While it may seem strange, there are tech companies that seem to agree with such people. There have been lowly attempts in the past by a few organizations to come up with new and better ways to deal with the issues that many people recognize as inconsistent with the ease of access and quality of experience that other online activities bring along. Thus far nearly every one has failed, leaving behind fractured shells of companies that could have been, with just slightly better coding or, more often than not, better business organization.

One company, however, is holding on and has successfully managed to bring about a pretty handy way to treat email that eliminate3s many of the problems that people seem to have with the activity. Called Shortmail, the service forces emails to be limited to a brief 500 characters and presents them in a more casual, conversational format than traditional email. Best of all, it is completely free, and anyone can get online and enjoy the better parts of email without the worst without any damage to their wallets.

If you would like to give the service a look, follow this link and register with your Twitter account (if you don’t have one, Shortmail can get you sorted out as well). As long as you already have an account with the social networking site registration takes all of about 30 seconds, well shorter than most such services. From there, simply explore the interface and see how it works. You will find that it removes most of the added features many email providers give users – on purpose, of course. Shortmail lets you get rid of the rubbish and cut straight to the chase.

Before you start using the service with your friends and colleagues, take a moment to try out a test dialogue with an already existing email account. Send yourself a message from your new Shortmail account and then reply via traditional email. As long as they keep it under 500 characters anyone can send messages to the address, not just those enrolled in the service. If someone gets too wordy Shortmail will email them back and let them know, requiring that they shorten their message to push it on through.

While probably not the sort of service you would like to use in all applications, Shortmail is a great option to use with anyone that you do not want cluttering your email inbox with messages you could not care less about. If you are tired with the email status quo and are ready for a change, try giving Shortmail a chance.

Their aim is to make Yahoo! services more personal for their 600 million users in an effort not to lose more customers to Google and Mincrosoft.  Chief Products Officer Blake Irving said in a statement this week “Yahoo in three years is a global series of web experiences across a variety of different devices that gives people what they want; the content, the folks that they care about.  There is a bunch of bringing cool back to Yahoo saying a lot of the things that you want to do on the web are here.”

New features, services and upgrades the company have announced include…

The company’s focus will be on connected devices such as smartphones, tablets and set-top boxes.  It’s a smart move for the company which has struggled in recent years to stay relevant and maintain market share.  Recent moves to use the Bing search engine on Yahoo! began recently and there has been extensive talk about takeovers by Microsoft.

It will be interesting to see how Yahoo! maintains its customer base and market share when they have slipped behind so much in recent years.  It will bea struggle but Yahoo!’s services are still some of the very best around.

Yahoo Mail today announced the integration of the Drop.io service as an application into Yahoo Mail. Drop.io is a file hosting service on the Internet that can be used to upload and share files on the Internet.

The Yahoo Mail solution adds a one-click solution to upload attachments with a size of up to 100 Megabytes. Users who receive emails with attachments that have been uploaded this way will see a link that is pointing to the uploaded files. Recipients have then options to view online or download the attachments to their computer system.

Yahoo Mail users who do not see Applications in the left sidebar need to visit the Yahoo Mail Applications page to enable them. The Attach Large Files is then available from the applications menu. The feature makes it a bit easier and more comfortable for users to share larger files although this method can be easily replicated manually by users who use different online email services like Gmail.

All kinds of protection have been created to prevent this from happening. Some suggest using images instead of text, many obscure their emails in the hope that the bots will not be able to identify the right one and others are not publishing their mail at all.

Tinymail steps in and tries to be a barrier between your email address and the Internet. It does that by linking your email address to a Tinymail webpage which becomes your profile page. Instead of publishing your email on the web you embed the Tinymail code that is created after linking the email to a Tinymail email address.

The Tinymail code is showing part of the real email address and a link to the profile page which is only accessible if the user enters a captcha. If he does that he can take a look at the real email.

The idea itself is nice but it has two flaws in my opinion.The first is that it adds another step to the contact process. That might not be a problem if you desperately are trying to contact one but it is definitely a problem for other forms like providing feedback on a product. Users might give up in frustration and prefer to spend their time elsewhere.

The second is the captcha protection. Captchas have been broken in the past and once it is broken it could become a haven for a email collector who stored all those Tinymail emails in a database waiting for the right moment to decipher them all.

It would be nice if the email link could be deleted again after usage for a certain time, maybe even let it run out automatically after x days where x is a figure that the user can define in the options.

A second application would be to fight spam before it is retrieved and downloaded to a local PC. Pal Mail is a tiny secure application that can retrieve the mail headers of an unlimited number of accounts with the main option to delete mails right on the mail server. Retrieved are the mail headers and the messages but not the attachments of the mails.

Every mail can be marked for deletion which effectively deleted it from the mails server. The consequence is that your primary mail client will not retrieve the messages that have been deleted before.

Pal Mail is a standalone application that does not require any dlls or other files to run. This makes it an idea software for a portable device.

This is also a privacy issues and some will be really angry if you do not send mails to multiple recipients this way. It happens however that not all messages receive the recipient listed in the BCC field. This can be the case if you did not add a recipient in the TO field as well.

