email

Looks like Yahoo mail is "resting" for the afternoon.

Yahoo's e-mail service was tripped up by a disruption today that temporarily kept some users from accessing their messages.

A flood of users took to Twitter to complain about the outage today. It's unclear how widespread the problem is, but monitoring site Downrightnow.com reported a service disruption. The outage follows similar hiccups from Facebook, which was briefly down for some people last week.

Yahoo confirmed the disruption but said service had been restored.

"We worked quickly to resolve the issue … Read more

It looks like constant patent litigation is taking its toll on Apple, which was dealt a pair of setbacks in Germany today.

Apple temporarily removed older iPhones from its online store in Germany due to a previous legal victory won by Motorola Mobility, according to legal blog Foss Patents. Slashgear later reported that Apple was granted a temporary halt on the ban.

Separately, the site also reported that a German court granted Motorola's request to permanently ban Apple's push e-mail services, a key feature of its iCloud offering.

So apparently Google's decision to cough up $12.5 … Read more

Sparrow is an attempt to get away from supercomplex, feature-packed e-mail clients in favor of a simpler e-mail experience. The interface is elegant while remaining very straightforward: the left side of the interface shows where e-mails are from, and the right side displays the message and any photos or other media commonly sent through e-mail. Setup only requires that you add accounts; then you can get started right away.

Though the interface is sparse compared with many big-name e-mail clients, you still get plenty of the common actions and options you'd expect from a basic e-mail app in Sparrow. … Read more

Trying to e-mail someone who isn't in your address book can be a pain--especially if your phone's auto-correct did a fantastic job replacing parts of the address with dictionary words.

You could send them a test message and see if you get a delivery failed e-mail in return, but this can be embarrassing because they'll most likely read it and wonder what's going on. Next time this happens to you, try using eToolz instead. eToolz contains, among other nifty things, a tool that can verify the validity of an e-mail address without … Read more

It was a little like learning that an old friend had passed away without me knowing about it.

I recently tried to log in to my account at Threadsy, an extremely clever Web-based service that wove multiple Gmail accounts, Facebook, and Twitter into one interface that let you handle all your communications in one place. When I did, I got a message: "threadsy will be shutting down on November 2, 2011. We have been honored to serve you, our passionate community."

Wow. For a few months, Threadsy--which debuted at the TechCrunch 50 conference in September 2009 … Read more

The New York Times is now saying that a believed-to-be bogus e-mail that told millions of subscribers that their subscriptions had been canceled actually did come from the newspaper company. But the e-mail, which was meant for only 300 recipients, was instead sent to more than 8 million subscribers, a tweet from Amy Chozick, a media reporter for the Times states.

This morning millions of New York Times subscribers received an e-mail informing them that their subscription had been canceled and then went on to … Read more

Last week we warned that people be aware of potential Christmas scams, especially those involving Apple's products as the company has become exceptionally popular in the past few years.

While the scam I mentioned in our previous warning was laughably fake, apparently a number of Apple customers have found a new e-mail scam circulating that gives the appearance of being quite genuine. The e-mail appears well-formatted with proper grammar, and is styled with shading and official-looking links, addresses, and copyright marks. The message also claims to come from an official looking e-mail address "appleid@id.apple.com."… Read more

If you've never been a recipient of a mistaken reply-all, you're either very lucky or you don't use e-mail much.

It's a useful tool that is also one of the banes of our electronic lives, as well-meaning people blast dozens or hundreds of recipients with boring (or, worse, sensitive) replies that should be directed to one person. Microsoft has devised a free tool for Outlook that lets users create messages that keeps recipients on the same Exchange domain from using reply-all or forward. It's simple to use and doesn't require installation on the recipients' … Read more

The world is changing fast--maybe faster than we ever thought. And within five years, science fiction is going to turn into non-fiction. We'll be able to read each other's minds, forget all our passwords, and create all our own homes' energy.

These are just three of the five predictions IBM announced this morning as part of its annual "5 in 5" prognostication project.

The list is meant to promote long-term work being done under Big Blue's Smarter Planet initiative--and the company says "5 in 5" already has a track record of success. In … Read more