email

Google brings new 'e-mail via text message' service to Africa

While a huge percentage of Africa's more than 1 billion residents have cell phones, far fewer have access to e-mail. Google is trying to change that.

According to the Associated Press, the Web giant is embarking on an ambitious endeavor that will let people receive e-mails via text messages. In effect, Google will be giving people access to the Internet with feature handsets. Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya are the first countries to get the service.

Nigerians began seeing ads posted on billboards around the country for Google's text message email service in July, according to the Associated Press. … Read more

Facebook battles phishing by reaching out to users

Most everyone has seen them, those annoying clickable phishing ads in the news feed or posted on friend's Facebook walls: "Get free tickets to Jamaica," "Win a free iPad," or "Friend, I need money urgently."

Phishing has been the bane of Facebook's existence for years, and today it announced that it is making a new attempt to curb the practice. It's launching a select e-mail address, phish@fb.com, where users can send notices of phishing they've seen on the social network.

"By providing Facebook with reports, we can … Read more

After 8 months, AOL e-mail refresh finally complete

After five years of inattention, in 2011 AOL execs finally began to put some serious resources into the company's e-mail service, AOL Mail. Starting in December of last year, AOL began rolling out a new version of the service to its 24 million users. Today, the news is, the upgrade is complete.

That's right, it took eight months to upgrade the system.

Why?

David Temkin, SVP of mail and mobile, said that redesigning this service was, "kind of playing with fire." AOL e-mail drives "a ton" of traffic to AOL content sites, "from … Read more

First Thunderbird, now Sparrow? We need e-mail clients, please

Today the small e-mail app company Sparrow announced it's getting acquired by Google. I hope this will be good news, but I am not convinced. With Mozilla ceasing development of Thunderbird features, things look bad for users of desktop e-mail software.

I'm a paying user of the Sparrow OS X application. I love it. I find it provides both a simple view to my GMail accounts, and a very fast interface to blast though messages. Google's GMail Web app gives me more features and better searching, and Thunderbird and Postbox are better for bulk operations, but for … Read more

Google snatches up Sparrow team to work on Gmail

Google has acquired e-mail software startup Sparrow in a move that brings its team to work on Google's Gmail product.

Sparrow's chief executive Dom Leca announced the news on the company's site and Twitter account this morning, as well as in an e-mail to existing Sparrow users.

Leca says that the company will continue to make Sparrow available, and keep it up and running with support, however the two versions of the product will not gain any new features.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Citing sources, The Verge suggests the deal came in at &… Read more

Dropbox users get spammed via personal e-mail accounts

David P. was the first Dropbox user to post on the company's Web site forum titled "Email-Address leaked from Dropbox" yesterday. He wrote that he received spam from an email address he uses only for Dropbox.

"So I guess you have a security problem with your user account data," he wrote. "And this sucks a lot."

As of this writing, there are now 106 posts in the forum of people complaining of receiving e-mail spam from online casinos and gambling sites via the online file storage service. The majority of the users are … Read more

Going 'unplugged' doesn't have to lead to an e-mail meltdown

This is the story of email and two vacations. Three, really. Because I'm on vacation now, totally unplugged.

Disconnecting is a lesson I learned from my breaks last year. I found that I could indeed walk away from e-mail and not come back with an out-of-control inbox. Maybe you can, too.

Last summer, I took two separate vacations, each lasting one week. During the first, I tried to stay on top of my e-mail. I didn't want to have a relaxing time off only to find 1,000 or more emails awaiting me upon my return.

I'd … Read more

Play time with the new games of Wii U

The world is annoyed with Facebook, but I'm stressed out over zombies:

Last week, Facebook automaticly changed the email address displayed in profiles to be the Facebook email that no one uses. Well the drama doesn't end there. Some smartphones that sync contacts with Facebook have auto-updated address book info with Facebook emails. Do yourself (and your friends) a favor and make sure the right email is listed in your profile. If you think you're missing emails because of this change-up, click on Messages in the left-hand column, then click on Other. That's where Facebook hides … Read more

Cloze gives relationship scores to everyone you know

Has it come to this? Do we need corporate CRM tools to manage our individual relationships?

The startup Cloze has launched a utility that scores every relationship you have with your e-mail contacts, based on when and how you communicate with people. The scores look like Klout numbers, but they're personal to you. Cloze uses those scores to rank your people, flagging the top-scorers for followup when you don't respond to their messages. Creepy? Maybe. But fairly handy.

Cloze was designed as a work tool. Founders Dan Foody and Alex Cote said they wanted to create … Read more

Take control of your e-mail with EmailTray

It's true that the busier you are, the more e-mail you receive. Yet that just makes you busier still, and takes away time from what you're supposed to be busy with: namely, your business. It just gets worse when you use multiple accounts and even clients in a vain but valiant attempt to divide and conquer the flood of messages. EmailTray from Web CEO is a free e-mail tool that collects all your e-mail and Webmail accounts in one interface and prioritizes your messages based on your usage patterns and your own customization. It displays the number of … Read more