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

The owners of the domain donotreply.com get a lot of mail. [via]
posted on Mar 19, 2008 - View this thread

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 on Mar 9, 2008 - View this thread

"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 on Feb 11, 2008 - View this thread

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

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 on Nov 21, 2007 - View this thread

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 on Aug 31, 2007 - View this thread

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 on Aug 15, 2007 - View this thread

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 on Jul 23, 2007 - View this thread

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 on Apr 23, 2007 - View this thread

"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 on Mar 26, 2007 - View this thread

BC cabinet minister flames out.
posted on Feb 7, 2007 - View this thread

The Anonymous Message Server - leave a message, get a message. (or a URL, if you want.)
posted on Jan 22, 2007 - View this thread

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 on Dec 2, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Oct 31, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Oct 26, 2006 - View this thread

The ultimate in passive communication. A time capsule doesn't say I love you like a time-delayed email.
posted on Oct 23, 2006 - View this thread

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 on May 18, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Mar 20, 2006 - View this thread

Monk-e-mail If you want to send a message, this is....unique.
posted on Feb 17, 2006 - View this thread

"Thank you for the refresher course on contracts. This is not a bar exam question."
'bla bla bla."
posted on Feb 16, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Feb 7, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Feb 4, 2006 - View this thread

"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 on Dec 15, 2005 - View this thread

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 on Oct 18, 2005 - View this thread

Russian spammer beaten to death.
posted on Jul 26, 2005 - View this thread

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.

The scary yet interesting part of all of this is that the No-Fly List is nothing more than a password-protected spreadsheet (see this PDF). One would guess our Government's geeks would know that it's a bad idea to send email attachments containing social security numbers and dates of birth, unencrypted, over the internets, even if they might be terrorists.
posted on Jul 15, 2005 - View this thread

“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 on Jun 24, 2005 - View this thread

"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 on Jan 31, 2005 - View this thread

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 on Jan 26, 2005 - View this thread

One Terabyte?! I remember the good old days. Back when I was a kid and Gmail revolutionized communication by offering 1 gigabytes of storage to it's users. Well step aside, G. These crazy bikers are giving away 1000 GB accounts with a whopping 500 MB limit on attachments. And no ads?! Is this really possible? Think of the bandwidth.
posted on Dec 14, 2004 - View this thread

Thunderbird 1.0 has RSS support integrated The release of Thunderbird 1.0 was covered yesterday, however nowhere in the thread was the new RSS integration mentioned. I'm now viewing MeFi in my email client, complete with all of the sort/search features that I depend on for my email, and that's pretty sweet.
posted on Dec 8, 2004 - View this thread

Thunderbird 1.0 out My faverit mail client!
posted on Dec 7, 2004 - View this thread

GMail not-so-safe Mail. So apparentley GMail has a major exploit that's been discovered by an Israeli hacker. "Using a hex-encoded XSS link, the victim's cookie file can be stolen by a hacker, who can later use it to identify himself to Gmail as the original owner of an email account, regardless of whether or not the password is subsequently changed." And so the fun with GMail begins..
posted on Oct 29, 2004 - View this thread

God help us if the Democrats find out. After Cheney's .com/.org mixup, Republican domain name confusion continues as Bush campaign staffers accidentally send email--including lists of voters that may be used to challenge voters--to addresses at georgewbush.org instead of georgewbush.com
posted on Oct 26, 2004 - View this thread

RSS Mailer emails the contents of RSS feeds to mailing list users. You can manage your users and RSS feeds through a web interface and send a selected number of items from your RSS feeds (individually or all together) to the email addresses on your mail list. Users can subscribe/unsubscribe themselves through forms, or the administrator can subscribe/unsubscribe them through the web interface. You probably won't need Bloglet anymore.
posted on Oct 6, 2004 - View this thread

