email

One of the selling points RIM has taken advantage and capitalized on over the years with its BlackBerry platform is security. RIM has used the same claim when providing reason for leaving out native e-mail, calendar, contacts, and other PIM applications on its tablet, thePlayBook. Accodring to RIM, the secure way to access this information on the PlayBook is through a BlackBerry smartphone using an application called BlackBerry Bridge.

This simple tutorial will cover how to set up BlackBerry Bridge on both the PlayBook and a BlackBerry smartphone. In the tutorial I will be using a BlackBerry Torch, but the … Read more

Earlier this week, German software vendor Ashampoo warned users of its products that the company's servers had been hacked and some of its users' e-mail addresses had been stolen. (CNET's Elinor Mills describes the breach in her InSecurity Complex blog.)

Ashampoo didn't disclose the number of addresses lost, but the breach likely pales in comparison to the e-mail addresses exposed in the massive hack of the servers at e-mail marketing service Epsilon, which was disclosed in the first week of April.

Malware purveyors may not need to hack a company's server to get their hands on … Read more

This simple tutorial will cover how to set up a Gmail or Google Apps e-mail account as an Exchange account on any iOS device. The setup process is fairly simple, and it won't take long at all.

When you first go to set up your e-mail on an iOS device, you are given the option of choosing Gmail as the service provider. Using this setup method is simple and straightforward, however, it does confine you to getting your e-mail fetched at a preset timed interval (15, 30, or 60 minutes). The benefit of setting up a Gmail account as … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--AwayFind has been around for a while. It's a clever e-mail helper that will alert you on your mobile if you get an e-mail that's important enough to merit an interruption. But it's based on rules: You tell the service that e-mails from your boss are important but only when they're to you alone, and you'll always get a ping when she drops you a personal note. Unfortunately, managing rules gets old. So AwayFind is adding e-mail reading intelligence and sentiment analysis to its filters. The company is trying to build a system that can figure out which e-mails are important enough to break through to you, without requiring you to set up a filter ahead of time.

The first smart filter is coming out soon, AwayFind CEO Jared Goralnick told me today at the 500 Startups Demo Day here. It'll work by watching your online (or Exchange) calendar as well as your e-mail. If you get a message from a person with whom you have a meeting scheduled shortly before the meeting is scheduled to start, AwayFind will forward the message to you, assuming that the e-mail is likely to be about the meeting itself.

Coming soon, the company will be layering in sentiment analysis. It'll read your e-mails for you, and alert you when someone writes you in a certain tone or about a certain topic. Say you want to get alerted when a customer e-mails you with a complaint, for example. That might be a hard rule to write for you and me, but if the algorithm can discern "angry," it could be a very valuable service.

I don't care what the social-network punks say, e-mail isn't dead. But it is overwhelming. Anything that can help people tease out the important e-mails from their overflowing inbox is worth a shot. I'm looking forward to trying this one out. … Read more

Debut Video Recording Software Professional Version from NCH Software turns your computer into a flexible, capable video capture and recording device. It can record video from a wide range of sources, including VHS VCRs, and save it in many formats; it can also capture screenshots and save them as JPEG stills. It will even capture and record video playing on your PC's screen. When all else fails but you've just got to save that clip, Debut can save the day.

Debut detected our video capture and playback devices, but it will automatically configure itself as a screen capture … Read more

X1 Professional Client is an enterprise-class desktop search application that indexes and searches more than 500 file types, including all major e-mail clients, as well as local and networked drives, folders, and files. It can find e-mail messages and attachments, system files and documents, appointments and calendar entries, contacts, and even pictures, music, and Web sites. It's suitable for corporate networks in both small and large companies, including excellent support, but it's not out of the range of individuals looking for a comprehensive desktop search option.

X1's interface looks like it means business, with the familiar Windows … Read more

It's important to know who you're talking to. But in our e-mail in-boxes, we're deluged with messages from people we don't know, companies we're not familiar with. Even messages from our friends and coworkers could be better handled if we had social or business context with the message.

To see what I mean, try at least one of the these three good tools: Xobni, Rapportive, and a new kid on the block, WhoSent.It. These tools all give you dossiers on the people e-mailing you by using data gleaned from around the Web, including Facebook profiles, Twitter postings, and, for business users, data from apps like Salesforce.com.

Of these apps, Xobni is for Outlook users. Rapportive works nicely with Gmail and Google Apps. WhoSent.It has a clever twist that makes it work with anything.

If you're an Outlook user, get Xobni. Like the other apps, it pulls personal data from Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in, and company data from Hoovers. Xobni also gives you relevant data from within your own e-mail archive: It gives you links to e-mails you've exchanged with the sender, and also shows you which other people the sender communicates with (taken from multi-addressed to: and cc: fields). Xobni's sidebar data panel looks great and is the front-end for a ton of additional info, though on a crowded notebook's screen it can be a little intrusive. … Read more

Apple's Mail e-mail client is a fairly straightforward tool for accessing IMAP, POP, and Exchange accounts, and for the most part it works quite well, but it is not without its quirks. One of these is that at times Mail can start prompting users for their account passwords again and seem to not properly store them. When this happens the program may appear to stop interacting with the mail server for such functions as downloading new messages.

The first thing to do whenever there is a problem with Mail's connection with an e-mail server is to open the … Read more

If you're still paying for AOL, there's a good chance you don't need to. Molly Wood shows you how to switch to a free account for AOL e-mail.