mail

Video: Tie default settings to your user account

Ramesh Srinivasan has clearly known the tensions of shared computing, especially the bickering over which mail app and browser to set as defaults when two or more users disagree.

Thanks to Srinivasan's two apps, DefaultMail and DefaultBrowser, families and roommates can cool it on the tug-of-war and continue clashing over important things, like drinking milk straight from the carton. The free apps smooth things over by linking default browser apps and e-mail clients to each user account.

Tune in to the video to see how the apps work, but forget typing those long URLs to download the apps. We'… 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

Voice-to-text services seek a human touch

If you want to convert a series of 1's and 0's to text, ask a computer. If you want to convert a voice message into a text message, ask a human.

That's the crux of the argument given by VoiceCloud, which launched into the voice-to-text fray on Tuesday with a speedy, employee-focused transcription service.

Speech-to-text is a huge trend in wireless and Web apps this year that--judging from the numerous services showcased at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas this week--is heating up as an important frontier in cell phone software. You may have read about … 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

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

The MacBook Air gets a leather jacket

Thank goodness some people finally came to their senses. The "AirMail" manila sleeve for the MacBook Air was cute when it came out, but please--it's actually sold out?

The "Air Manila" from Civilian Lab is a much more sophisticated version, dressing up the envelope concept with hand-stitched leather, Tech Digest says, as well as a padded interior and air vents. That should help keep it from getting mixed in with interoffice mail, which is important because the anorexic laptop is accident-prone enough as it is.

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

Preview: AOL's Web mail with a dose of Silverlight

We were lucky enough to get a chance to play with one of AOL's works-in-progress, a version of the company's popular Web mail service done entirely in Microsoft's Silverlight. It was briefly shown off at Mix '08 last week, but is not due to get into your hands for another month or two--where it will be an opt-in alpha before going out to everyone else when Silverlight 2.0 leaves beta.

In its current form it doesn't look a whole lot different from the regular version of AOL's mail. The big difference is in the … Read more