For the past 18 months, engineers at PayPal, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and
nine other technology companies have spent their off-hours (and some on-hours) working hand in hand to tackle the problem that plagues them all: e-mail
phishing. The result is
DMARC, or, "Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance". It's not new, but puts
SPF and
DKIM to work in a new
way.
posted by Blake
on Jan 31, 2012 -
45 comments
It seems that there is increasing
frustration with the current state of email leading some to look for more technical solutions, such as Shortmail - an email client/social networking tool which attempts to redefine what its creators see as a broken relationship with email described on their
blog as a "river of trash." , while
others to turn to
less technological solutions to lessen their email burden.
[more inside]
posted by SpaceWarp13
on Jul 13, 2011 -
40 comments
"Excuse me, but it appears you have been presented with an addition to your in-box. Would you like tea and crumpets with that, my lord?"
Do you still receive email
(previously)? If so, perhaps you are tired of your system's built-in email notification sound. Never fear,
a brave .wav enthusiast has compiled endless references to the receiving and reading of email. These sound bytes span America's rich TV past (well, mostly Simpsons references), but don't miss the veritable Inbox of Babel toward the bottom.
posted by obscurator
on Jul 5, 2011 -
50 comments
Most of us know and love
Dailylit. But, if you want to have more current book snippets emailed to you every day, you can upload your own ebooks to
Dripread.
[more inside]
posted by reenum
on Jul 3, 2011 -
8 comments
"
Mother Jones [and, later, other media outlets] requested [Sarah] Palin's
gubernatorial emails during the 2008 election. Almost three years later, the wait is over. ... Today, at [1:00 pm ET] in Juneau, the state of Alaska is scheduled to release 24,199 pages of emails Sarah Palin sent and received during her half-term as governor of the Last Frontier. State workers will distribute six-box sets and hand trucks (which must be returned) to representatives of
a dozen or so media outfits" "Volunteers from the League of Women Voters and the Retired Public Employees of Alaska will be at Juneau's Centennial Hall convention center ... look[ing] for
any significant or interesting emails, stick a post-it note on the page, and pass them to journalists, who also will be reading through the 24,000 pages. Exact copies of the best of those emails will be posted online immediately. ... In the same room ... a second set of the documents will be scanned for msnbc.com by Crivella West, an analytics and investigative-research company from Pittsburgh, returning the records to their original electronic form, allowing anyone anywhere to join in the crowdsourcing. That free, public, searchable archive will go online, sometime later on Friday, at
http://palinemail.msnbc.msn.com." "The
Washington Post is looking for '100 organized and diligent readers' to work with reporters to 'analyze, contextualize, and research the emails.'
The New York Times is employing a similar system.'"
* [more inside]
posted by ericb
on Jun 10, 2011 -
158 comments
It is 2007, and R.P. Salazar is living in Waco, Texas. His email username is rpsalazar. One day an email arrives addressed to another rpsalazar, meant for someone with the same initials and surname but a slightly different email address. He sends it along to the right person, an R.P. Salazar living in Bangkok. Before clicking Send he adds a p.s.: "How's the weather in Bangkok?"
Before the end of 2007, Ruben Salazar and Rachel Salazar are married.
Storycorps and NPR report the whole story. (The text is good, but the audio is even better. Click "Listen to the Story.")
posted by mark7570
on May 13, 2011 -
21 comments
Steve Tucker met a woman at a nightclub in Canberra, made an extreme effort to find her, and was then ridiculed by the Australian media and most of the general public when his email went viral. But there's a
backstory that gives a whole new perspective.
[more inside]
posted by malibustacey9999
on Nov 29, 2010 -
167 comments
The Sunshine Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to government transparency & accountability, has obtained Supreme Court nominee
Elena Kagan's emails from her time in the Clinton White House & made them available in a handy web application. Browse, read, search & mark those you find interesting for others to read.
posted by scalefree
on Jun 23, 2010 -
26 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 Internet
1.
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
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
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
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
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
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
