e-mails

The digital divide is apparently alive and well.

About 20 percent of all U.S. heads-of-household have never sent an e-mail, and about 20 million households, or 18 percent, are without Internet access, according to a study released earlier this week.

Similar percentages of respondents also indicated that they had never looked up a Web site or information on the Internet, the survey found.

Age and education were significant factors cited in the study, which was conducted by researcher Parks Associates. Half of those who have never used e-mail are older than 65 and 56 percent had no formal education … Read more

Those annoying ads the Yahoo Mail has been appending to the bottom of e-mail messages soon will be a thing of the past.

Yahoo stopped adding the ads a few days ago, the company said on its Yahoo Mail blog on Friday.

Sounds good to me. Because the ads would be appended after each message, a back-and-forth exchange could lead to an accumulation of the pesky text lines like gradual accretions of soap scum.

I also never cared for Yahoo's text intruding into the content of my letter, which is much more presumptuous than a one-time display ad showing … Read more

DailyLit, which offers entire books over e-mail and RSS in daily serialized chunks every day, is now offering information from Wikipedia on various topics.

The free service would be perfect for people who are short on time and don't mind digesting literature and information in 5 minutes at a time on their handheld.

The Wikipedia-based topics DailyLit is creating "tours" of major world religions (22 installments--compared with the 260 installments for Moby Dick), "Wine 101," presidents of the United States, "Best Picture" Oscar winners, famous poets, famous women in history, Greek mythology, famous … Read more

Got a friend or family member who just loves to send you chain e-mails? The kind that have been forwarded a hundred times over and have so many indents and signatures on them that the original sender probably sent it off years ago? If you secretly enjoy these, but want to find a place where others have compiled their own in-box gems, check out FwdItOn, a simple service that lets you share images, videos, and text e-mails with others in one huge pool.

The service shares a lot of its core functionality with Digg. There's an upcoming section, a … Read more

A few weeks back at the Web 2.0 Expo, I got to catch up with Amit Mital, general manager of Microsoft's Live Mesh (review), and formerly of Office Live Meeting and BizTalk who told me some of the ways he deals with the hundreds of e-mails he gets every day. His solution deals with Outlook specifically, but the same techniques could be used to manage an in-box in Thunderbird, Apple Mail, or even Gmail with good use of its labels and filters. With Outlook helper Xobni opening up its doors to all today (story) I thought it would … Read more

As part of the Bush administration's post-Clinton cleaning house efforts, the White House replaced its Lotus Notes e-mail system with Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange. Compatibility issues broke the automated archiving system and e-mails were lost.

No problem, Bush and Co. said and decided to have employees save files by hand. That's despite the fact that doing it manually is not a reliable or even tamper-proof way of dealing with important government communications that are required by law to be carefully archived.

Subsequent efforts to retrofit the old Lotus Notes-based archiving system to work with the new system … Read more

A problem this week hampered some Gmail users trying to use their PayPal accounts.

The problem caused Gmail to reject some legitimate PayPal service e-mails, Google confirmed in a statement Friday. The problem, reported Tuesday, prevented people from using Gmail to receive confirmation e-mails, set up new accounts, or reset passwords for eBay's online payment system.

The problem "affected a very limited number of users," Google said. "We worked quickly to fix the problem, and we apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused." The company encourages those with technical difficulties to report them … Read more

Many Gmail users had problems with the Google e-mail service's ability to communicate with e-mail software Wednesday.

Numerous people on a Gmail Help forum reported problems tapping into Gmail with IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) technology, which lets people with desktop e-mail software such as Thunderbird or Microsoft Entourage to do so.

Google acknowledged the problem but said it's fixed. "Gmail users had difficulty accessing some features in Gmail for about a half hour today. The issue is now resolved," the company said in a statement Wednesday.

"We take issues like this very seriously, and … Read more

You get an e-mail not only addressed to you, but it includes your company name and phone number and appears to come from the U.S. District Court.

It looks like a subpoena to appear in court on a civil case and it instructs you to download the document from a Web site.

What should you do?

Whatever you do, don't click on the hyperlink to the Web site, warns Web security services firm MX Logic. It's probably a malicious Web site that will download malicious software, such as a keystroke logger, to your machine.

The social engineering … Read more