Grind. Endless drudgery. Too much in your in-tray, not enough in your out-tray. You put your headphones on, but it doesn't really help. You want a distraction - just for a moment or two. "A happy employee is a productive employee" you justify to yourself, although you're not convinced. Then it happens. A 24 carat nugget of plain text escapism lands in your in-box. You're an alt-tab, double-click away from sheer bliss. DNRC; A.Word.A.Day; FlipFlopFlyin Newsletter; The Plain Text Gazette; and the previously mentioned Snowmail and Newsnight Newsletters, which take a less formal but equally sharp look at the day's news, with anecdotes and observations thrown in. What other quality plain text mail lists are around?
posted on Sep 29, 2004 - View this thread

Two Writers Drinking, Sitting Around, Talking About Stuff. That about says it! Two online veterans get drunk and exchange e-mails. (An ongoing series. The above link is part one. Part two is here, and part three can be found right here). (Via Maud)
posted on Aug 22, 2004 - View this thread

Spamusement Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines. (via The Ultimate Insult)
posted on Jul 31, 2004 - View this thread

E-mail snooping is legal. A U.S. federal appeals court set an unsettling precedent last week by ruling (PDF) that an e-mail provider did not break the law when he copied and read e-mail messages sent to customers through his server.
posted on Jul 7, 2004 - View this thread

85% of all email is spam. 83% of all email is spam. Between 80 and 90% of all email is spam. 80% of all email is spam. 76% of all email is spam. Between 64 and 78% of all email is spam. 64% of all email is spam. 63% of all email is spam. 60% of all email is spam. 52% of all email in 2004 will be spam. 50% of all email is spam. By 2006 98% of all email will be spam.
posted on Jul 6, 2004 - View this thread

Gmail 4 Troops! The idea of matching U.S. troops in need of a low-cost way to communicate with their friends, family, and other loved ones back home with those who have spare Gmail invitations is the brainchild of Wil Wheaton and Drew Olanoff. Gmail4Troops is their project, as a result of their inspiration. The sponsors here, including Whizardries and ISIPP, are here to help further and support Drew and Wil's project, and are honoured to be able to assist Wil and Drew, and to serve our troops serving overseas, and their loved ones back home, in this manner .
posted on Jun 22, 2004 - View this thread

Yahoo! Mail is trashing Gmail invites. Regular Gmail appears in the inbox, but invites are sorted to the spam folder.
posted on Jun 22, 2004 - View this thread

Ain't this grand? Pop Goes the Gmail is a program that sits between the http://gmail.com web server and your email client, converting messages from web format into POP3 format that a program such as Outlook Express or Thunderbird can understand.
posted on Jun 15, 2004 - View this thread

Yahoo feels the heat. Yahoo webmail users logged in this morning to find that they suddenly have mailboxes with 100MB capacity, can send emails up to 5MB in size, and have a much nicer-looking interface.
posted on Jun 15, 2004 - View this thread

Gmail is too Creepy "Dear Gmail user: Due to privacy considerations, we cannot respond unless you resend your email from a different account."
posted on Jun 10, 2004 - View this thread

Aventure Media is the Gmail killer. No more waiting for Gmail to be released, Aventure Media is already offering 2GB of storage. [via theregister]
posted on Jun 2, 2004 - View this thread

What would you swap for a gmail account? "Everyone's talking about Gmail, but it's still only a handful of lucky ducks who have snagged an account. And while the rest of us go hungry, you can be sure that the best email addresses are being gulped down by nefarious hooligans. gmail swap tells the people with Gmail about the people without."
posted on May 17, 2004 - View this thread

RFC 1855: Netiquette Guidelines. "Never send chain letters via electronic mail. Chain letters are forbidden on the Internet. Your network privileges will be revoked... Remember that many people pay for connectivity by the minute, and the longer your message is, the more they pay.... Don't point to other sites without asking first."
posted on May 4, 2004 - View this thread

SpamKing: Out of the Inbox and Into the Closet? I wan7 my XXXXXXXL sh1rt N0W.
posted on Apr 20, 2004 - View this thread