Chat and e-mail

It's important to know who you're talking to. But in our e-mail in-boxes, we're deluged with messages from people we don't know, companies we're not familiar with. Even messages from our friends and coworkers could be better handled if we had social or business context with the message.

To see what I mean, try at least one of the these three good tools: Xobni, Rapportive, and a new kid on the block, WhoSent.It. These tools all give you dossiers on the people e-mailing you by using data gleaned from around the Web, including Facebook profiles, Twitter postings, and, for business users, data from apps like Salesforce.com.

Of these apps, Xobni is for Outlook users. Rapportive works nicely with Gmail and Google Apps. WhoSent.It has a clever twist that makes it work with anything.

If you're an Outlook user, get Xobni. Like the other apps, it pulls personal data from Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in, and company data from Hoovers. Xobni also gives you relevant data from within your own e-mail archive: It gives you links to e-mails you've exchanged with the sender, and also shows you which other people the sender communicates with (taken from multi-addressed to: and cc: fields). Xobni's sidebar data panel looks great and is the front-end for a ton of additional info, though on a crowded notebook's screen it can be a little intrusive. … Read more

Google points to a software update error that caused thousands of Gmail users to lose e-mail, contacts, and folders last Sunday, but for the unfortunates who were affected by the glitch, any explanation for an emptier inbox is cold comfort.

Thankfully, there are ways to save the contents of your e-mail account online and on your desktop, and I show you three of them in the video above. While I focus on Gmail specifically this time around, the principles are the same for any Web mail service that supports POP forwarding, as most of them do.

If you have a … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google is giving its Priority Inbox feature more priority.

Speaking here at the Inbox Love event, Gmail product lead Paul McDonald said the service's priority indicators would soon start showing up even in in-boxes of users who have not turned on the Priority Inbox feature.

Gmail users won't be forced into viewing their in-boxes in the segregated Priority view, but McDonald showed how the little yellow flags that indicate a high-priority message will soon be displayed by default in the standard, unprioritized view. Users will be able to train the feature by turning the indicators … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Joshua Baer, CEO of the e-mail company OtherInBox, agitated for a new addition to e-mail standards at the Inbox Love e-mail conference today. He's proposing a standard that would let e-mail messages carry with them the date of their own irrelevance.

E-mails could use the the "x-expires" header to tell the receiving in-box that they become outdated after a certain absolute date, or a certain time relative to when they're sent or received. Baer says this idea has been "bouncing around" for 10 years, but he's learned, "the best … Read more

You're stuck in a cross-town taxi. An important meeting is just getting under way at the office. What do you do? What do you do?

You can dial in, of course, but then you'll be missing out on all the visuals: slide decks, spreadsheets, and so on.

Solution: fire up Join.me, a universal application that lets you connect to remote meetings or screen-sharing sessions. It's free, and nothing short of fabulous.

In case you're not familiar with it, the Join.me service offers fast, hassle-free Web conferencing. Whoever is hosting the meeting merely downloads and … Read more

Just in time for the appearance of the Verizon iPhone tomorrow, VoIP calling service Skype is updating its iPhone app to include support for the H.264 video format. H.264 is the most widely accepted encoding standard for high-definition video.

In addition to boosting image quality, the enhancement means that Skype for iPhone users can place and accept calls from and to Skype callers using a select bunch of Skype-enabled TVs.

The free Skype update is available in the App Store.

Gmail users who rely on the Priority Inbox feature to sort their e-mail will now find the same feature available through their mobile devices.

Launched in August, Priority Inbox was designed to help clear the clutter of your inbox by filtering out e-mail deemed less important. Initially available on the standard Gmail Web site and via the Gmail Android app, the feature has just made its debut on the mobile Web version of Gmail accessible through any portable device.

Priority Inbox filters the e-mail from your regular inbox into one of three categories: Important and unread, Starred, and Everything. You … Read more

Microsoft knows you're making throwaway e-mail accounts, and wants to make that process easier.

Today, Hotmail is getting a new feature aimed at "e-mail enthusiasts," which lets anyone create multiple e-mail accounts that can be read, replied to, and managed from their everyday e-mail inbox. These additional e-mail addresses can be had in the same manner as signing up for new accounts, but they require no extra log-ins or upkeep.

The idea is to give users a safe way to provide third parties with an e-mail address, without giving up the address they've provided to family … Read more

Windows Live Messenger is seeing its integration with Facebook chat grow rapidly.

Microsoft announced yesterday in a blog post that close to 18 million people have "connected" Facebook chat to Messenger since August, when it became possible to do so. And those folks have now accumulated more than 2.8 billion minutes of Facebook chat. All told, there have been 440 million chat sessions between Messenger and Facebook in less than six months, Microsoft said.

Microsoft, which owns a small slice of Facebook, became the first instant-messaging provider to allow its users to chat with friends on Facebook … Read more