e-mails

What's the NSA doing in your e-mail?

A former technician is hauling communications giant AT&T into court for sharing "email, search, and Internet records for more than a dozen other global and regional telecommunications providers." If it's true, the company may have massively violated federal privacy and industry law, and the National Security Administration may have acted in direct violation of legal parameters governing its domestic surveillance mission. Read the full story at The Washington Post.

Test your e-mail program

My last posting, Defending against a phishing e-mail message, described a JavaScript trick bad guys use to make a link appear to go one place when it really goes somewhere else.

So you can test if your e-mail program (or Webmail system) falls for this type of forgery, I created a test e-mail message.

To receive my test e-mail message, send an e-mail to:

It does not matter what, if anything, is in the subject or the body of your message.

The test e-mail message contains a link that appears to go to CNET, but really goes to my personal … Read more

Coming next week: A tax on your e-mail?

Editor's note: Click here for Friday's update on the Senate's Internet access tax vote.

When the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill last week extending a ban on Internet access taxes, it may have opened up the possibility of previously forbidden taxes on paid e-mail and other Web services.

That's what a Congressional Research Service attorney concluded in a two-page memorandum (click here for a PDF) released on Thursday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the author of the original tax ban in 1998. The CRS is a federally funded sort of "think … Read more

Hands-on with Gmail's new IMAP support

Gmail is getting support for IMAP clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, and the iPhone. This means Gmail users will no longer be limited to the Gmail.com user interface or to the weak integration they might get from clients using the much more rudimentary POP e-mail protocol.

There's no word on the official rollout schedule for IMAP support. Some users have it, some don't. I do. Don't ask me why. To see if you have support, click the "Settings" link to see if you have a "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab.

Update: IMAP rollout … Read more

Attent turns Outlook into a microeconomy/MMORPG

If you're a Microsoft Outlook user at work, managing your in-box could be one of the most challenging things you have to wrestle with each day. Handling incoming e-mail and categorizing its importance is a skill, and a process people have to learn. There are several third-party apps to help you figure out what's important beyond the stock methods included with the Outlook (colored flagging, and urgency), but many are for the individual, rather than the entire company.

Likewise, as a sender, figuring out how to prioritize the e-mail you're sending to others is a balancing act, … Read more

Mac Office 2008 adds Excel templates, supports Exchange

Microsoft is revealing more details about new features in its Office for Mac 2008 suite, due for a release early next year.

Excel 2008 for Mac will offer worksheet templates with baked-in calculations designed to make it easier to balance household finances, manage inventory and other common tasks. The new Ledger Sheets features will include a gallery of elements, shifting formulas to the background.

In addition, the Entourage e-mail client will offer more support for Microsoft Exchange, which traditionally has enabled non-Mac PC users to make appointments and share notes and files with each other.

Each version of Office for … Read more

Fuser solves the multi-account e-mail juggle

A few weeks ago I got to play around with Orgoo, a multi-client e-mail and IM service that's still in private beta. Right around the same time, another e-mail aggregation service, called Fuser, opened up its doors to everyone. Fuser, like Orgoo, lets you pull in a number of Webmail accounts from popular services, and view them in the same in-box, with handy color coding and several ways to separate which in-box you're looking at. Unlike its competitors however, Orgoo forgoes the instant messaging angle in place of integrating social networks, almost like what Flock offered when it … Read more

Joopz does SMS messaging for Outlook

This morning Web-SMS service Joopz is launching a new Outlook plug-in that turns your desktop e-mail client into a one-stop SMS hub. Once tied into your Joopz account, you can send and receive text messages like you would e-mail. The tool also syncs up with your Outlook contacts, to let you send notes to anybody with a phone number.

The service is flouting the new plug-in as a handy way to keep in touch with friends, but for business users who use SMS to communicate with their colleagues while out on the road, this could be a handy, finger-saving tool … Read more

FCC asked to mandate 'e-mail address portability'

The Federal Communications Commission is being asked to do a remarkably silly thing: create mandatory "e-mail address portability."

The idea is that because the U.S. Post Office offers to forward physical mail, and because FCC rules require telephone service providers to offer number portability, the same principle should be extended to e-mail accounts.

Here are some excerpts from the petition to the FCC asking for an immediate rulemaking:

In today's world, many individuals and businesses depend just as heavily on their e-mail addresses as on their phone numbers as public points of contact with the larger … Read more