It’s hard to let go of your roots. For AOL, their status as internet pioneers has proven to be much of their downfall in recent years thanks to an unwillingness to jump when the web said, “jump”, and a recent willingness to jump into things that people really didn’t need them to such as content (Huffington Post and Techcrunch). Mail has always been an important service for them. They are the parents of “You’ve got mail!” However, people have moved away from their AOL email addresses, few are willing to change to them (or anyone else), and they needed a new direction, so now they’re getting into the email…

While everyone else seems focused on new media technology such as social networks and mobile sharing, Microsoft is mastering what they’ve always done well: email. Their latest push towards perfect email management and distribution comes in the form of Outlook.com which they are billing as “modern email designed for the next billion mailboxes.” Judging by the video below, they’re definitely heading in the right direction. Despite the rise of new media, email still remains one of the most common and important online activities. Here’s what they’re saying about it on their latest blog: Webmail…

The news of Google’s purchase of the 5-person Sparrow team struck me as a bit odd. Sure, they’ve done some great things in email with their native iPad app, but the concept that they were purchased “to bring polish, ‘beauty’, and ease of use to all of its Gmail experiences” isn’t jiving. Google has been in email for a long time now and they have a lot of really smart people working on it. It wouldn’t be hard to reverse-engineer anything that anyone is doing in email (it’s not rocket science, after all). Why buy a team? Some would say it’s a value-buy; $25 million is a drop in the bucket for the Mountain View…

Many of us grew up writing letters long-hand and sending them via the Post Office. It wasn’t until 1965, that the concept of email emerged and about 6 years later that the very first email was sent out. In 2007, Google made Gmail available to the world and now that it is 5 years later, the big question is, “Do you still use email?” Whether you use Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail it is interesting to know how sending mail via the internet has evolved. …

They’re just not ready. They weren’t ready for their IPO.They’re not ready to get into the hardware business with a smartphone. They’re not ready to take off the hoodie and put on a suit. They’re still just a social network and they’re making the kind of mistakes that startups make. That doesn’t mean they won’t continue to be successful in the realm they own nor does it mean that they can’t make a lot of money doing it. It simply means they not ready to get into the “big time” with the likes of Google, Microsoft, or Apple. They’re still a 2nd-tier tech company. The latest problem stems from their botched…

Email is one of those rare holdovers from the dawn of the Internet that continues to have practical applications to our everyday lives. Through constant challenges from the likes of tweets and text messages as the preferred means of relaying information to a friend or colleague, email has remained as useful as ever. Like any other technology, email has its limitations, but with the help of a couple of easy to use apps, you can turn your inbox into a beacon of productivity and efficiency. Here are a few useful apps you should be using for your emails right now.   Moveable Ink Thanks to the proliferation…

There was a time not too long ago when technology bloggers and pundits (myself included) believed that email was going away. We thought that the system would be replaced by Facebook messaging, IM, social networking, and other variations of online communication that were more elegant and less abused than email. We were wrong. I was wrong. We failed to see one major flaw in our judgment. Despite so many people being on Facebook and other forms of communication, everyone has an email address. Even with the necessity of many to check their other forms of communication regularly, almost obsessively,…

Some ideas were born to work. The Listserve may be one of them What would you say if you were selected to send an email to 10,000 people? 100,000? 1,000,000? What if the audience was a relatively-captive one, an audience that knew they would only be hearing from one person every day, and today that person is you? That’s the concept of The Listserve. People sign up to receive one email a day. Launched by 5 NYU graduate students as part of a new project out of NYU’s ITP masters program, it is currently waiting to reach 10,000 subscribers before sending out the first email. The person who is sending…

For many tech-savvy web users, Microsoft’s Hotmail has become a badge of ancient times, a service that was valid a few years ago but that has gone the way of AOL as a symbol of not being “up with the times” in email technology. People who see their friends using it might ask, “Why aren’t you using Gmail?” Tech-snobs aside, the service is still extremely popular and their most recent innovation may give even the tech-savvy crowd a reason to check out their old Hotmail inboxes if only to use it for the gray-area emails. When they declared war on “Graymail” a month ago, they introduced a set of tools that will…

I hate spam. Who doesn’t? I tend to hate it more than others because a relative fell victim to phishing a couple of years ago, so I tend to actually look at phishing emails to see what’s happening in the world of Nigerian Princes and people trapped in London. This particular email struck me as oddly awesome simply because of the “Trust Factor” (an important component in the world of phishing) that they employed at the end. “This message is never sent without Google Mail Accounts Trust & Safety Authenticator.” The message was sent, therefore the Authenticator must be working in full force. The…