email

Unlike some, I believe the French are to be admired.

They have a sense of life's priorities. They occasionally snub their noses at gauche Americans. And their foie gras is first-class.

So I will not be stepping onto the philistine bandwagon of criticism which has greeted the news that Thierry Breton, chief executive of Atos SA, hates e-mail so much that he is doing away with it in his company.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Breton would rather people communicate with him by visiting him, calling him or sending him a fluffy carrier pigeon with parchment in its … Read more

Ever made plans or laid out action steps while on a business call, and wish you had taken notes? Maybe you were on your Bluetooth headset while driving, or you couldn't find a pen. Or maybe you just plain hate scrawling anything on paper at all.

Enter Tote Notes, a brilliantly conceived app that pops up after voice calls so you can dictate notes before you forget any important details. It not only records voice notes, it e-mails them to you, and even transcribes them to text so you can easily search for them later.

Here's how it … Read more

Gmail for iOS is the official e-mail client from Google for iOS, and it's mostly a solid offering with only a couple of issues. The initial release got off to a rocky start with notification errors, but a subsequent release seems to have ironed out the major problems.

Obviously, the Mail app that comes with your iPhone lets you connect to Gmail accounts, but with the official app from Google, you'll get a few more options that you may have come to rely on when using Gmail. Get started by creating a new Gmail account or logging in … Read more

If you are like me, you have a number of Webmail accounts. I have two Gmail accounts, an old Hotmail account I use for filling out Web forms, and a Yahoo Mail account for fantasy baseball purposes. Thankfully, I can keep an eye on all of these accounts with a single Firefox extension.

WebMail Notifier is a simple Firefox extension that alerts you when new e-mails arrive from a variety of Webmail clients, including Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and even ol' AOL. After installing WebMail Notifier, you'll see that a small envelope icon gets added to your Firefox toolbar. It's gray when no new messages await (or before you add any accounts). When you have unread e-mails, the envelope turns yellow and displays the number of unread messages to the right. And by default, a subtle audio alert plays when new messages arrive.… Read more

The current GOP presidential candidates might want to consider using AOL as their e-mail handler to reach out to supporters.

According to poll results released today by Poll Position, AOL e-mail is a favorite among Republicans, with some 20 percent picking it as the best service.

Poll Position says it conducted the survey among 1,184 registered voters nationwide on November 10, 2011. The poll results are weighted to be a representative sampling of all American adults and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent. You can see a complete breakdown the poll participant by age, … Read more

My wife's office recently ditched its BlackBerrys for iPhones. Now, when one of our iPhones chirps with the arrival of a new e-mail, we look at one another, wondering who just got an e-mail and who can continue uninterrupted with his or her evening. Unless you have been using a prerelease version of iOS 5, which lets you change the tone for any alert, you're stuck with the default tone. (On my iPhone running iOS 4.3.5, I can change my ringtone and my text tone but not the tone for e-mails.) I wanted to find a way to change the tone for new e-mails without (a) paying any money, and (b) jailbreaking my phone. After an intensive search, I found iPriorityMail 2, a free app that does the trick

iPriorityMail may not be the prettiest app, but it's fairly easy to set up an alert with a custom tone for all new e-mails. You can also set up alerts for specific contacts or groups, and you can also set up alerts for Facebook and Twitter and other apps. For this tutorial, I'll show you how to set up an alert for all incoming e-mails, how to create a different tone for a specific contact, and then how to disable the default tone in iOS so you don't get two tones when a new e-mail arrives.… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft is aiming to make its Hotmail e-mail service better than ever--and confronting what it admits is a subpar perception of the brand--with a series of new features designed to help users easily clean up their inboxes.

At an event here Monday afternoon, Windows Live corporate vice president Chris Jones explained that Microsoft has long been aware that the Hotmail brand was damaged by a series of issues that affected users' experiences, including storage, spam, performance, and an inability to work properly on most mobile devices.

But those issues peaked in 2006, Jones argued, and since then, Microsoft has … Read more

Xobni, maker of popular contact management tools for Outlook and BlackBerry, has today announced a new sub-brand along with two new products ready for public beta. Smartr Inbox for Gmail and Smartr Contacts for Android--both previously branded as Xobni products during their private beta stage--now bring Xobni's contact management powers to Google's e-mail platform.

Smartr Inbox for Gmail is a browser extension that adds a useful sidebar to your Gmail interface. With it, you can easily pull up any contact you've ever communicated with, along with details of your e-mail relationship, history, and even common contacts between … Read more

Many workplaces frown upon using company time for leisure activities such as browsing Facebook. This isn't without reason, however, as many people have gone on Facebook to post a status update and found themselves still on the site 45 minutes later instead of working. Fortunately, there is actually a way to update your status by simply sending an e-mail, escaping the grasp of the site during work hours.

Step 1: Sign into your account from the main Facebook page.

Step 2: Navigate to http://www.facebook.com/mobile in the same browser (not on … Read more