Along the way, he considers what to make of the current “email is dead” meme, how to assess objectively the impact of the facebook phenomenon, why Gen Z (or whatever we are up to) still needs its email addresses, the innovative nature of Gmail’s design and also hazards a guess at what Google Wave might mean.

It’s worth reading. Check it out at TidBITS: “Why Email Remains the King of Internet Communications” email, social networking, facebook, google wave, gmail, internetSimilar Posts:

• EventSync: Sync iCal and facebook events
• UK Survey proves “death of email” premature
• FacebookSync: facebook plugin for Address Book
• More Rumours of the Death of Email
• Turning your back on Gmail

will be the year when it becomes truly obvious … that email’s days are numbered. Not that it will disappear — surface mail and fax will linger on due to the long-tail of communication media — but it will clearly be a byway, and not the highway, for communication and collaboration.

Now ValleyWag has dredged up the first actual statistics that I have seen, in defence of its claim that “email is dying as a form of communication”:

I’m not a statistician, but it seems that there are least two things to say about this “evidence” from Valleywag.

1. The chart displays the amount of traffic – or “hits” – to email services and to social web sites. The number of times a person visits his or her email service provider may not be a safe indicator of the value that person places upon email, nor of the frequency with which email or other forms of online communication are used. All it shows is that people in the UK now visit social web sites more often than they visit their email service providers, which is… well…. unsurprising.
2. The general trend is not one of social web visits supplanting visits to email service providers, but of supplementing them. As the social web site traffic grows, visits to email service provider do not decline by a corresponding amount for most of the graph.

If there is eveidence for the death of email, this is not it. email, not apple mail, internet, web 2.0, social web, facebookSimilar Posts:

• Web 2.0 hype is all fluff and hot air?
• UK Survey proves “death of email” premature
• Big Wraps for IMAP (and tuffmail)
• Collaboration and “occupational spam”
• The Death of Hotmail for Mail.app users and a new solution

He (cad) emailed it to a few friends and soon (whadda ya know?) it’s all over the police email system and the local news.

She now faces an Ethical Standards investigation and the possible loss of her job.

Claire Swire (lest we forget — Wikipedia ) first blazed the trail of email stupidity, but it seems that others are only too willing to follow in her footsteps.

I guess the moral of the story here is the same as it was in 2000.

As the BBC put it at the time, “Email in haste, repent at leisure”:

Of all the technological innovations of recent decades, few have the ability to wreck your life quite as quickly, and to quite the same extent, as e-mail…

…The lesson is clear: e-mail may be quick and cheap, but it has its drawbacks. It’s more bother to find a stamp and address an envelope, but at least it gives you time to reflect on the wisdom of sending the contents in the first place.

Readers lacking in imagination will find more (or less) coverage here and here .not apple mail, not mail.app, email, think first, internet, claire swireSimilar Posts:

• Emailing to live, not living to email
• Colourise Mail.app messages for visual queues
• Chatalog – Integrating iChat logs into Mail
• More technology, less productivity
• Where did the day go?

In the end, they all depend on willpower.

A poster on macOSXHints has come up with the answer for people without willpower — using a timer switch to cut off internet access for some portion of the day.

He suggests a couple of set-up to cut off varying degrees of connectivity.

Another poster notes in the comments that the new Airport Extreme allows for a child protection option that also cuts connectivity off for a set period. A bonus for the inner child in us all.tough love, productivity, getting things done, GTD, email, internet, mail.app, apple mail, addictionSimilar Posts:

• Wikipedia: A most excellent cause
• How email is still the best colloboration tool
• Keeping Mail.app, Gmail and mobile phone mail in sync
• Immobile me: An idle thought
• Put Yojimbo on an iPod

For a once-off activation fee of USD 25 and a sliding scale of monthly fees , the company’s service lets you see images of the postal mail you have received and then,

with a few mouse clicks you can have your mail forwarded, opened and scanned into a searchable PDF document you can read online (or print or save), recycled or shredded, or stored securely.

Interesting idea. Particularly useful, one imagines, for travelling salespeople, rockstars and others who are always on the move or have no fixed abode.

This service is only available to people with a postal address in the USA.

[Via TechCrunch ]not apple mail, email, internet, postal mail, culture change, snail mailSimilar Posts:

• Snail Mail: Beautiful envelopes from Address Book
• Better formatting of web content in Mail.app
• Snail Mail 1.5: Slick Address Book Envelopes
• Smarter subject lines
• Missing messages muddle in Apple technote

The company claims that spam now accounts for four out of every five emails that passed through the company’s scanners, an increase of 1.6% over August.

It also reports that,

at any given time, 50,000 unique computers on the Internet that were simultaneously exhibiting malicious behavior such as attempting to propagate spam, viruses, phishing and other attacks against email communications.

Virus-laden emails made up 0.44% of all emails that the company scanned.

Either I am particularly blessed or these reports are a bit of a beat-up.

Even when you read them cautiously (it only measures the email that Postini sees — c. 9 billion emails, and the company has a vested interest in talking the problem up), it seems so out of whack with the amount of spam than passes through my accounts.

I reckon that only 30-40% of my emails are spam. Perhaps my email service catches the rest, perhaps Australians are not desirable targets, perhaps things are worse in the corporate email world, perhaps personal experience is not the most statistically sound starting point.

