Plaxo, an online contact management service, has released a beta version of its plugin for Address Book.

The Plaxo service allows you to synchronise contact information, to update the information of contacts who are also Plaxo members automatically and to ask for updated contact information from others.

The idea is to keep ahead of the endless changes in phone numbers and email addresses that cause you gradually to lose contact with people.

With the plugin much of the work of keeping your contact information current is made automatic. Its preferences allow you to “set and forget” the synchronisation and update options. It also adds a collapsable pane to each Address Book contact that enables you to manually request an update on contact information and displays a history of your communication with that person (this feature is “coming soon”).

Last year Plaxo struck a deal with AOL to manage the contact information for AOL’s Triton Instant Messaging application. Unlike some other apps, Plaxo has also opened up its API to third-party developers.

Services like this are not for everyone. It’s not for me. Despite Plaxo’s strong privacy policy, I’m not happy loading up my contact information into some third-party’s database.

Oddly, I do almost the same thing hourly with iSync and don’t think twice about it. Somehow I trust Apple more. I’m such a babe-in-the-woods.

But if you are interested in testing out a service like this (you can delete your Plaxo account and all your information entirely if you change your mind), download the beta of Plaxo’s Address Book plugin and give it a try.plaxo, contact management, address book, plugin, synchronization, AOL, contact information, email addresses

MacFreePOPs is a stand-alone app which allows you to use Mail.app with web-based mail services like Yahoo, hotmail, Gmail, AOL and SquirrelMail.

An updated version (1.6) has been released. It includes a more recent version of FreePOPs (0.0.97), an English localisation, a better log window, detailed plug-in information and an improved on-line update system.

MailForward is another utility that does the same job. It is easier to use, but it costs money.

MacFreePOPs is donation-ware and is available from the project’s web site .macfreepops, yahoo!, gmail, AOL, hotmail, squirrelmail, plugin, mail.app, apple mail

A little while ago AOL decided to charge organisations and companies for guaranteed delivery of fully-hyperlinked and imaged emails in users’ inboxes.

A New York Times article described it as “a major change in the economics of the Internet”.

Many saw this a bad thing. Some because it looks like a naked grab for cash , others because it creates a two-tier email system, others because they view it as an attack on free speech (SpamHaus too), others because it might be anti-competitive, putting another squeeze on small businesses but easily absorbed by larger corporations.

Seth Godin, however, puts his head up above the parapet and provides a robust defence of the idea.

It’s all about friction, apparently. He concludes that everyone’s a winner. The only people who will lose are spammers and marketers who measure tonnage.AOL, Yahoo!, delivery assurance, email, stamps, spammers, goodmail, metrics, friction

AOL now charges companies and organizations money to ensure that their emails arrive in AOL members’ inboxes.

Previously AOL used a free IP-based “Enhanced White List”. Senders that observed best practice in their email habits could be (mostly) sure that their emails would reach AOL customers.

According to a report on ClickZNews , companies must now sign up for accreditation with Goodmail, an “email delivery assurance business” that charges “accredited companies a fraction of a cent per message sent”. Otherwise their emails may not arrive, or will arrive with hyperlinks and images disabled.

Slashdot reports that Yahoo is expected to follow suit.

Is this a bad thing? An investor in a rival delivery assurance company thinks so

And so it’s a sad day for email. The spammers have won. They have turned email delivery into a business that can be bought and sold for the highest price.

Or is it a win for customers in the end, as AOL Postmaster Charles Stiles says in the ClickZNews report?

Our focus and goal here is to provide a safer and more secure environment for our consumers, and restore some trust in the e-mail inbox.

UPDATE: According to the New York Times , the charge for using this new service ranges between .25 and 1 cent an email.

The article also suggests that

the move to create what is essentially a preferred class of e-mail is a major change in the economics of the Internet.

email, spam, delivery assurance, AOL, yahoo, whitelist, Internet, email in general

In a move that may surprise many doom-sayers (like me) who fret about Google, Gmail and privacy, the search engine company has refused a request from the US Department of Justice for information about the search habits of Google users.

It’s important to recognise that the DoJ only asked for “de-identified” data, aggregated statistics that cannot be linked to individual users. Yahoo!, MSN and AOL all happily complied with the request.

But Google refused, partly because it fears turning the information over will create the public perception that Google doesn’t protect the privacy of its users.

Leslie Walker at the Washington Post has written a very interesting article in response on what exactly Google does know about individual users. Or you could browse the 934 hits on the story at Google News.

In further Google-realated privacy news, Gmail has introduced a more visible delete button. This gives users the impression that they can delete emails from the Gmail system.

Certainly the button removes the messages from the web interface, but whether it really means that they have gone, or whether they lurk around in Google’s massive data collection system is another matter. Gmail’s privacy statement is not clear about that.

Whoops, there I go again….

Half the fun of running a blog is looking at the stats it generates — where people come from, what they look at while they are here, what browsers they are using.

Normally one would only mention that in small, infrequent statistical celebrations, but I was looking at the stats for searches on the blog today and noticed two things:

• The most common search term over three months is not Apple Mail or Mail.app or IMAP lock-ups or iPod or restoring lost mail. It is, you guessed it, Gmail.
• A few people, or maybe one determined person, are/is searching for “AOL IMAP path prefix”. As far as I know, you don’t need one, and the Unofficial AOL FAQ for IMAP in Apple Mail thinks so too.

There were eight searches just for “goodness“. That’s what I like about Mac users. They’re such nice people!

An updated version of Mail Forward was released today.

It is a stand-alone app that will forward your email from any or all of the providers above, or from any POP account. You can choose to forward it to any other account, say, one that Apple Mail can access and then read your web mail in one account in comfort and style.

It works by accessing your web mail or POP mailbox and then forwarding each email onto your chosen account through your SMTP mail server. The preference screen displays most of the options:

You can choose to delete the mail from the original account or retain it and schedule the polling interval to suit. It also features basic “AppleScriptability”.

It doesn’t work with as many providers as MacFreePOPs and it’s not donation-ware, but to me it seemed easier to configure and use. My extensive five minute trial demonstrated that it works flawlessly with Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail.

You can use it for up to 20 accounts and it has a 30 day free trial option. Registration costs USD 19.95. Mail Forward can be downloaded from the developer’s website.hotmail, gmail, AOL, yahoo, apple mail, mail.app, webmail