The Inquisitr » email

Forgetting to turn off the CAPS lock could get you fired.

Steven Hodson — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:24:54 +0000

Man talk about touchy people with absolutely no sense of ha ha. Sure I can see getting irritated is some co-worker decided to emphasis their point by using the CAPS lock as well as trying to blind you with colored text in an email, but to get fired over it – c’mon people this is just plain stupid.

Unfortunately though for Vicki Walker of Auckland, New Zealand, her employer ProCare Health felt that it was justified in dismissing the woman for sending out “confrontational” emails. So after two years of being on the job Vicki Walker found herself having to file for unfair termination with the Employment Relations Authority.

While the company said that Walker had caused disharmony in the workplace because of her use of block capitals, bold typeface and red text in many of her emails to fellow employees Vicki said that only one was used as evidence against her. The email in question was to advise employees how to fill out staff claim forms, specifies a time and date highlighted in bold red. As well the sentence “To ensure your staff claim is processed and paid, please do follow the below checklist” was written in capitals and highlighted in bold blue.

Luckily for Walker the Employment Relations Authority found on her behalf.

As part of her compensation, Walker was awarded nearly $6000 in lost wages for the 13 weeks between leaving ProCare and finding a new job, but she says she didn’t find fulltime work until October 2008.

Walker was also awarded $11,500 for any harm caused through her dismissal.

"To say that [email] is confrontational is ridiculous," says Walker. "I have spent thousands defending myself and there are so many issues that are unresolved that I want to take them up on."

Authority member Alastair Dumbleton said Ms Walker received no warnings, and while she had contributed to disharmony in the workplace it was not to the extent that dismissal was fair or reasonable.

Source: nzherald.co.nz – Emails spark woman’s sacking

Can following Tim Ferriss’ theories save you from email? Lets find out

Duncan Riley — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 06:32:39 +0000

One of the most popular self-help management books in recent years has been the somewhat controversial “Four Hour Work Week” from Tim Ferriss.

Everyone in the web industry claims to have read it, but very few have actually implemented any of the strategies in the book. I read it maybe 18 months ago, and to be brutally honest I thought that it the concept of working four hour weeks was insane, and I still do. It might work when you can delegate for a living, but it doesn’t work when your primary job is writing; that mine still is could be argued either way, although I’m happy to say that when I walk away from posting on The Inquisitr for a day (well, mostly, on the worst day last week I posted twice) all hell doesn’t break loose and the site doesn’t fall off a cliff.

All that aside though, Ferriss’ theories about delegating to lessen the load do make sense. I’ve been swamped with email for so long now I don’t remember a time that I wasn’t. As The Inquisitr has grown, so to has the email load. It’s not that I don’t try to filter email; I have maybe 30 rules set up in Gmail that filter out the email I don’t have to directly respond to, but that’s not enough. If you’ve sent an email to me in the last few months and never received a reply, my apologies; at a rough guess most days I might get to maybe 30-50% of it.

Things have to change, and I’m tired of apologizing to people for responding to their emails 7-14 days after they’ve sent them. So today I hired a virtual assistant via oDesk. Melanie starts Wednesday (Australian time), giving me another 24 hours to clean up my inbox for handover, and to write a pile of rules/ instructions for her to follow.

My experience with outsourcing hasn’t been great in the past; I seem to have a bad knack of picking people who promise the world then never deliver, but I’m mildly confident here. Melanie has a number of other clients she does VA work for, some who have had her on the books non-stop since January, and that’s always a positive sign.

I’ll report back in the coming weeks as to how it all goes. Sometimes you have to admit defeat and seek help, and my inbox was long overdue for that assessment.

GMail’s ultimate gift to mankind

Steven Hodson — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:45:00 +0000

I would bet that just about anyone reading this post still has one or two newsletter, or newslist, types of emails that they are no longer interested in coming into their email inboxes. These are the one’s that we signed up for as part of some service we thought was cool at the time or some site’s mailing list that we thought we would always be interested in. Things change, interests move on but still we get those emails coming but now they are caught by filters or rules and shuffled off to the trash bin.

