Filed under: E-mail

With the tagline 'work outside the inbox', and customary all-lower-case branding, Cc:Betty has just been relaunched and rebranded as Threadbox. Citing 'branding issues' and the need to 'reel in the cute', Threadbox is still the same software -- it just has a different name.

If you haven't heard of Cc:Betty, it's a very neat email organizer. As you probably guessed from the (old) name, you add Betty in the CC field when you write an email -- she, in a display of classic sexist misogyny, then keeps all your email threads shipshape and tidy. Where Cc:Betty really comes into its (her) own is group discussions: mailing lists, event organization, projects -- things like that.

The irony is, while you have to request an invite for Threadbox access, you can sign up to Cc:Betty right now. I presume accounts at Cc:Betty will be merged with Threadbox in due course.

There's an awful commercial for Threadbox after the break, but the demo video on the Cc:Betty website is better.

[via VentureBeat]

If you hate the Facebook inbox as much as I do, this will come as welcome news; according to TechCrunch, Facebook will soon be launching a full webmail client.

Dubbed Project Titan it will be a full blown mail client similar to Gmail with full POP and IMAP support. According to Michael Arrington your address will be your current Vanity URL @facebook.com.

With 350 million active Facebook users automatically getting a new email address all other webmail services are about to get a monsterous new competitor.

Mozilla finally released version 3 of their Thunderbird desktop email client last December, and they now have their attention focused on a minor bump to 3.1. Last night the first alpha build was made available, and it sports the usual handful of changes and improvements.

Among the tweaks are enhancements to stability and memory usage, better IMAP access, fixes for smart folders, filters, and attachment handling. The Thunderbird interface is also being re-tooled -- so far the changes are fairly subtle.

Thunderbird 3.1 is also dropping support for Windows ME and older as well as Mac OsX prior to 10.4 Tiger. But hey, if you're still running an OS that old you're probably not too concerned with running up-to-date apps either...

Ready to take it for a spin? Testers can download alpha builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux from the Thunderbird early release page.

You'd think Google would have had this search thing down by now, but the search functionality within Gmail lacked some much needed (and requested) features. A recent addition to Gmail Labs hopes to fix this and make searching within mail much, much better.

In April, Google announced that you could search the web from Gmail without leaving the page. You could even add the search results you find to a message. The feature was a great addition to the Lab and made life much easier than switching browser windows to find results. The changes made recently add some awesome features such as dictionary definitions, spelling correction, news, weather and even local results.

Google search within Gmail is now also accessible via a icon from the compose window. I never thought I'd need a feature like this, but it's come in handy quite a few times. Even for quick functions like definitions, it's certainly an improvement. If you haven't already, head on over to Gmail to get searching.

Signing up for Google Apps for your domain is a pretty sweet deal, but there's still the matter of your current email account, and all the messages that come with it. Fortunately, Google has anticipated the demise of your old email account, and taken the liberty of planning for its future. Email packrats who run Windows have had access to a Google Email Uploader tool for some time, and now there's a Mac version that lets you easily dump your old email into your new Google Apps account.

The biggest caveat here is that we're not talking about uploading to a Gmail account. Google Email Uploader only works with Google Apps email (i.e. POP3 and IMAP). Other than that, it couldn't be easier to upload messages from your Mac - assuming you're running a popular mail client like Apple Mail, Eudora or Thunderbird. A warning, though: due to server rate limits, you might want to upload 500 messages or fewer at a time, because performance will lag significantly on large batches.

For some people, the built-in Mail.app on the Mac is all they need in an email client. For others, it is frustratingly close to being what they need, but lacking in some key areas.

The problem is that because Mail.app comes with every copy of OS X, and it's not a bad email client, the perception among the Mac development community is that there is no money to be made making a better Mac mail client. This is a case where "good enough" seems to be standing in the way of "great".

This scenario frustrated Brent Simmons (of NetNewWire fame) greatly. So greatly, in fact, that he was driven to write a blog post titled Email init begging the Mac development community to get together and collectively write a new, better email client. That post went up on Saturday, January 16, and a little over a week later, quite a bit has happened.

As part of the post, Brent created a mailing list for the yet-to-be-named app, which subsequently has been named Letters. A vote was also held to determine who would act as the President of the project. The role of president will be held by various people, and each president's job will be to marshall the project to the next major version release. The inaugural president for Letters will be John Gruber, who will hold that position until Letters 1.0 is released.

