Postbox is a powerful email client based on Mozilla's Thunderbird, and, like Thunderbird, it now supports extensions. The selection of add-ons is limited right now, but it includes some useful ones: ReminderFox handles reminders and to-do items. Minimize to Tray is just what it sounds like, allowing Windows users to put Postbox in the system tray. Nostalgy adds keyboard shortcuts, and MozBackup backs up your messages and settings. This is a good start, but it'll interesting to see what other useful extensions pop up now that the door is open.

The latest build of Postbox also adds a long list of other useful features. If you're switching from Mail.app, you can now easily migrate your settings to Postbox. Postbox will now also pull photos for your contacts from OS X's address book or from Twitter. Several performance upgrades and fixes of annoying issues from earlier versions are also in place now, so it looks like a good time to consider giving Postbox a try.

If you have the ability to install software on your work computer, by far the easiest way to move files back and forth between your home and work computer would be a file synchronizing product like DropBox. But if you don't, what's the best way to move a relatively large file between two remote computers? For small files, email is usually the answer, and for users of Gmail that expands to files of up to 25 MB in size. But with what can often be a big catch: Gmail won't allow you to transfer executable files, even if they are inside a zip archive.

However, if you're simply wanting to move a file between computers, you can exploit the fact that Gmail doesn't actually scan a file to see if it is an executable until you actually try to send the email containing the file. This means that you are free to attach any file up to 25 MB in size to an email in Gmail, as long as you don't send it. You can then log into your Gmail on another computer, and download the attached file, without ever running into the executable file restriction.

Of course, the other easy way around Gmail's limitation is to change the file extension of the file you are sending. If you have an executable file inside a Zip archive, and you change the archive's file extension from .zip to .zzz, for example, Gmail doesn't know what a .zzz file is and does not scan it. Voila, you can now easily send executable files through Gmail.

Google wants to help you become a Gmail ninja, and has created a site called Gmail Tips for the purpose. What is a Gmail ninja? It's someone who knows all the ins and outs of the productivity tools that Gmail offers, and can process their email very quickly and efficiently.

Rather than just asking Gmail's team for a list of all of the features Gmail has, the Google Tips page is made up of tips from Google employees working in all different parts of the company. It's a hit list of the best email productivity ideas from the bright minds at Google.

The page is divided up into four sections: White belt, Green belt, Black belt, and Gmail master. Each of these sections describes a level of productivity tip, White belt being the most basic, and Gmail master being the guru-level tips.

Helpfully, the Gmail Tips page also includes a handy printable PDF that gives you one double-sided page full of all of the tips listed on the page.

Now, to be fair, none of the tips are going to be much of a surprise to heavy Gmail users, even the Gmail master level tips. But it's a great resource to point friends and co-workers to if they are struggling to really get the most out of Gmail, or if you're looking for a way to convince someone that Gmail is probably a better solution for them than what they are currently using.

There's a minor uproar happening on Twitter over Microsoft's plans to continue using Word to render HTML email in Outlook 2010. Fixoutlook.org reports that nearly 8,000 people have signed a petition via Twitter to encourage Microsoft to change its mind and support web standards before the new version of Office leaves beta. To back up its claims, the site links to an HTML email message rendered in Outlook 2000, and the same message in Outlook 2010: the new version looks a whole a lot worse.

By sticking with Word's rendering engine, which Microsoft started using to render email in Outlook 2007, Microsoft would also be sticking designers with outdated font tags and tables, instead of the latest CSS hotness. According to The Email Standards Project, Microsoft's reason for doing this is to allow Outlook users to use Word's prepackaged design tools and email templates, and have those render correctly for other Outlook users. Microsoft itself is worried that rendering through a browser could slow performance and lead to inconsistent appearance across different HTML engines.

There are plenty of complex, feature-rich collaboration systems out there, but the web developers at Tgethr found that they weren't using all those extras. When it came down to it, all of their collaboration was happening over email, and Tgethr is just a way to make that email system work better. Start a new group with its own @tgethr.com email address, and Tgethr can encrypt and archive all the messages sent to that address online for easy reading.

The cool thing about Tgethr is that it's not really another service to use and commit to. You can respond quickly to the group by using your email client, and all the messages wind up in your inbox. Attachments get saved and linked, so you can download them from the web instead of having them sit in the individual inboxes of people in the group. If you're looking for a simple, sensible way to do email groups, Tgethr is a good bet.