Much of the time this happens because we forget the information we provided when we signed up. Even myself I still have four or five emails coming in regularly but they head to the junk folder because I’ll be damned if I can remember some obscure password I might have used at the time.

Well I just found out via Zee over at TheNextWeb.com that Google’s GMail has come to the rescue with a new feature that attempts to help you with this problem. As of today you can now use the Unsubscribe tool to have GMail send an unsubscribe request on your behalf at the same time as you mark the email as spam.

From the GMail support page on this new option

You’ll see the unsubscribe tool when you mark a message from particular types of mailing lists as spam. If the particular message is a misuse of a mailing list you like to receive, you can Report spam as usual. But if you never want to receive another message or newsletter from that list again, click Unsubscribe instead. We’ll send a request to the sender that your email address be removed from the list. It’s that simple!”

This almost makes me want to use Gmail for a week or so.

Please keep sharing your crap on Facebook – it may save our email inboxes

Steven Hodson — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:45:00 +0000

I think everyone probably has some favorite relative; or so we keep telling ourselves they are, who no matter how nicely you try and tell them to quit it keep on sending you all kinds of crap via email. So not only to we have to struggle with a constant flow of spam, notifications coming out of the wazoo but we have to deal with Uncle Joe Bob and Aunt Bobbie Jo’s recycling of the same stupid links you got from other people 10 to a 100 times last week.

However we could actually see a rise in email usefulness thanks to – you guessed it – Facebook. It seems that social sites like Facebook are seeing a rapid rise in the sharing of links. Yes apparently social sites are seeing an increase to around the 66.8% mark of users sharing links which is surpassing email’s 65.1%. Granted it might not seem like a lot of difference but common we gotta take the good news where we can find it and anything that reduces the load of crap hitting our inboxes should be celebrated with a block party – on Facebook of course.

As Jason Meserve over at Technologizer says

Rather than in-boxes cluttered with “Me too” and “That’s great!” replies from a litany of people you may not know, social networks are serving as the catchall for everyone’s need to chime in and giving hope to those that desire to “zero” their inboxes.

All hail ‘zero’ inboxes with many thanks to Facebook so please keep up the good work people. The Web thanks you.

Microsoft shows once again how it doesn’t listen

Steven Hodson — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:11:55 +0000

Just as one thinks that Microsoft has begun to understand the whole idea of listening to its customers and is turning that battleship around it shows that maybe it’s still deaf in one ear.

There’s been a lot buzz on Twitter about a movement to try and get Microsoft to backtrack on its decision to use the Word rendering engine for HTML based email in Outlook. So far some 22,000 plus Twitterers have heeded the call and visited fixoutlook.org to register their vote on this.

The reason for this kind of passion is because in many people’s opinion the Word rendering engine sucks the big one when comes displaying HTML and that it has no place in a modern email client. However Microsoft is fighting this tooth and nail.

As Ed Oswald writes over at The Technologizer

“We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents. Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages,” said the Outlook team in a blog post Wednesday.

The company also goes on to say there is no standard for HTML in e-mail. It does not address however the evidence that Word rendering is faulty, as shown by Fix Outlook’s comparison of an email in Outlook 2000 and 2010. The rendering in 2010 is frankly horrid.

It would seem that Microsoft has turned a deaf ear but that could turn out to be a big mistake. Anyone remember what happened when they had the same attitude about Internet Explorer? That saw the creation of Firefox which has gone on to be the biggest threat Microsoft has seen to any of their products.

Already Microsoft is facing stiff competition on the email front and this decision to stick to their guns on using the Word rendering engine could end up being another one of those tipping points.

About that ‘The world is a global village’ theory

Steven Hodson — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:49:45 +0000

One of the biggest buzz phrases we hear is how the world is getting smaller and becoming more of a global village. This is one they like to throw around in the social media world a lot as a way to get us thinking about how we communicate with each other. The problem is that this theory may not hold as much water as everyone would like to have you think.

According to Jacob Goldenberg and Moshe Levy the opposite might in fact be closer to the truth. They come to this conclusion after studying the messaging habit of some 100,000 Facebook users by zip code and suggest that the volume of e-mail traffic, as a function of geographical distance, follows an inverse power law.

