email

Catch all your spelling mistakes

Spell Catcher is the modern-day descendant of a spell-checking app from ancient times (as a Desk Accessory called Thunder, from 1985), now with powerful, system-wide spell-checking and text-expanding features.

By default, this muscular app tracks every word you type on your Mac, across every application, and provides you with much more than the live visual feedback you get in separate apps with built-in spell-checking. Spell Catcher can give you automatic typo fixing, spoken alerts (for example, pointing out repeated words, or curious spellings with a quick "Curious!"), instant access to the dictionary and thesaurus (with support for multiple … Read more

Obscenity-laden e-mail leads to Facebook boycott

Some e-mails are not suitable for opening in the workplace, and then there are e-mails not suitable for sending from the workplace.

This must be the difficult lesson for Steven Payne, a vice president (at last word) of Evergreen Entertainment. Payne's company operates a chain of movie theaters, including the St. Croix Falls Cinema 8, in St. Croix Falls, Wis. Recently, a patron of the movie theater wrote a letter to the company complaining about the experience she and her husband and another couple had during a showing of "Shutter Island."

Sarah Kohl-Leaf of Taylors Falls, Minn., … Read more

E-mail addicts losing sense of propriety, risk

Do you check your e-mail while driving or during an "intimate moment?" If so, you may be one of many e-mail addicts.

E-mail addiction is causing people to engage in risky or inappropriate behavior, according to a study conducted by Osterman Research and commissioned by Neverfail. Released on Wednesday, the second annual "Mobile Messaging Study" surveyed employees at businesses to learn about their e-mail habits.

The study found that 95 percent of those questioned check their business e-mail outside of work, 78 percent while in the bathroom and 11 percent during "intimate moments." (The … Read more

Ad-Aware gets e-mail scans, tiered rootkit removal

E-mail scanning and a tiered level of rootkit removal come to Ad-Aware in Monday's update to version 8.2. Ad-Aware Free, Ad-Aware Plus, and Ad-Aware Pro now come with e-mail scanning for Microsoft Outlook users, as well as expand the Ad-Aware Live system to block malicious files from downloading, and introduce a tiered rootkit removal system that increases in efficacy as you upgrade Ad-Aware.

The new features are part of the recent expansive approach that Lavasoft has been pushing in Ad-Aware, looking beyond antispyware as the company tries to keep the program relevant. The tiered rootkit removal is the … Read more

Webmail alternative

YouSendIt Express provides a nifty alternative to e-mail accounts that use online browsers. Though its ability to quickly send large documents is great, its special features come at a price, literally.

The program's interface is easy to navigate, since it mimics a very basic e-mail program's layout. We didn't like having to register online, but YouSendIt's simplicity proved to be worth the extra work. We were able to build an address book, write e-mails, and even attach large files with no problems. The program took more than a minute to e-mail a moderately sized photo, which … Read more

Facebook revamps home page

Facebook has gotten another face-lift.

The popular social-networking site has tweaked its home page yet again. This time around, the redesign puts more of Facebook's core features and settings right on the home page. The goal is to spare users from having to jump from one page to another to access their favorite features.

The redesign was rolled out to the first group of users on Thursday, Facebook's 6th birthday. As of Thursday evening, 80 million out of Facebook's 400 million customers should have received the new home page, according to Inside Facebook.

The top menu of … Read more

Tearing down Twitter's walls

Remember those crazy days of e-mail when you couldn't send messages between systems? Microsoft Mail customers could only send mail within their enterprise or to other customers of Microsoft Mail (ditto for the other systems). It wasn't until SMTP standardized things that e-mail could move between systems.

E-mail was interesting then, but it didn't really become dominant until it standardized around the SMTP messaging protocol.

Are we experiencing the same thing with Twitter?

Twitter has become hugely popular, but it remains a closed communication medium. Yes, it has opened its data stream and maintains an open API approach … Read more

Address extractor

Technocom specializes in extraction utilities. The Email Extractor Outlook 'N' Express is one of a number of unique tools designed to extract e-mail addresses or messages from a variety of platforms and documents; this one pulls e-mail addresses from Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. Anyone who's ever tried to find lost e-mail addresses among thousands of saved messages in either program will probably appreciate Email Extractor's ability to quickly accomplish what can be a tiresome and time-consuming task. Things have the potential to get more complicated when both programs are involved, because Outlook saves addresses in .pst files … Read more

Open-source communities fight Apple Mail alone

Most Mac users default to Apple's good-but-not-great Mail program to manage their e-mail. But given Mail's serious deficiencies (e.g., weak to nonexistent integration with calendaring and contacts), a variety of open-source initiatives are underway to bring a full-featured e-mail client to the Mac.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that there appears to be little to no coordination between the different groups, leading to duplication and fragmentation of efforts.

Zimbra, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Raindrop, and a new project initiated by NetNewsWire founder Brent Simmons, Letters.app, all seem to be heading in the right … Read more

Verizon ends service of alleged illegal downloaders

Months after Verizon Communications began issuing warnings to accused file sharers, the company has acknowledged that multiple offenses could result in a service interruption.

"We've cut some people off," Verizon Online spokeswoman Bobbi Henson told CNET. "We do reserve the right to discontinue service. But we don't throttle bandwidth like Comcast was doing. Verizon does not have bandwidth caps."

What this means is that Verizon, one of the country's biggest broadband providers, appears to have adopted an approach to illegal file sharing that sounds very similar to one promoted and pushed heavily by … Read more