Hot on the heels of Facebook's big username land-grab comes news that Facebook may be using the email addresses you import even after you choose not to add them as friends.

The issue occurs if and when you let Facebook search your email contacts for people to invite to become your Facebook friend. As part of this process Facebook will list every contact you have that is already on Facebook, and offer you the chance to "friend" them all at once. You can choose to uncheck the ones that you don't want to friend, essentially skipping them, or choose to skip all of them.

While Facebook makes it clear that they will not store the password for your email account, what they don't make so clear is that they will store the addresses of everyone it found in your email account and keep them associated with you, even the ones that you chose to skip.

So how does Facebook use this information? They present you as a possible contact to the people that you skipped - even if that person has never shown Facebook a connection of any kind to you. Nice, eh? Effectively, Facebook is ignoring your preference to not contact these people by going behind your back to ask them if they want to friend you.

Somewhere between the vagueness of to-do lists and the complication of calendars, there's Superminder . It's a simple email and SMS reminder service that looks great and works will a minimum of fuss. Set a timezone, give it an email and a mobile number, and away you go. Reminders just get a name, a date, a time, and a delivery method, and you can forget the rest. It's like iCal without the "cal."

The strength of Superminder is in its simplicity. The most obsessive modern design gurus will love the look and intuitive feel of the UI. The only thing I can knock it for is that you have to pay for SMS reminders, but even that isn't the worst thing. SMS shortcodes are obscenely expensive, and designer geeks have to eat. Plans range from $4 for 15 SMS messages to $25 for 100, or you can always use Superminder via email for free.

Email n' Walk is one of the most innovative uses of the iPhone's camera I've seen in quite a while. It lets you compose a normal email, but the text fields are overlaid on top of the view from your iPhone's camera. Finally, a solution to embarrassing accidents where you walk into a signpost while typing on your phone -- not that I would know about that from experience, or anything.

Email n' Walk can also be used to spy on suspicious characters while looking like you're nondescriptly writing a message. Fortunately, though, it's really meant for your safety, not for stalking. You can't take or save photos from it. Email n' Walk also doesn't replace the built-in Mail app on the iPhone. When you save your message, it pops open Mail so you can address and send it.

You can pick up Email n' Walk for 99 cents in the App Store.

[via Lifehacker]

For the seasoned Internet user, that headline is a no-brainer. Unless you're hoping to be spammed ad nauseum by everything from (ahem) stamina enhancers to mail order brides to bogus antivirus software, don't post your real email address anywhere.

Less security and privacy savvy users, however, might not be aware of the pitfalls yet, so here's some advice. If you are using a social site like Twitter or Facebook, don't be so quick to give your personal information away.

For an unsavory soul to harvest your address from Twitter is as simple as setting up a search for a topic like "email me at" - text which CNet found occurred nearly 300 times in a one-hour period. It's worth noting that a good portion of that volume actually comes from Twitter spammers trying to drum up business - but unwary users are doing it, too.

It's bad enough that these people are actively spamming trending topics on Twitter, so don't invite them into your inbox. If you must post an address for people to contact you via email, sign up for a dedicated public email address with service like GMail or Live/Hotmail. That way you don't need to give out your everyday family-and-friends address.

Another option is to familiarize yourself with some sites that provide disposable email addresses like the ones I wrote about a while back. They're a perfect way to let people contact you without the risk of polluting your inbox.

It's pretty simple to set up your Gmail to forward to Yahoo!, Hotmail or whatever other email account you might have, but not all of your other email accounts have a way to export contacts and messages to Gmail. The Gmail team has taken matters into its own hands and added new import settings that make it easy to switch to Gmail.

Now you can bring your contacts and mail from Yahoo!, Hotmail, MSN, AOL and a bunch of others over to Gmail in a few steps, and have new mail from those accounts forwarded to Gmail for the next 30 days. That gives you time to let everyone know what your new address is. You can also label all of the imported mail, so you know which mail is coming from which account.

If you've got a ton of email that you need to dig through very efficiently, the iPhone's built-in Mail app might not be adequate to the task. That's where reMail comes in.

