MetaFilter posts tagged with email

Civilizations and E-Mail

spaltavian — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:03:31 -0800

A team of computer researchers analyzed ten million Yahoo! e-mails and noticed a phenomenon: "E-mails tend to flow much more frequently between countries with certain economic and cultural similarities". The paper, titled "The Mesh of Civilizations and International Email Flows" was written by researchers at Stanford, Cornell, Yahoo! and Qatar’s Computational Research Institute. It places the research in the context of Samuel Huntington’s much-maligned “Clash of Civilizations" theory: "In this respect we cautiously assign a level of validity to Huntington’s contentions, with a few caveats. The ﬁrst issue was already mentioned – overlap between civilizations and other factors contributing to countries’ level of association. Huntington’s thesis is clearly reﬂected in the graph presented in Figure 3, but some of these civilizational clusters are found to be explained by other factors in Table 5. The second limitation concerns the fact that we investigated a communication network. There is no necessary “clash” between countries that do not communicate, and Huntington’s thesis was concerned primarily with ethnic conﬂict." We see in the study that nations placed into the same "civilization" per Huntington’s definitions do e-mail each other more frequently than nations e-mail nations e-mail outside their civilization. The authors themselves, however, add “the advancement of an explanation is premature.”

bartsimpsonbartsimpson@gmail.com

silby — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 17:50:18 -0800

Sorry, that username is already taken

Email transparency at Stripe

jeffburdges — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 06:21:35 -0800

The credit card processor Stripe has an interesting policy of email transparency within the company (previously).

Eulogy for Hotmail

Chinese Jet Pilot — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 13:15:45 -0800

As Microsoft prepares to retire its unfashionable Hotmail in favor of Outlook.com this summer, let's remember the viral marketing revolution that Hotmail invented. Journey back seventeen years to Hotmail's origins, the birth of the dot.com millionaire, and the boozy optimism of a pre-crash web industry in full-growth mode (Wired, December 1998) .

Hey

OmieWise — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 13:14:30 -0800

"The bottom line: Obama’s e-mail fundraising team tested hundreds of grabby subject lines. The most successful—“Hey”— brought in millions of dollars." Inside Obama's chatty e-mail fundraising campaign.

Markovian Parallax Denigrate

the man of twists and turns — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:52:09 -0800

But back in 1996, users of the proto-Web community Usenet got spammed with messages that reached an almost transcendent level of bizarre—a weirdness so precise it implied the influence of a very human intelligence. “Markovian Parallax Denigrate,” read the title of each post, followed by a mountain of seemingly meaningless word spew:

Unraveling the Internet’s oldest and weirdest mystery

Down with this sort of thing - Michael Calleri

urbanwhaleshark — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 21:37:10 -0800

"snow white and the huntsman is trash. moral garbage. a lot of fuzzy feminist thinking and pandering to creepy hollywood mores produced by metrosexual imbeciles." Michael Calleri, film reviewer for the Niagara Falls Reporter, receives an email from his publisher.

You've got mail! And a drone strike!

unSane — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 13:54:10 -0800

Taliban accidentally CCs everyone on its mailing list.

Sorry, no new messages

cenoxo — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 04:29:39 -0800

Email stress test: Experiment unplugs workers for 5 days — Slave to your email? Wonder what would happen if you had to do without it?

'Silence seems to keep me from idealizing myself.'

the man of twists and turns — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 23:35:50 -0800

How Silence Works: Emailed Conversations With Four Trappist Monks

Goodbye, Hotmail

vidur — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 21:40:23 -0800

Bored of Gmail? Why don't you try Outlook?

Death of a fat email client

Rhomboid — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 19:49:35 -0800

The Mozilla Foundation has announced that they're throwing in the towel on their popular email client Thunderbird, citing a dearth of active contributors and the growing popularity of web-based email. Mozilla remains committed to releasing Thunderbird ESR 17 on 20 Nov 2012 which will be supported with stability and security fixes until 3 Dec 2013. They've also announced a plan to provide infrastructure and support for Thunderbird to live on as a community-driven project.

Why do scammers say they are from Nigeria?

modernnomad — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 13:57:28 -0800

Why Do Online Scammers Say They Are From Nigeria? A research paper from Microsoft argues it's a method of weeding out the savvy [via Slate]. Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.

