email

Gmail afflicted with remote access problem

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

Beware the 'whaling' e-mail that includes your company info

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

Speed up Gmail searches the old-fashioned way

Gmail is great for many reasons, but one of them is the built-in power search tool. It's constantly indexing your e-mails to makes them easy to parse through on a later date.

My colleague and how-to guru, Dennis O'Reilly, of CNET's Worker's Edge has a few tips for people who want to speed up the way they search for old e-mails as their in-boxes continue to grow and fill up with messages. His tips involve using good old-fashioned operators, the little shortcuts you can put in front of a query to flavor your results.

You can … Read more

Yahoo Mail outages due to maintenance

Some Yahoo Mail users were unable to log in to their e-mail accounts on at least two separate occasions this week due to planned maintenance work, Yahoo says.

On Monday, Yahoo Mail was inaccessible to an unknown number of users as a result of an "unexpected issue" that arose during routine scheduled maintenance, the company says. The issue was resolved and by 9 a.m. Tuesday morning the outage was over.

Then, on Tuesday evening the mail service was unavailable for one hour and 40 minutes during a scheduled maintenance release coordinated with AT&T, according to … Read more

Mail Trends looks deep into your in-box

Sorting out the overload of e-mail is one of the mostly unsolved problems of computing. The first step is analyzing your in-box, which is what Google developer Mihai Parparita has done with Mail Trends, a program that lets users analyze and visualize their inbox.

Mail Trends, which is similar to Google Reader Trends, extracts data from IMAP servers and displays statistics such as distribution of messages by year, month, day, day of week, and time of day; distribution by message size; a breakdown of top senders, recipients, and mailing lists; distribution of senders, recipients, and mailing lists over time; and … Read more

Sync as the center of my new Zimbra universe

A few weeks ago I said I was dumping Microsoft Entourage for the open-source Zimbra email offering. I did, but not quite. I started using the Zimbra server to pump mail to my Entourage client, but couldn't quite give up on the comfort of a suite I'd been using for years.

But then Entourage 2008 happened and everything broke.

Well, not everything. Microsoft's Entourage 2008 is a fantastic island of productivity. It's fast and I love things like My Day. But Entourage 2008 abandoned my Blackberry, wouldn't sync with iCal (for me), and otherwise left me stranded.

So on Sunday I dumped it. Completely. I haven't opened it since.

All of which makes me realize just how fundamental sync is to my life, and why Zimbra makes sense. Let me explain.… Read more

Digsby open to all, adds Twitter

Digsby, the application that lets you view your instant-message, e-mail, and social-network accounts through one interface, opened up to the public on Thursday. Download Digsby for Windows from CNET Download.com.

The application also has support for popular micro-blogging application Twitter and allows real-time audio and video chat across IM networks through a partnership with TokBox. Oh, and it now offers inline spell check. WooHoo!

Digsby first hit the scene in early February. It's still in beta, but now you don't need an invitation to use it.

Other applications that enable you to manage multiple IM accounts include … Read more

Yahoo's secret Google Docs killer: Zimbra

Last September, Yahoo acquired Zimbra, an enterprise Web email company. Zimbra is an impressive product. It does e-mail in a browser better than you've ever seen it. The company also makes a business-class e-mail server, and many of its services interconnect to Microsoft's e-mail products--the Exchange server and the Outlook client. Nonetheless, it is hard, at first glance, to see how Zimbra fits into Yahoo's business. Yahoo previously acquired OddPost, another dazzling e-mail technology company, and it was still in the process of rolling out OddPost-powered improvements to its millions of Yahoo Mail users when it acquired … Read more

Desktop robot invasion advances to e-mail

It's fine with us for the Japanese to continue pursuing a human-free society, but some of their robotic advances are hitting a little too close to home. We began getting uncomfortable upon learning of various blogging functions being taken over by bots, for example, and now there's another one of the little creeps that's reading e-mail and performing other desktop tasks.

Bandai's "Tachikoma" connects to the computer's USB port, helping to "create and process applications" and play games as well as handle the mail, according to GeekAlerts. Judging by the photos … Read more