e-mail

One of the biggest gripes about the Mail app on iOS has always been the inability to attach a photo or video from within the app.

Previously, once you began composing an e-mail, you'd have to leave Mail, copy the photo from the Photos app, then return to Mail to paste the photo in the message. Alternatively, you would have to begin the e-mail from the Photos app by selecting a single photo to send. Neither method was convenient.

Thankfully, Apple has finally decided to take care of this issue in iOS 6.

Apple's iCloud services are now fully operational again according to the iCloud status page, but some problems may linger for users.

For the past few days, a large number of iCloud users had been hit with an outage that prevented them from using their e-mail accounts. In some cases the problem resulted in delayed e-mail messages that would arrive hours after being sent, but in other cases no mail would get through at all.

When the problem happened Apple did not offer much information on what was causing the outage, and only mentioned in a terse status update on … Read more

After more than 25 years since the passage of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), Sen. Patrick Leahy is hoping to get the out-of-date privacy law up to speed by introducing a new bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee today, according to Ars Technica.

The key component of this new bill is that law enforcement officials would no longer have the ease of freely being able to read people's personal e-mail and online communication -- they'd need a warrant first. As the law now stands, police are allowed to get individual's private correspondence by simply asking e-mail … Read more

Yesterday a number of users of Apple's iCloud service found they could not access their e-mail. While Apple claimed to be working on the problem to have it fixed "ASAP," for affected users the problems are persisting for a second day.

On the iCloud System Status page, Apple notes the problem, claiming that for 1.1 percent of users the Mail service "may be slow or unavailable," and that if users are able to access their e-mail, it may be slow and show delays with incoming messages.

Being a problem with the central iCloud service, … Read more

In Apple's Mail program, when you add an e-mail account you can specify a full name to associate with it, which will be used instead of the account's log-in name or address when sending or receiving messages, and which can make various To and From fields a bit easier to make sense of. While this option is convenient, with Apple's new iCloud service you may find your display name has been changed to your account name or another alias with no apparent way to change it.

If you go to the Accounts section of your Mail preferences, … Read more

It's been 12 years since Chad Ruble's mother suffered a stroke that led to aphasia, a disorder that affects language processing but not intelligence. Most of the one million Americans who have the disorder experience difficulty both reading and writing, according to the National Aphasia Association, and Chad's mother Lindy was unable to recognize text and thus unable to use a keyboard.

So Chad did what any computer-savvy son should: he hacked a Kinect to help her.

After designing a visual dashboard of emoticons (happy, sad, angry, tired, etc.), each of which can be further qualified by an amount (expressed as signal strength -- one, two, three, or four bars), Chad says he turned to a Kinect, some gesture recognition code, and the simple OpenNI library for Processing to track the position of his mother's hand. A green arrow button sends the email and a red X resets the screen.… Read more

There are two ways to check your Outlook.com e-mail account on Android. One way is to point your Android browser to www.outlook.com. Once you log in, the Web site will autodetect your browser and load the mobile version of Outlook.com. It looks great and works well in a pinch, but if you prefer app-based access, you can use the official Hotmail app.

The Hotmail app isn't limited to just Hotmail accounts. Instead of typing in a Hotmail address during setup, type in your Outlook.com e-mail address and password. If you have multiple Outlook.com … Read more

Are you getting spam that has a Facebook friend's name listed as sender but was actually sent from an unknown e-mail address? Me too.

These are vestiges of an attack that exploited a misconfiguration on Facebook that was fixed last week, according to Facebook. Though spammers aren't scraping any new friend information off Facebook accounts, they are apparently using previously obtained data to send spam. That means the messages could come until e-mail providers are able to find the source of the spam and shut the spammers down.

Here's the Facebook statement:

Recently, we discovered a single … Read more

Most of us spend a large part of our day reading and writing e-mails. If you're a Hotmail (now Outlook.com), Yahoo! Mail, or Gmail user, you may already be familiar with using Webmail keyboard shortcuts. They can save you time by not having to constantly take your hands off of the keyboard to reach for a mouse. But how many of those shortcuts have you actually learned?

KeyRocket for Gmail is a Chrome extension that can help you learn Gmail keyboard shortcuts, while you're using Gmail. All you have to do is install the Chrome extension, make … Read more