Of course, that’s 30-40% too much but it’s not prophet of doom material.email, spam, phishing, viruses, internet, the end is nigh Similar Posts:

• Bounced emails cost $5 billion a year
• Sp@mX: Spam reporting app
• A new wave of high brow “empty spam”
• Spam Cube: Hardware spam catching on small networks
• .Mac spam on the rise?

Gene at Fred’s house worries about it too.

He looks around his Desktop and sees Google This and Google That and Google The Other Thing. He’s becoming dependent on Google apps to get through the day. And each new, undeniably clever and good, constantly improving Google app adds to the amount of data that Google knows about him.

He has an idea:

I think I need a new Google product to drop into beta. That would be, let’s see, Google Data Privacy. GDP would allow me to review all of the information that Google retains on me across all services, from all devices, and from all sources. GDP would allow me to determine the maximum data retention period for each of my services. GDP would allow me to selectively opt out of cross-service data mining & correlation, even if it reduced the quality of the services I receive. GDP would allow me to correct any inaccurate data in my profile. And GDP would log and alert me when my data was queried by other services.

I want my Google Data Privacy.

Google, gmail, privacy, data ownership, data protection, new beta, internet, Web 2.0Similar Posts:

• Nine reasons not to worry about Gmail
• More on Gmail, privacy and data ownership
• Google, Gmail and privacy
• Storing email on Gmail?
• Turning your back on Gmail

He tells a disturbing story (extra disturbing because I see myself in it):

I must hit the ‘get mail’ button at least a hundred times a day. Sometimes, if I don’t have any new mail, I hit it again immediately, just to check. I interrupt my work to check my mail even when I know that I’m not going to find anything interesting and that I should just concentrate on what I am supposed to be doing. When I come back to my office it’s the first thing I do. If I’m prevented from checking my mail for more than a few hours I get a little jumpy and remain that way until I have.

He thinks that the answer is to be found in “operant conditioning”, one of the cardinal principles of behaviourist psychology:

This means the mechanisms by which behaviour is shaped by its consequences; how what we do depends on the rewards and punishments of what we did last time. This topic is the heart of behaviourism, that school of thought which dominated psychology for most of the last century.

One solution is to break the connection between action and reward. Like Glen Stansberry and Merlin Mann he recommends reducing the frequency of mail checks. Hard-core fans of the cold turkey school will check mail only twice a day. I would rather cut my heart out with a teaspoon, but it might work for you. Or close Mail.app altogether for six or eight hours. Urrggh.

Other possibilities, he suggests, are weakening the stimulus-action association (hide the Check Mail button), shifting the cost-benefit ratio (electric shocks administered by a mail check?) and rewarding alternative behaviour.

Whatever you might think about Behaviourism, it’s interesting reading, as is the link he provides to an article published eighteen months ago in the New York Times on designing computer interfaces that aid rather than diminish attention.email, internet, addiction, mail checks, behaviourism, addiction, productivitySimilar Posts:

• More technology, less productivity
• Six tricks to get your email organised
• OneClick: Autochecking in Apple Mail
• Leopard Mail’s stupid save attachments button
• Adjust visible hours on the fly in iCal

This is not the “image spam” plague, but something else. Spammers are loading up inboxes with emails containing short extracts from authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, Alexander Dumas and Daniel Defoe.

Sometimes called “empty spam” because it contains no advertising pitch or offers or phishing attempts, this type is on the rise according to IronPort Systems . I can’t find an IronPort press release to confirm the figures, but the WSJ says that,

the number of empty spam messages has almost doubled to 4% of all spam email in recent weeks, according to IronPort Systems…. For a few days in June, it peaked at 40% of all spam.

Theories about the motivation behind “empty spam” messages vary. Some suggest that it is an attempt to confuse spam filters so that more malicious spam will slip through later.

Others point to a possible breakdown of communication between spam host servers and the virus-infected “zombie” computers that circulate the spam more widely. When communication breaks down, the zombies continue to send the “hashbusting” text that helps spam make it past the filters but without the “active package” which contains the advertising offer or phishing scam.

Unlike “image spam”, I haven’t seen any of this “empty spam” myself.spam, junk, email, empty spam, image spam, tolkien, dumas, defoe, internetSimilar Posts:

• Image spam: Spam gets more canny
• Bounced emails cost $5 billion a year
• AppleScript to report .Mac spam
• Spam Cube: Hardware spam catching on small networks
• Another Mail.app rule to catch image spam

The new version (1.2) brings support for syncing your bookmarks with your del.icio.us account, adds hot key support for Firefox and Shiira, clickable hyperlinks in the notes field and more.

All the fields in a WebnoteHappy webnote are now editable, including the URL itself.

The app sells itself partly as a native Mac OS X interface for del.icio.us and it does look nice:

You can read the full list of changes in the release notes .

WebnoteHappy is shareware (USD 24.95) and is available from the developer’s web site.bookmarks, delicious, URLs, tagging, Web 2.0, firefox, internet, not apple mailSimilar Posts:

• WebNoteHappy 1.1 now plays nicely with Mail.app
• Scripts for Yojimbo, del.icio.us and NetNewsWire integration
• Pukka 1.3: del.icio.us posting client gets even better
• Applescript to back up iCal and other apps
• Yojimbo and EagleFiler updates