MetaFilter posts tagged with email

She is your Virgil on the descent into L.A.

Scram — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:07:32 -0800

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.

Time in a bottleneck

Kronos_to_Earth — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:37:01 -0800

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! The system is up and running (When I tried it.). There's even a snailcam, which will be available August 11th - 15th, 2008. Also, from the website: DISCLAIMER: RealSnailMail is still under development. For testing purposes some messages may be forwarded sooner than expected. Sorry we can not guarantee unreliability of service at this time. We hope to have RealSnailMail working less predictably as soon as possible.

VF: How the Web Was Won

spiderwire — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:02:34 -0800

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. I just like this quote because it sums up my experience with all hackers-as-CEOs:

Jeff Bezos: When we started out, we were packing on our hands and knees on these cement floors. One of the software engineers that I was packing next to was saying, You know, this is really killing my knees and my back. And I said to this person, I just had a great idea. We should get kneepads. And he looked at me like I was from Mars. And he said, Jeff, we should get packing tables. We got packing tables the next day, and it doubled our productivity.

The Bush White House "upgrades" the e-mail system.

butterstick — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:35:24 -0800

Ars Technica has a fascinating account of the IT "planning" which lead to the loss of 5 million+ emails. Via /.

what did we tell you

Armitage Shanks — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:46:38 -0800

The owners of the domain donotreply.com get a lot of mail. [via]

G-Archiver discloses username/password

krautland — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 14:29:05 -0800

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)

All your berries in one basket?

jbickers — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:55:34 -0800

"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?

Fuzzy Mail

cashman — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 16:07:18 -0800

Fuzzmail records your email as you type it and provides the actual composition for the person, or people on the receiving end. [via]

The Courier's Tragedy

Smedleyman — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 05:52:52 -0800

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?

Visualizing your email as microbes.

Rumple — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 10:44:10 -0800

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".