If you're interested in the philosophy behind Letters, check out the Letters vision document that first appeared on the mailing list. You can also follow Letters.app on Twitter.

Just when you think the Facebook privacy debate has reached its peak, the popular social network drops another privacy-related bomb. This time, Facebook has said it will allow apps to demand users' email addresses. Currently, apps communicate with you via the red-flag "updates" tab in the bottom-right corner of the site. On the plus side, Facebook is taking that annoyance away. On the "oh my gosh, this could really suck" side, it's asking app creators to reach users via email instead.

Of course, you don't have to hand over your email address to any app, and they're required to send you through a series of dialog boxes making sure you've given them the go-ahead to have your information. That would be the end of the problem, except for one thing: Facebook is allowing apps to deny access to any user who doesn't hand over an email address.

With no alternative mode of sending out messages, I'm sure a lot of developers will gladly take advantage of this forced option. On top of that, the old on-site notifications were only allowed to bug you a certain number of times. With email, it's open season. Facebook has okayed developers to send you as many emails as they darn well feel like sending.

Disaster! It looks like Facebookers will be forced to choose between email privacy and their favorite apps. Facebook's proposed solution? Give the app a proxy email instead. That's certainly the alternative I'd go for if I were particularly attached to a Facebook app. What about you, DLS readers?

[via Washington Post]

Despite the recent shenanigans overseas involving Google, China has at least taken steps to help cut down on the amount of spam in our inboxes.

Symantec's Samir Patil reports that their company has observed a major drop in spam originating from .CN domains. Back in December, the CNNIC announced that they would be enacting new rules about domain name registrations "in order to further enhance the authenticity, accuracy, and integrality of the domain name registration information."

The change seems to have worked wonders. Patil notes .CN based spam has dropped from previous rates -- as much as 50% of all spam -- to as low as 5% since the new policy was put in place. Whether or not the change was intended to have this effect remains to be seen. After all, this could have been a decision based purely upon the desire to have more control over the approval process.

So why is .CN so popular, anyway? It's apparently a believable place to send Canadian Pharmacy spam from.

As much as it pains me to tell you all this, that discount Viagra from Canada you've been this close to ordering?

Yeah...Canadian pharmacies (at least the ones I know about) don't operate in China. We'll have to get our little blue pills elsewhere.

People around the world are rallying together to help those affected by the crisis in Haiti. Despite the kindness and goodwill, there are always a few that will take advantage of such a situation. Gaming the search trends and people desperate to help, some internet scammers have set up fake charity websites with donations going right into their bank accounts instead of to those that need it.

In addition to fake websites, there is no shortage of email scams going around. Phishing scams are not new, but unsavory types are getting smarter and providing actual mailing information with very small changes that would fool the average person.

The Better Business Bureau has set up a website on checking the credibility of sites you are donating to. The most important tips are to be cautious, find ways to donate from reputable sites like the Red Cross and avoid email/texting-based donations unless you've heard they are safe from sources you trust. ed: as several of you pointed out, there's a big difference between hackers and scammers. We've made the appropriate edits - thanks for being vigilant!

One of the things I like about Gmail, Google Reader, and other Google services is that they're easy to navigate using keyboard shortcuts. That means you don't need to lift your hand from the keyboard to use the mouse as often. But what if you have a hard time remembering all the keyboard shortcuts? You could hit the ? key to bring up a list, or you could write down a list and tape it to the side of your monitor. But Gboard has another solution.

The company sells a USB mini-keyboard that's maybe a bit larger than a numeric keypad. Each key corresponds to one of the keys used as a shortcut by Gmail. But rather than label the keys J, K, G, F, # and so on, the keys are labeled with icons and words like Trash, Archive, and Forward.

The concept is pretty cool. But the problem is that you still have to lift your hands off the normal keyboard to use the Gboard, so I'm not really convinced that it's much better than using a mouse... or just memorizing the keyboard shortcuts you need most frequently in the first place.

The keys are also not customizable, which means the Gboard pretty much only works with Gmail and other applications such as Google Reader which share many of the same shortcuts.

The Gboard is available for about $20.

[via The Gadgeteer]

Virtualization software maker VMWare has acquired Zimbra, a company that essentially provides a web-based alternative to Outlook.

