Check the junk folder of your email service, and we're guessing you'll find hundreds of messages offering to enhance various body parts, decrease others, or ask for your help withdrawing large sums of money from a bank account. But what if you're simply misreading all of these messages? What if you're the one with the dirty mind, not the marketers?
Yeah, we're pretty sure that's not the case, but artist Janet Nelson is definitely onto something with her Innocent Spam series. She's taken actual subject lines from junk email messages and turned them into cute comic images, with none of the innuedo attached. For example, "oh man, he is ridiculously huge" could refer to anything, right? Why not a big dog? And just because you think of something else when you hear the word "Willy" doesn't mean it has to be dirty.
You can buy Nelson's work on a T-shirt or mug. Or you can just check out the comics on her website for free.
Free webmail is nothing new. But the field is pretty much dominated by big names like Google, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Zenbe is a startup that hopes there's room for one more. And the company's webmail client makes a pretty strong case that there should be.
Zenbe is a free email service that gives users 4GB of storage for emails and attachments. But that's just the start. The service features an attractive interface that combines some of the best aspects of Gmail and Outlook. For example, you can star messages and add tags like you do with Gmail. But you also ahve access to an integrated calendar and task manager like you get with Outlook.
There are also a few featues you won't find in other services, like the ability to star messages with different colors, or create ZenPages that let you organize messages, appointment, attachments, and other information on a single web page which you can share with other users.
Zenbe is currently in private beta, but you can request an invitation from the company's home page.
Update: We've got invites for the first 100 people who sign up through this link.
It seems like every day a new company comes along with a service that lets you send huge files over email. Or rather, they let you upload a file to a server and then send the download link to a friend. Filemail may be one of the newer kids on the block, but there's a lot to like about this service.
Filemail lets users send files up to 2GB for free. You can also password protect your files, and customize how many times each file can be downloaded and how many days it will be available on the site. Filemail also lets you ZIP and encrypt multiple files. And you can receive email notification when a file is downloaded.
When we took Filemail for a spin, the upload and download speeds were good, but not spectacular, at around 200KB/s. We've had problems with corrupted files the last few times we've tried our previous favorite file sending service, so it's nice to find another alternative.
For $2.91 per month you can sign up for a premium account and send files up to 5GB. Or if you want to send files up to 25GB, you can snag a corporate account for $24.91 per month. Premium and Corporate account holders get a few other benefits as well, including the ability to leave files onine for longer periods, and an option to let each file be downloaded more than 20 times (which is the limit for free users).
Xobni is one of those services that you kind of have to see to understand its value, which is why we've included the promotional video above. But in a nutshell, it's a Microsoft Outlook add-on that gives you detailed information about the people you email most often and help you organize your communications.
The program adds a sidebar to Outlook and creates a profile for people you communicate with by pulling information from your email messages even if you haven't created a contact profile in Outlook. Here are a few of the things Xobni can show you:
The phone numbers of people you email are automatically extracted from messages
You can see a graph of the times of day when a contact typically emails you, so you will know if they're less likely to respond to a message after business hours
Xobni automatically displays all attachments a contact has sent you
See statistics about your contacts, easily find the people you email the most often, and identify contacts you've lost touch with
Xobni has been available as a private beta for a few months now, but this morning the company took down the private sign and opened the beta up to everyone who wants to download and install the utility. Well, everyone who uses Windows and Outlook anyway.
Have you ever read an article where the title pretty much tells you everything there is to know? Yeah, this article is basically one of those. DupeDeDupe is an applications for Windows Mobile devices that searches for duplicate contacts from your address book.
Paul at MoDaCo wrote the utility, and it's designed to work with AppToDate, which means you can automatically download any future updates.
DupeDeDupe compares each contact's "file as" and email fields as well as home, work, and mobile phone numbers. If all of those fields match, the application considers your contact to be a duplicate.
Overall, the tool is easy to use, fast, and best of all free. It should work on any device running Windows Mobile 5.0 or newer.
