[email] Was E-mail a Mistake? … A good look at synchronous Vs. asynchronous communications. ‘The dream of replacing the quick phone call with an even quicker e-mail message didn’t come to fruition; instead, what once could have been resolved in a few minutes on the phone now takes a dozen back-and-forth messages to sort out. With larger groups of people, this increased complexity becomes even more notable. Is an unresponsive colleague just delayed, or is she completely checked out? When has consensus been reached in a group e-mail exchange? Are you, the e-mail recipient, required to respond, or can you stay silent without holding up the decision-making process? Was your point properly understood, or do you now need to clarify with a follow-up message? Office workers pondering these puzzles-the real-life analogues of the theory of distributed systems-now dedicate an increasing amount of time to managing a growing number of never-ending interactions.’

[email] There is no non-wanky way to sign off an email, study finds … ‘Professor Henry Brubaker said: “Does anyone actually know what ‘kind regards’ means? Also it sounds a bit drippy and outdated, as if you’ve somehow received an email from a Victorian aunt. “An abrupt ‘thanks’ sounds sarcastic, or as we academics would describe it, ‘a bit pissy’.’

[email] Emkei’s Instant Mailer … When you absolutely have to send fake email from a tooth fairy I recommend Emkei’s Instant Mailer. Accept no substitutes.

[email] How To Free Yourself From Email … ‘The key point: whenever you email someone you are intruding, stealing time that they could be spending with their family – or without their family. You certainly shouldn’t be blithely asking them for unpaid services. There’s one dreaded email, familiar to every professional writer, known as “Will you read my script?” The correct answer is, “Certainly. My hourly rate is”‰.”‰.”‰.”‰” Probably the best business secret Sir Alex Ferguson, the former Manchester United manager, will have to impart at Harvard Business School is what he once told Tony Blair’s aide Alastair Campbell: don’t let people steal your time with petty requests.’

[email] The First Emoticon May Have Appeared in… 1648 … Alexis Madrigal attempts to push back the history of the Smiley to the 17th Century … ‘Why would anyone care about a smiley face in a poem from the 17th century? For me, it’s like a wormhole that connects our time with theirs. If you’d been alive in 1648, you might have considered that a colon and a parenthesis form a smiley face. Our ancestors looked upon the same marks on the page and saw the possibilities that we take for granted. While emoticons have probably been independently invented many times-the earliest documented use of the smiley face with a nose, :-), comes in 1982-Herrick very well could have been the first.’

[email] What Your Email Sign-off Really Means … looking at the social minefield of choosing the best way to conclude an email… ‘You can sign off with “regards”, which means, quite literally, “I have no regard for you at all”. Or you can use the more extreme “warmest regards”, which means, “never contact me again you insufferable bastard”. Then there’s “yours”, which means, “I don’t even know who you are or what you wrote to me about”, and its cousin, “yours sincerely”, which means, “you owe me money and I will make your life a living hell until I get it”. Some people sign off emails with “best”. Not “best wishes”, which is used when the emailer is for some reason under the impression they’re writing in a Christmas card, but just “best”, which is a slightly creepy sign-off, like writing “be seeing you REALLY soon… ”. Best? Best what?’

[email] Time’s Inverted Index … What it’s like to examine your past using your email archive … ‘While right now it’s unusual in general population for a person to have all this history so close, so quickly searchable, obviously the world will go this way. There will be many new forms of art and commerce over time, I think, that allow us to interact with, and share from, our private archives. There is going to be an urgent market need for tiny mechanical historians who can live in our pockets and point out our flaws.’

[email] Inbox Zero for Life … a straightforward approach to the Inbox Zero lifehack using Gmail … ‘Triage. Your one and only goal for processing your inbox is to make it empty. Not to actually do anything productive, because processing email is inherently anti-productive. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re doing work here. Just get it over with as quickly as possible.’

[gmail] Gmvault … great little cross-platform backup solution for Gmail which dumps your email in flat files to a local disk.

[email] Merlin Mann On Email…

Worth repeating:’Organizing’ your email is like alphabetizing your recycling.

— Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies) April 6, 2009

[email] Legal Disclaimers: Spare Us The E-mail Yada-Yada … Legal disclaimers at the bottom of e-mail’s are useless … ‘They are assumed to be a wise precaution. But they are mostly, legally speaking, pointless. Lawyers and experts on internet policy say no court case has ever turned on the presence or absence of such an automatic e-mail footer in America, the most litigious of rich countries. Many disclaimers are, in effect, seeking to impose a contractual obligation unilaterally, and thus are probably unenforceable.’

[email] American Charged With Hacking After Snooping On Wife’s Emails … ‘Walker was charged after opening the Gmail account of his wife, Clara, who was married twice previously. Walker found she was having an affair with her second husband, who had once been arrested for beating her in front of her young son from her first husband. Walker handed the emails over to the boy’s father, saying he was concerned for the child’s safety. The father sought custody.’

[gmail] Send mail from another address without “on behalf of” …. useful tip for Gmail users to send e-mail from another SMTP server with a custom e-mail address.

[gmail] How to Embed Images into a Gmail … useful tip and I always forget how to do it! … ‘Drag your mouse across the image so the whole image gets selected or highlighted (it would turn dark to indicate that it is successfully highlighted/selected). don’t miss that part. then while it is selected/highlighted, right-click your mouse over it, then from the menu which appears, choose COPY. (It works in Firefox too. You just have to make sure you “COPY” NOT “COPY IMAGE”.)’

[email] Email Addicts Offered 12-step Detox … ‘Marsha Egan, who claims email “abuse” can cost US business millions in lost productivity, cites the chilling cases of “a golfer who checked his BlackBerry after every shot” and a client who “cannot walk by a computer – her own or anyone else’s – without checking for messages”.’

[email] Why email is addictive (and what to do about it) — interesting article about dealing with compulsive email checking … ‘Checking email is a behaviour that has variable interval reinforcement. Sometimes, but not everytime, the behaviour produces a reward. Everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link. Sometimes checking your email will get you one of these rewards. And because you can never tell which time you check will produce the reward, checking all the time is reinforced, even if most of the time checking your email turns out to have been pointless. You still check because you never know when the reward will come.’ [via Yoz]

[email] Excellent post on the life-cycle of a mailing list. Stage Five: ‘Discomfort with diversity (the number of messages increases dramatically; not every thread is fascinating to every reader; people start complaining about the signal-to-noise ratio; person 1 threatens to quit if *other* people don’t limit discussion to person 1’s pet topic; person 2 agrees with person 1; person 3 tells 1 & 2 to lighten up; more bandwidth is wasted complaining about off-topic threads than is used for the threads themselves; everyone gets annoyed)’

[spam] Spamcop… for when your Inbox is full of weird porn sites, crap share deals and bad philosophy.