Yahoo! purchased Zimbra a few years back and used the startup's technology to tweak Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar. But Zimbra has always been a bit more enterprise-based than Yahoo!, so it wasn't exactly a perfect fit.

VMWare gets all of Zimbra's intellectual property, but Yahoo! will still be able to use the company's email and communication technology, so don't expect any major changes to Yahoo! Mail right away.

The acquisition brings together two big players in virtualization and cloud computing technology, which could lead to powerful new web apps. VMWare will continue to support Zimbra's existing products. But the company also plans to use Zimbra's technology to expand the software available for customers to deploy using the VMware vCloud ecosystem.

MailBrowser is a new Gmail 3rd-party browser plugin that sits in the sidebar, giving you more information about your Gmail contacts. The plugin works by downloading a complete local copy of your email archive from Gmail over IMAP, then cross-referencing it to your Google Contacts in your Google account. I should state up front that the MailBrowser plugin is in beta, and likely to change.

MailBrowser for Gmail presents useful information about the contact you are viewing like a list of your last conversations with them, trending information about your communications with the contact, and fields so that you can add tags and notes to the contact in a very similar fashion to Xobni. It also attempts to look up the domain name of the contact and from there grabs information from the domain's website, which often turn out to be meta tags that are not all that useful. It would be nice if MailBrowser allowed you to choose the order it shows this information, or to hide sections entirely, because the most important information is hidden down at the bottom.

Beware: because (as mentioned above) MailBrowser works by downloading a copy of all of your emails, it will use up a significant amount of disk space.

It will probably take the plugin a few hours or even days to index your entire account, depending on how much email you have.

Mozilla Messaging, a subsidiary of Mozilla, has just released Thunderbird 3. Compared to its illustrious brother Firefox, Thunderbird receives relatively little attention. Why? I have no idea...Thunderbird is frickin' great, and with version 3 there's lots of new, juicy functionality that will hopefully (finally?) make a dent in overlord Outlook's market share.

Version 3 brings everyone's favourite productivity-booster and memory-sucker: tabs. Open email in tabs! Folders! Websites even! They're stored, just like Firefox, so when you open it again your tabs pop back into existence. For the enthusiasts and power-users there are filtered searches and 'smart folders' that can contain email from multiple accounts.

There's also better integration with Gmail, support for Windows 7 (and OS X -- Thunderbird is cross-platform!) and, for the new users, there's a nice, new set-up wizard to guide you through your first few baby steps.

If you've never tried Thunderbird, or perhaps never even tried an offline mail program like Outlook or Eudora, now's a great time to give it a go.

Download Thunderbird 3 now!

Thunderbird now plays nicely with Gmail all around, recognizing special Gmail folders that have traditionally been a bit of pain to set up in an email client. Setting up new accounts on Gmail and some other popular email services is also easier, thanks to some new account presets in Thunderbird. Even if you're not using Gmail, Thunderbird has borrowed the archive/all-mail sorting system from Google, so you can get email out of your inbox and find it later with search, without totally deleting it.

Since Thunderbird is a Mozilla product, plug-ins are another big selling point. Version 3 has a new add-on manager for themes and extensions. You can also now set up smart folders, for automated sorting of your messages. Thunderbird also integrates with Vista Search in Windows Vista and with Spotlight in OS X.

The final release of Thunderbird 3 should follow shortly after this release candidate. Going forward, Mozilla hopes to shorten Thunderbird's development cycle significantly, so maybe we won't see another year wait for the next major update.

[via CNET]

There are some great little tweaks available in Google Labs for GMail, one of which is pictured above - 'Green Robot!'!

Like many of the labs additions (accessed by clicking the little green conical flask at the top of the GMail page), the beauty of Green Robot is in it's simplicity. It changes the appearance of your Google Talk contact list to illustrate which of your contacts are using Google Talk from their Android mobile device - handy!

If you haven't checked out the contents of the laboratory yet it's well worth a visit - I have a total of 12 labs features enabled on my account at this time which really smooth my GMail experience.

My labs features at the time of writing are Offline Mail, Message Translation, Sender Time Zone, Mark as Read Button, Inbox Preview - to let you view your inbox contents as the main site loads, Multiple Inboxes - to allow me to view a specific subset of my messages in a seperate 'pane', Undo Send, Green Robot (of course), Search Autocomplete, Inserting Images, Google Docs Gadget and the ability to Add Any Gadget by URL.

Which labs features are you using?