Yahoo! has added the ability to view photos in email messages as slideshows without downloading them first. Honestly, we're not entirely certain when this feature was added, but it was brought to our attention by a reader comment. When we looked into it, we found that at least five months ago, there was no photo slideshow feature. And now there is. So we're going to call it a new feature.
In order to view attached images as a slideshow, you'll need to switch to the Yahoo! Mail beta interface. This feature is not available in Yahoo! Mail classic. When you receive an email with attached images, you should see an option to show images. Once you click the button, you should see several thumbnails at the bottom of your message, and the option to view those images as a slideshow.
If you use Outlook Express to manage your Hotmail account, Microsoft wants you to download Windows Live Mail instead. Come June 30th, Microsoft will be shutting off Hotmail support for Outlook Express because the company is switching the protocol used by Hotmail from DAV to a newer protocol called DeltaSynch.
The move isn't really intended to inconvenience Outlook Express users. It's just that Outlook Express uses outdated protocols. Windows Live Mail is available as a free download, and it supports POP3 and IMAP as well as DeltaSynch. Microsoft says the new protocol does a better job of handling large email inboxes since it allows your email client just to download changes since the last synch instead of grabbing every single header, as DAV does.
While it's possible to add DeltaSynch support to Outlook Express, Microsoft decided it would be easier to push its new email client. Or you could always just access your webmail services like Hotmail through the web interface. Do you still use a desktop email client, and if so which one do you use?
Over the years, odds are you've accumulated more contacts than you know what to do with. What's more, those contacts are spread out across an array of applications and services. There's your Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, and Hotmail contacts. There's the contacts stored in Outlook on your desktop. And then there are your social networking contacts on sites like Orkut and LinkedIn. Keepm lets you import all of your contacts from each of those locations and store them online in one place.
When you need to find an email address or phone number, you can then just login to Keepm and find it, no matter where you had initially stored it. You can also share individual contacts with others by sending an email from the site. And of course, you can export your contacts as V-Cards or CSV files.
While we'd be much happier with Keepm if it were actually integrated with an application that lets you use your contacts like Gmail or Outlook. Give us a tool that lets us combine all of our contacts and make phone calls or send email from that application and you will make us very happy.
Note that Keepm also needs your Gmail, Yahoo! or other email passwords to import your contacts. The site says it won't save your login information, but you do have have to trust the site before using it. But that should go without saying for any web-based contact manager.
Salesforce for Google Apps goes live today, which basically means that Salesforce.com users can integrate Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar, Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services with their Salesforce account.
Why exactly does this matter? Basically, it gives small business owners a one-stop shop for managing their workforce, customer, and marketing information. Saleforce has its own email application, for example, allowing you to keep track of business related emails from the same interface you use to manage contracts. But now that there's Gmail integration, you can send an email from Salesforce.com, Gmail, or a desktop application like Outlook linked to your account. All of your information will be viewable from the Salesforce web interface.
The folks at Common Craft put together a simple explanatory video which you can see above. We kind of like it better than the official video from Salesforce, but you can check that one out after the jump.
New web service Time Machiner enables you to send emails to any recipient on any future date.
You can use the service to remind yourself of upcoming events or appointments, or you can set up happy birthday emails to friends, family members, and co-workers, in one glorious chunk of time.
And, if you time it right, you can even send emails from beyond the grave. Cue Vincent Price's ghoulish laughter.
While we think this service has its uses, some more beneficial than others, it seems to be more of a novelty at this point. Some basic features are missing: e.g., you can't email a group of people, formatting of any kind (except for line breaks) is disallowed, you can't add attachments, etc...
Besides, for events such as birthdays, wouldn't it be easier to set reminders in a calendar application? If you're averse to calendar apps, they even have calendars that are made out of real paper and hang on walls.
The most beneficial use of Time Machiner is the ability to send present advice to your future self. Maybe you've had an epiphany, and would like to make sure you don't forget it. That's where Time Machiner can really shine.
While the ability to send SMS is built directly into Microsoft Office 2007, users are always on the lookout for an affordable way to use the service.
SMSOfficer is one of the SMS services that has answered the call. SMSOfficer allows you to easily send SMS to any mobile phone using Microsoft Outlook 2007. No installation is required, which is an instant plus in these dark times of worm-infested installers.
