mail

Freeware Xobni integrates into your Outlook installation and shows you more about your e-mails than Outlook can by itself. For each person who sends you e-mail, it shows you who else they frequently communicate with--their de facto social networks--and it also finds their phone number from inside their e-mails. It shows you all conversation threads you've participated in with the person, and all the attachments they've sent you. You can drill into message threads, and it has a snappy but redundant e-mail search engine built-in.

Xobni the app runs on Xobni the platform, which has hooks deep into … Read more

I was like you once. After fetching my e-mail, I'd open a message I wanted to delete, tap the trash-can icon, go back to the in-box, open another message, tap the trash-can icon, and on and on.

Then I discovered a killer shortcut: From the in-box, just swipe your finger across the message you want to trash, and then tap the shiny red Delete button that appears. Talk about a time-saver!

You can wipe multiple messages even faster by tapping the Edit button in the top-right corner of the screen, tapping each e-mail you want to mark for deletion, … Read more

Despite the many accolades the Peek received last year, we ragged on it for offering too little for too much, and we still stand by that original claim. Twenty dollars a month for only e-mail just did not seem worth it.

However, Peek has now released the Peek Pronto, which offers way more than just e-mail. Not only do you get push e-mail delivery, you also get Microsoft Exchange support, texting, PDF, and Word doc support, Search, and e-mail apps like weather, news, and maps. Other improvements include a larger font set and faster software speed. It also now allows … Read more

Gmail users can now select multiple attachments and add them simultaneously to an e-mail message. The new system simply opens your operating system's file explorer, and supports selecting of multiple files at once. Best of all, it includes a status bar for each file as it uploads (just like Flickr's Flash uploader does) to let you know how far along each file is. This can be comforting if you're adding a file that's close to Gmail's 20MB attachment limit, since you can see something other than a spinning loading icon. It also warns you if … Read more

A Republican congressman is calling on President Obama to ensure that all business-related e-mails from White House staff are appropriately preserved, including e-mails the staff sent from temporary Gmail accounts.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a letter to White House Counsel Gregory Craig on Thursday, raising the concern that e-mails sent through personal accounts may not be retained.

"It is incumbent that the new White House implement policies and processes to minimize the risk of losing e-mail subject to the Presidential Records Act," Issa said in his … Read more

GeeMail (download for Windows|Mac) is a standalone Gmail client that runs on Adobe AIR. It looks and feels exactly like Google's Gmail, or at least how it did before the introduction of labs last year. It's big feature is that it lets you view and reply to Gmail messages while offline. Messages are then sent the next time the application detects you have a connection.

Unlike Google's official offline solution that uses Gears, GeeMail is quite a bit faster. It grabbed 1,500 of my most recent messages in just a couple of minutes. This speed, … Read more

Zumbox is an interesting e-mail start-up based on the company's capability to create an electronic mailbox for every residential physical address in the United States.

The idea is that companies that send our paper statements--banks, utility companies, and so on--can now send those documents electronically. The benefits include lower environmental impact, security, and archivability of the messages. More importantly, service providers already know their customers' physical addresses. They can start delivering messages to users immediately, instead of trying to gather their customers' e-mail coordinates.

To sign up for the service, consumers go to Zumbox, enter their physical address, and … Read more

Correction at 7:55 a.m. PST: Googlesystem is not an official Google blog.

Google has inked a deal with online account migration tool provider TrueSwitch in an attempt to streamline the process of moving to Gmail from competing e-mail services, according to Googlesystem, a third-party blog that tracks the search giant's efforts.

Gmail has previously offered tools that let people import contacts and messages from other e-mail services, but the company apparently believed it was making it too hard on new users to import data and wanted to find a way to make account migration more straightforward.

According … Read more

When I heard the news that Gmail was offering "Multiple Inboxes" as part of Labs, the first thing that popped into my head was "finally--now I can check multiple accounts from the same place!" Unfortunately, that's not how it works.

Instead, Google's solution is simply to place the results from various filters and search queries off to the side of your main in-box. By default it sets you up with messages you've starred, and unsent messages from your drafts folder. This is nice and all, but you can hop to those two places … Read more