What would you say?

likeatoaster — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:05:26 -0800

the listserve is simple: one person a day wins a chance to write to the list of subscribers. The project is an "online social experiment" by a group of graduate students at NYU's ITP program.

"Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation." ~ Michael Dirda

Fizz — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 10:31:12 -0800

Daily Science Fiction: Original Science Fiction and Fantasy every weekday. Welcome to Daily Science Fiction, an online magazine of science fiction short stories. We publish "science fiction" in the broad sense of the word: This includes sci-fi, fantasy, slipstream—whatever you'd likely find in the science fiction section of your local bookstore. Our stories are mostly short short fiction each Monday through Thursday, hopefully the right length to read on a coffee break, over lunch, or as a bedtime tale. Friday's weekend stories are longer.

DMARD: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance

Blake — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:12:59 -0800

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.

I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

Blazecock Pileon — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 07:01:21 -0800

A series of emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request shine light on collusion between the United States government and TransCanada, a corporation building a controversial pipeline from the Canadian Athabasca oil sands into its southern neighbor. The controversy extends beyond the currently poor safety record for delivering oil between the two countries, and beyond the environmental and health consequences of the oil extraction process for locals and the cost of climate changes it will contribute to, all the way to legal wrangling between Canadian media and Saudi Arabia over the "death panels"-like term "ethical oil", based upon a conservative group's advertising that argues that the purchase of Canadian-sourced oil is a morally superior act, because of oppression of women and human rights violations by the Saudi kingdom.

Short and Sweet

SpaceWarp13 — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:51:49 -0800

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. Shortmail is interesting in that it attempts to fuse the traditional private domain of email with a social component. An example of a public Shortmail message exchange between Dan Misener of the CBC and Dave Troy from Shortmail goes into more detail about the service and its uses.

"Message for you, sir"

obscurator — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 07:47:33 -0800

"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.

Dripread

reenum — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 20:10:58 -0800

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. The site also has public domain books for people to read.

Unfortunately for Freddie, he has fallen in love with you

the young rope-rider — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:54:10 -0800

A bride-to-be has been given a very public etiquette lesson after an email from her future mother-in-law, attacking her "uncouthness", went viral over the internet.

Time-sharing Terminals, Math Dynasties, Music, Coping with Loss, and the Invention of Email

benito.strauss — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 11:45:27 -0800

Did Errol Morris's brother invent email? Film documentarian Errol Morris starts an extended, discursive piece at the Opionator section of the New York Times. Having previously documented his investigation of Crimean War photographs, Morris has posted the first part of a planned five part series covering his older brother's role in creating an early form of email. Along the way he touches on the computer culture of the 60s, dining options in Cambridge, MA, the MIT experience, and the Van Vleck dynasty.

"The Digital Revolution In Reverse"

ericb — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 09:25:06 -0800

"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.'"*

"Palin was governor for 966 days, before ending her term abruptly. As of Friday, [the various media outlets'] request for public records was pending for 997 days. At $725.97 for the latest set of documents, that price is a bargain, only 3 cents a page for the photocopying, compared with the state's first cost estimate of $15 million for search and copying costs during the 2008 campaign, when officials were flustered by the burst of attention focused on their governor. At that point Crivella West offered to do the work for the state for free. The state didn't respond to the offer, but msnbc.com teamed up with the company to plan an online archive. Executives in the office of the current governor, Sean Parnell, Palin's former lieutenant governor, said they could not figure out how to release the electronic records in an electronic form, not after certain records had to be printed so portions could be blacked out or withheld entirely."*

"Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something." ~Ernest Hemingway

Fizz — Mon, 23 May 2011 05:31:10 -0800

An Open Letter to Writers of Open Letters: To those who feel compelled to address the world from Facebook, Twitter, and email chains, TEDDY WAYNE has a message: No one is listening, least of all Luther Vandross. [TheMorningNews.org]

Everyone Knows You're A Hack

The Whelk — Sun, 15 May 2011 15:56:56 -0800

Judd Apatow got into an e-mail argument with the creator of That 70s Show back in 2002