Their conclusion is that contrary to reducing the importance of geographical location all our different forms of electronic communication may have in fact increased it. This they suggest is probably because people swap more messages with with those they have a more personal interaction with.

If that’s true, why have we gone so wrong in thinking that the world is getting smaller? One source of confusion, argue Goldenberg and Levy, is the famous six-degrees-of-separation experiments originally performed by Stanley Milgram with letters, and later by Steve Strogatz and Duncan Watts using e-mail. These seem to indicate that a "small world" effect is at work in social networks.

But Goldenberg and Levy point out that most of Milgram’s letters were lost; only a dozen or so reached their targets. And in Strogatz and Watts’s experiment, they say, only 384 out of 24,163 e-mail chains were completed. That suggests that there may be more barriers to communication than we thought.

Source: Technology Review

I’m not sure that basing the changing of our concept of the world becoming a global village should be based solely on such a small sampling of people on a social media service like Facebook.

GMail under investigation for killing … Outlook

Steven Hodson — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:32:41 +0000

Here we go again.

Once more some-one in need of a weekend post to make it to Techmeme latches on to the fact that GMail has added ‘offline’ capabilities to its web email client and how that is going to be the death of Microsoft’s Outlook. It never fails that the moment Google does something that others have been for sometime before them it is the beginning of the end for some Microsoft product. In this case Zoho’s email client, Yahoo’s Zimbra and Hotmail through Windows Live Mail have had this kind of ‘offline’ ability for some time but it isn’t either one of those apps that GMail is going to kill. No, it’s one of the most widely used e-mail / calendaring / Task Management client both in and out of the corporate world that GMail is going to bring to its knees and then bury.

Ya … okay whatever you say bud. Think you could share those drugs you must be on?

This isn’t to say that GMail won’t solidify its position as the MacBook Pro Web 2.0 love everything Apple hate every Microsoft crowd with the addition of this ‘offline’ mode. This isn’t to say that GMail won’t continue to gain users because it will but to suggest that Outlook is now going the way of the Dodo bird is the height of ridiculousness.

The author of this Techmeme bait post Farhad Manjoo goes on to add

Now that Gmail has bested the Outlooks of the world, it’s a good time to assess the state of desktop software. There are some things that work better on your computer (your music app, your photo editor, your spreadsheets), and there are some that work better online (everything else).

Well if this past week is any indicate what with Magnolia having to go offline because they lost all the user data or Google having a hiccup and labelling every site on the as malware my conviction that some things at this point in time belong more on the desktop than the web. Chief among these applications is the very lifeblood of our online lives – the email client. The idea that I could be responsible if I should ever lose my data for some reason would pale in comparison to the reaction I would have if say for some reason Google lost my data either by a freak hardware failure of a deliberate deletion ala Facebook or Flickr.

It is one thing to place your trust in something within your own control; such as your email but another to do the same thing with a web service that has no liability because the service is free. this is what corporate environments look at when it comes to the valuable electronic data that it generates everyday. So unless things change a lot in this regard we will probably see more of these delusional types of claims but in the end – sorry but GMail will never kill off Outlook or any desktop application.

With a new round of $35 million, could Mail.com be the next Yahoo?

Duncan Riley — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:43:38 +0000

Custom email provider Mail.com has taken $35 million in a round led by Quadrangle Capital Partners.

My first take of the news was to write this up as being the last great round at the end of bubble 2.0, after all, $35 million to a company that provides an email service seems absurd on the surface. But then I started looking at what the company does beyond email, and it’s quite impressive.

Naturally the core of the service is email. Mail.com has over 2 million email users, and defines itself from competitors such as Yahoo and Google by offering 00 specialty email addresses, such as lawyer.com and usa.com. But it’s not just an email company, it’s also a big content player as well.