First, you need to register for your free SMSOfficer account. They'll send you a text message (natch) with a password, and a link to introduce the service to Microsoft Outlook. That's all for the setup.
Sending messages is a no-brainer. In Outlook, go to File-New-Text Message, type in your contact, type in your message, and hit send. Easy like Sunday morning.
10 free messages are yours when you sign up. After that, you have to pay to play. And while we like the service, we don't necessarily like the cost (if you've been reading Download Squad for a while, you'll know that we like free best of all).
So we'll ask you, constant reader: are there any similar services that offer this type of Outlook integration that are less expensive, or free?
Yahoo! Mail has been one of the most popular free web-based email services ever since its humble beginnings. Not too long ago, Yahoo! started to feel the pressure from the brazen upstart Gmail, which offers a gradually increasing mailbox limit. Not to be outdone, Yahoo! introduced an unlimited mailbox size, promising that users would "never need to delete a message again."
As many of us expected, there is a limit, and it has been found. The Wall Street Journal has found a bug in the system that renders a account inoperable if it has too many messages in one folder. According to their findings, 55,000 or so is the maximum that the system can handle. Yahoo! is working on fixing the issue (of course), but be sure to point and laugh in the mean time.
Amic Email Backup is another new email backup solution, designed for ease-of-use and offering support for a wide variety of email accounts, such as Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora, IncrediMail, Opera Mail, and more.
Amic Email Backup not only saves the text of the emails themselves, but the address books, settings, news accounts, message rules, blocked senders lists and signatures.
The program has two modes: Wizard and Standard mode. Obviously, the Wizard mode will walk you through creating, restoring, and/or scheduling your backup. Standard mode is for the tweakers and the customizers. The email backup can also be moved from one computer to another, handy if you're moving all of your information to a new computer.
In all, Amic Email Backup is a nice, and affordable (read: free) entry into the realm of automated email backup, though there wasn't much in the program that made us sit up and take notice. In other words, it's not the kind of thing that wars are started over, and not the kind of thing that makes us want to do cartwheels. But if you're looking for a free and simple email backup solution, believe us, you can do worse.
Looking for a way to post your email address online, but don't relish the idea of spambots picking up your address and sending you email ads for Viagra and anatomical enhancement pills? ReCAPTCHA Mailhide provides a simple tool for obscuring your email address.
All you have to do is enter your email address (and hope that the folks behind Mailhide aren't doing anything nefarious with it), and reCAPTCHA Mailhide will spit out a URL and some HTML code. Both take you to a page where you have to solve a CAPTCHA test like the one shown above to reveal an email address.
You can either provide a hyperlink to the URL, or embed the HTML code in your page. If you go the HTML route, visitors to your website will see a partial email address that looks something like b...@downloadsquad.com. When they click on the "..." a window will pop up asking them to solve the CAPTCHA. In other words, people don't have to leave your web site to get your email address. They just have to be able to decipher hard-to-read text.
How many of the applications you use on a daily basis are web-based as opposed to locally installed native applications? For me, the answer is way more than I ever would have expected.
Had you asked me this question a few years ago, I would have vehemently denied that the future of development is on the web. As much as I could see and understand the value of a ubiquitously available web-based application, there's just no way to approach the level of power and integration (not to mention the ability to be always-available) that is possible with well conceived and developed desktop software.
Of course, back then I didn't imagine that web applications could become as useful as Google Calendar or Remember the Milk. I also didn't imagine that light - yet still useful - versions of these apps would be available from my mobile phone almost wherever I was.
Most of these are probably pretty familiar names, but one is a newcomer in the web space: Evernote. Still in beta, the new version of Evernote contains a full-featured web version, but synchronizes seamlessly with desktop software on either Windows or Mac platforms. And it's a breath of fresh air.
Check the junk folder of your email service, and we're guessing you'll find hundreds of messages offering to enhance various body parts, decrease others, or ask for your help withdrawing large sums of money from a bank account. But what if you're simply misreading all of these messages? What if you're the one with the dirty mind, not the marketers? 
