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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

Spammers are going legit, and they're using Yahoo e-mail authentication servers to do it, said Mark Sunner, chief security analyst with MessageLabs.

Most people use the Web interface for Yahoo Mail, which attaches a banner of advertising on the e-mail somewhere within the message. Yahoo also provides a service, Yahoo Plus, that allows the sender to use SMTP and traditional e-mail clients such as Outlook Express or Thunderbird. Mail sent via SMTP passes through Yahoo's servers, signing the mail as legit using the Yahoo Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) service.

What this does is strip out the usual … 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

Since I started using Gmail as my primary e-mail program a couple of years ago, I haven't missed much about Microsoft Outlook. However, there's one useful Outlook feature that Gmail lacks: the ability to delay sending all of your outgoing messages, or to set individual messages to be transmitted at a particular time in the future.

Have you ever wished you had reconsidered sending that e-mail to your boss, explaining in detail his shortcomings as a manager? Or perhaps you regret complaining to a client about her unprofessional behavior for canceling a meeting at the last minute--before learning … Read more

Our favorite Seinfeld character, Newman, was a U.S. postal worker who had a simple solution when he got behind in his deliveries: He'd just stow the mailbags in the basement. If you suspect your own mailman saw that episode and got the same idea, read on.

The "Micro GPS Mail Logger" is designed to be tucked in with the mail and, after delivery, the recipient can track where it's been between origin and destination by examining the data on its microSD card. Bendable and a half-inch thick, it's small enough to fit into packages … Read more

Yahoo Mail is Yahoo's free, Web-based e-mail service. The newest release feels a lot like a desktop e-mail application: there's a preview pane, and messages can be dragged-and-dropped between folders. Right-clicking the mouse does mail-specific things instead of performing browser actions. There's no longer any concept of paging through your in-box. You can see all of your messages, no matter how many there are, in one big, scrolling list.

Besides e-mail, Yahoo Mail offers users built in instant messaging, weather reports, and an RSS reader that users can parse through as they would their e-mail.

Winner: Yahoo … Read more