The front page of Mail.com is a content portal similar to Yahoo, and comes with news and coverage across a wide range of topics. Some content is original, some comes from AP, but all of it is posted on the mail.com site. Although never the best reference point, Alexa notes that 32% of Mail.com’s traffic is on Mail.com itself, and while some of this traffic will be people hitting the site to log into their email accounts, they none the less hit the page (the email server at mail01.mail.com takes 60% of the traffic). The company has also branched out into blogging, with celebrity gossip blog HollywoodLife.net and car reviews site OnCars.com.

The traffic numbers for Mail.com are impressive as well: Alexa ranks the site at 803, Quantcast 945. Compete notes over 1.5 million US uniques in September 2008.

Content is the focus on the new round, with the company noting that “The proceeds from the financing will provide capital to further accelerate Mail.com’s growth, including initiatives such as content creation, vertical site development, selective acquisitions and new management hires.” Joining the board is Daniel Rosensweig, a former COO at Yahoo.

Maybe suggesting Mail.com could be the next Yahoo might be a stretch for a number of reasons, and given Yahoo’s recent problems, they probably don’t want to go in that direction anyway. But the fundamentals are sound: key product, leverage into content, money in the bank, and experienced staff. Mail.com doesn’t have, nor will it likely ever have all the bells and whistles Yahoo has today, but that’s a positive when you consider that Yahoo’s long held strategy of trying to be everything to everyone is the reason today why they are masters of nothing. Mail.com can target growth areas without the baggage, and they can only continue to grow from here.

(in part via VentureBeat)

July Sets E-Mail Virus Record

JR — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:16:04 +0000

July has set a 2008 record for virus-laden e-mail, according to tracking information released by Google’s Apps Security & Compliance Team this afternoon.

The data shows more malicious messages sent in July than in any other month so far this year. The worst was on July 24, when 10 million infected e-mails went out around the world.

Google says a UPS scam accounted for much of the traffic. The e-mails had what looked like a link to package tracking information but ended up being a link to malware instead. Another offender was a fake CNN newsletter, also containing dangerous links.

For August, the team has found a shift to infected file attachments — a phenomenon that had been decreasing in recent months. The particular case cited uses encrypted RAR files.

Update: Moments after publishing this, I received a virus-linked message myself. Good timing.

Dear valued PayPal member:
Due to concerns, for the safety and integrity of the paypal
account we have issued this warning message.
It has come to our attention that your PayPal account information needs to be
updated as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to
reduce the instance of fraud on our website. If you could please take 5-10 minutes
out of your online experience and update your personal records you will not run into
any future problems with the online service.

However, failure to update your records will result in account suspension.
Please update your records on or before August 14, 2008.
Once you have updated your account records your paypal account
service will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.
To update your PayPal records click on the following link:

Thank You.
PayPal UPDATE TEAM

Of course, the links led to nonsense domains that had nothing to do with PayPal.

Yahoo Tries to Outdo Outlook with Zimbra

JR — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:40:54 +0000

Yahoo has a new plan to seemingly lure AOL and Gmail users into its service.

The company has released the beta version of Zimbra Desktop, an offline mail client marketed specifically to users of Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and Gmail. The utility offers POP and IMAP access as well as offline access to the iCal calendar function.

The program includes a list of other features, such as offline access to the Zimbra Documents and Zimbra Briefcase programs. None of them, however, appear to offer anything significantly different from or better than what users could find on Gmail or any other popular third-party mail client. Here are the primary selling points:

“All your accounts in one place.”
Yeah… Gmail’s been offering that option for ages. So does Outlook, Thunderbird, and basically every other desktop mail utility.
“Better for big inboxes.”
Maybe a slight advantage over Outlook, though not Gmail. Still, not enough to warrant a switch, at least for me.
“Be more productive.”
The statement here is that Zimbra Desktop can manage contacts, calendar appointments, documents, and tasks. See previous statement about Gmail, Outlook, etc.

This is a strange one. It’s clear what Yahoo is attempting to do with the Zimbra Desktop program — but at this point, I’m not sure why anyone would bother switching from their current e-mail system. It’s a decent enough program, sure, but why would I bother migrating over? It strikes me as someone saying, “Hey…want a program incredibly similar to what you’re currently using? It does most things about as well.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not seeing the value.

Zimbra