It's a dedicated email search app that connects to your IMAP account to find the message you're looking for. ReMail's featureset is impressive, with an offline mode, autocompletion for your contacts' names, and a very sensible natural language approach to search queries.

Although reMail doesn't support Exchange, it does support any IMAP account -- multiple IMAP accounts, in fact -- which means it works well with Gmail. The only hangup is that reMail provides a lot of its features by indexing your email on its own servers, which means you have to trust them. you didn't expect your iPhone to hold your whole Gmail archive, right?

The reMail privacy policy seems straightforward enough, though, so there's no reason to think they're not on the level. The app is free, and the service is free during beta, but will go up to $3.99 a month after launch.

It seems like Gmail users are always hungry for new ways to tweak Gmail's appearance. One trick that will save some space in your sidebar is the Gmail Compactor script. If you have Greasemonkey or a similar userscript engine installed, just download Gmail Compactor to turn the text links in your sidebar into space-saving icons.

The icons aren't the only space-saving feature of Gmail compactor, though. It alos shrinks Gmail's built-in search bar down into the sidebar, and eliminates the Gmail logo. It's up to you whether you think this look feels less cluttered. It does offer the same functions in a smaller space, but the icons also feel a bit a crowded to me compared to the text links, and they take some getting used to.

[via Lifehacker]

There's a new experimental feature in Gmail labs that you probably didn't know you needed until it existed. OK, you still probably don't *need* it, but it's a great example of how a service like Gmail can take the information it automatically gathers about your behavior and use it to make the simple act of sending an email easier.

Here's how it works. If you enable the "Suggest more recipients" option in Gmail Labs (which you can find by clicking the green test tube icon in the Gmail menu), Gmail will attempt to suggest people in your contact lists you might want to add to group emails. For example, if you have five friends that you frequently forward pictures of cute puppies to, the next time you enter two of their names, a menu should pop up suggesting you also include the other three contacts on your email.

You'll need to enter at least two names before the suggestion feature kicks in. And it only works if you've regularly sent emails to groups of people. If you enter the names of two people who you've never sent group messages to before, no suggestions will appear.

Gmail may be used by millions of people every day. But as we're constantly reminded, the service is still in beta and lags behind other webmail services in some rather baffling areas. Case in point, up until yesterday there was no simple way to embed an inline image in a Gmail message. Today you can, by enabling the "Inserting images" feature in Gmail Labs.

In order to insert an image you'll have to have "rich formatting" turned on. Once it is, you should notice an image icon squeezed between the emoticon and link icons. Click it and you can upload an image to post in the body of your message. That's it.

Now can somebody explain to me why this is in the experimental "labs" section instead of being a standard update to the Gmail interface? Maybe it needs more testing, but really, Gmail has been around for 5 years. You'd think Google would have been able to work out the kinks in this feature by now.

There are many ways to share your content online with family and friends. From Flickr to Facebook to MySpace, YouTube and Twitter, there's no shortage of ways, or platforms, to express yourself via words, pictures and videos. Several months ago I was introduced to another of these type of sites called Posterous.

At Posterous, much like these other sites, you can post words, pictures and videos via email from whatever device you happen to be using -- be it iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry or desktop computer. At first, I was a bit skeptical about how Posterous would distinguish itself from the other sites and platforms I use regularly.

However, once I started using Posterous and had my own page, I was quickly impressed with its simplicity, its design and its usability. Soon it became my site of choice for posting images on the go from my iPhone and may very well replace Flickr as my photo site of choice in the near future.

Recently, I talked with Sachin Agarwal, one of Posterous' co-founders, to get all the latest info on the site, how it came to be and where its going.

CHRIS ULLRICH: First off, let's talk a bit about your background. Where did you grow up, go to school, work and develop the skills to do something like Posterous?

SACHIN AGARWAL: Garry and I both went to Stanford and majored in Computer Science. When I graduated, I worked at Apple on Final Cut Pro for 6 years which was all the way up to starting Posterous. I was building the real-time playback engine and effects architecture.

That didn't have a direct impact on the formation of Posterous, except that we're definitely Apple people at heart, and we want to be the Apple of blogging. We want to make the simplest, most beautiful site out there, and make it accessible to the masses.

CU: When did you first have the idea for Posterous, how is it put together and when did it first go live?