Some mail programs and filters block messages that have no TO recipient. The easiest workaround is to add your own email address to the to field which should take care of all the mail filters and programs that filter the mails otherwise.

The second change might be interesting to users that have to work on different computers. Gmail now offers the option to access mail accounts that support the pop3 protocol from within gmail making it easy to use gmail as the central platform for all your incoming and outgoing emails. This new feature does not seem to be available to anyone yet, just check your settings in the gmail account and click on accounts.

If the option Get mail from other accounts: is visible you can add other accounts to your gmail account. I’m however not really convinced to use gmail for my mail consolidation and administration. I have the same objections when it comes to online storage devices.

I do not trust companies enough to have important mails or files stored online on a server. There is always the possibility of misuse and I don’t want to take any risks. Maybe I’m a little paranoid about this whole thing.

Still, I will continue to download my mails from gmail using Thunderbird and I’m happy with the solution. Mainly because I only work on one computer. I can see the advantages if you work on more than one in different locations.

Update: Four years later and Gmail is still offering to retrieve mail from other providers. Providers like Hotmail have in the meantime started to offer similar options so that their users can also retrieve emails via Pop3 from other mail providers. This is handy for users who only use a website to do email.

The folder size of my Inbox for instance with 100 mails was more than 500 megabytes which could not be true at all. I remembered that Thunderbird did not delete the mails even though they would have been deleted in the trash. This was the cause for the discrepancy between the meager amount of mails and their size and the big huge mail folders on my c: partition.

The solution nevertheless is pretty easy. All that needs to be done is compact the folders which removes all deleted mails immediately. I was able to reduce the folder size of my Thunderbird folders from more than 3 gigabytes to 300.000 kilobytes freeing up valuable disk space on my main partition.

Just right-click a folder and select compact this folder to remove all deleted emails and keep only emails that are visible in Thunderbird. You could check the Disk Space option to automatically compact folders if that saves a defined amount of kilobytes. (You find the option under the advanced tab and offline & disk space tab in the Thunderbird options).

Open the Thunderbird Application Data folder which is located in your document and settings folder in Windows. Select the appropriate Thunderbird profile if there is more than one and click on Mail in that profile. You get a listing of all your email addresses. If you setup Firefox to have different mail folders for every email address you have to click in the folder of the email address that received (or send) the message. Otherwise Local Folders is the way to go.

The important files are those without extensions (Trash, Sent, Inbox ..) – locate the one that contained the mail(s) that you have deleted or are corrupted (do not show up anymore). Open it in an text editor, you could use notepad2 for instance for this purpose. Some folders might be rather big so choose a text editor that can handle large files. Thunderbird should be closed completely while editing those files.

All mails are basically stored in that file. The important part for us are the lines X-Mozilla-Status which defines a certain state of a message such as Read, Unread or Deleted. Search for the message(s) that you want to recover and edit the X-Mozilla-Status: XXXX line into X-Mozilla-Status: 0000 for unread or X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 for read messages.

Recovered messages will appear at the bottom of the folder and should be there after you startup Thunderbird for the next time. You sometimes have to delete the .msf file to make this work. If you edited the file Trash you would delete the file Trash.msf afterwards if the mails do not re-appear after a new start of Thunderbird.

source (and additional information)

Chris Brogan described another method which should be fine for most purposes. He suggests to create a pop3 account for gmail to be able to download all mail that is new in that account. Once downloaded you could backup the mailbox file and schedule the mail client that way that it is downloading mails from gmail regulary to reduce the chance that you lose mail. The steps to backup your gmail mails in detail:

It is probably not necessary to backup the gmail mailbox locally. You could create a backup of all of your mail profiles instead which would be a better way I think.

The Thunderbird add-on Quote Colors is able to change the way Thunderbird handles quotes. You can change the way back to the default way quotes are handled or change it into the way that the picture below shows.

So, if you do not like the way Thunderbird handles the way quotes are displayed you can change it easily by installing the Quote Colors add-on.

Mailman is a firefox extension that is able to get that information from gmail, hotmail, yahoo and pop3. Mailman adds itself to a toolbar and displays a message if new mail did arrive. You will have to add your login details to the extension to be able to do so. I do understand that this raises security concerns but this is the trade off.

Mailman has some additional nice features. Once you see that new mail did arrive you may click on the link and will be directly taken to the mail account using an auto-login feature. Right, you do not need to login a second time. You may define the update frequency and add sound alerts if you like. (I would never use sound alerts because I would hear a constant sound then, with all the spam that is flodding my mail boxes.

It also offers a search function to search your accounts from within firefox. Some users seemed to have problems with hotmail. I do not have a hotmail account, maybe someone else could verify if problems exist ?

How to change your content preference:
* log in to Yahoo Mail
* click Options
* select Account information from the left panel
* go to Member Information, General Preferences, Preferred Content
* select, for example, Yahoo UK
* click Finished
* go to Yahoo Mail
* you’ll see a page that says “It’s the New Yahoo! Mail Beta… and you’re invited.”
* click on “Try Beta Now”.

If you need to enter a valid zip here are some for Germany: 45130 Essen, 12159 Berlin, 16356 Berlin

[tags]yahoo beta, yahoo, mail, mail account, yahoo mail beta[/tags]