if you've ever called internationally or sent email overseas: ...the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, ... (very long, NYT--and the NSA's mission is to spy only on communications abroad)
posted by amberglow on Dec 15, 2005 - 74 comments

Call the aliens using first intentional intergalactic communication system. Just $3.99 a minute, though prospective callers should know that they aren't really breaking new ground. Do you need inspiration about what historic message to send? The first commercial telegraph message was the poetic "What hath God wrought?" The first telephone call was the famous "Come here Watson, I want to see you." The first email, rather boringly, announced the availability of email. Stuck on the first word? Follow the path of Edison, who coined the word "hello" as a telephone greeting over Alexander Graham Bell's "Ahoy Ahoy." (Audio version) Just hope that you don't receive a collect call in return.
posted by blahblahblah on Oct 18, 2005 - 14 comments

Russian spammer beaten to death.
posted by mono blanco on Jul 26, 2005 - 35 comments

Security, the TSA, and the No-Fly List You would think that our National Security apparatus would be like the TV series "24", with the most ingenious and sophisticated technology available. You would be wrong. Disclaimer: TSA is not an intelligent intelligence agency. Here's a blurb from the resume of the designer(Kenneth Mack) of the application the airline industry uses for *PDF* managing their employee data and the cross-checking them with the no-fly list:

- Sr. Developer: Developed a program [for Goddard Technologies] that uses the "No-Fly List" Excel spreadsheet, provided by the FAA and the database of badged employees to permute the name combinations. It takes into consideration multiple first and middle names, with Soundex and the various "initial" combinations. This program reduced the time for comparison from 3 days to 10 minutes.

“Thank you for your recent E-mail. I appreciate your concern. However, I am, at this time, completely satisfied with the size of my penis.” Says a Gizmodo post: Now I consider myself fairly well versed in penis lengthening—a skill introduced to me, inadvertently, by my 6th grade math teacher—but I did not realize one could become a medical doctor and specialize in the topic. They also point to a similar device mentioned in an earlier post. Ow.
posted by spock on Jun 24, 2005 - 11 comments

"You have the audacity to call me intelligent.” We covered Spongebob promotes the gay here. Now comes an amusing coda: a catfight between the Dobson forces, who started an anti-media email campaign, and Keith Olbermann, who printed and ridiculed said email. Dobson's people claim victory because Olbermann spent so much time on them, and Olbermann, a trifle defensive about the secular media, makes more fun.
posted by CunningLinguist on Jan 31, 2005 - 85 comments

US ISP Verizon decided late last year to block any email sent from outside the US. I thought the bounces I was getting from my Verizon contacts were glitches until I googled and found this.

The arrogance of Verizon is astonishing: "If it's really important you might want to make a phone call".
posted by essexjan on Jan 26, 2005 - 44 comments