If you're looking for a little anonymity and security when signing up for download links or invite codes, a disposable email service is a good option. Instead of providing one of your working email addresses, just grab a meaningless temporary one from any of these sites and keep your identity hidden.

These five sites all provide RSS feeds for your address, which is handy. No need to return to the site after registration, just subcribe with your favorite newsreader.

MailCatch - Choose your own address or roll the dice. MailCatch also provides an iGoogle gadget and creates a subdomain (using your address) for quick access to your web inbox. MailCatch also provides temporary forwards, and they've got an FAQ and forums.

MyTrashMail - Offers password protected temporary accounts in addition to the traditional public variety. Note that the Firefox "toolbar" they offer requires you have the Google toolbar installed first. FAQ and about links are prominently displayed.

Although Mail Badger sounds like a small woodland creature trained to deliver packages, it's actually an OS X app that allows you to add extra badges to the Apple Mail dock icon. For some people, it's good enough to have one single red badge, proudly displaying the number of unread messages from all their email accounts. The developers of Mail Badger didn't want to stop there: why not have a different badge for each account?

Once installed, Mail Badger lives in your Apple Mail preferences. There are a few preset shapes - hearts, stars, circles and the default starburst. You can adjust the color, size and font on these easily, and even upload your own. For power users, Mail Badger will assign a badge for messages that meet search criteria you specify, and it will also badge the results of an AppleScript. This app is definitely worth installing for anyone who keeps mail across more than one folder or account.

Mail.appetizer is a handy little plugin that enables you to preview incoming Apple Mail right on your Mac desktop. The Mail.appetizer window shows you the subject, sender, and a brief snippet of the message.

Once the plugin is installed (and Mail is restarted), you'll have a new Notifications option in your Mail preferences, with options to change:

• Which mailboxes show the notifications
• The font and size of the notification text
• Transparency
• Time to display the message

Mail.appetizer is in beta, and the plugin has a few known issues. But if you've been looking for a simple tool to preview your Mail messages on your desktop a la Entourage style, then we would give Mail.appetizer a shot.

There are currently builds for both Tiger and Leopard.

[via Cool OSX Apps]

Due to another company trademarking "G-Mail" in Germany, similar to Google's "Gmail" in the US, the search engine giant lost an appeal to use "Gmail" in the European Union. G-Mail stands for "Giersch Mail" in Germany, where Daniel Giersch runs an electronic postal delivery service -- if that's not email, we couldn't say what it is.

As a result, Gmail is now known as Google Mail in Europe. Google's email service is also known as Google Mail in the UK, where another company trademarked "Gmail" shortly after Google launched the service.

And the moral of the story is: The next time you launch any product or service, make sure to trademark the name before. As for Google, the company "got caught slippin" -- as we say in the hip hop world -- so too bad, so sad.

Is your email inbox overflowing with thousands of messages, or is it virtually empty, with only the few messages that have come in since the last time you checked it? It seems like a simple personal preference, but the answer to the question of whether you are an email "filer" or "piler" says a lot more about you than you might think it does.

While nobody can see into your inbox, the fact is that if you simply leave everything there and let it get pushed down by new messages that are coming in, you're almost certainly not giving enough thought to the things that hit your inbox. For pilers, the only clue as to whether an email has been dealt with is whether it is marked as read or unread. But all too often we read emails when we are not currently in a position to do anything about them. Even if we're careful about going back and marking messages as unread, they still get pushed down, out of sight, out of mind.

Right now, many of you with overflowing inboxes are probably screaming at your screen. How can we be so bold as to assume that we know if you're on top of your email or not based on this simple criteria? And plus, just last week we were writing about the virtues of Gmail. Gmail! You know, the email client made by that internet search juggernaut, Google! Surely if you need to find an email, it's only a search away. So why bother filing things at all?

Okay, we hear you, and understand your position. But there's really no gentle way to say this, so we're just going to come out and say it.

You're wrong.

Okay, there, we've said it. Everyone take a deep breath! Now let's look at how we can take such a controversial position in complete and utter knowledge that we are right, with not even the remotest possibility that we could be wrong. Alright then.

Have you ever lost your massive email database to a hard drive crash, inadvertent deletion, program failure, or monsoonal winds? Go on, it's okay to admit it; we're all friends here. Well now there's no need to let the failures of the past haunt you; now there's MailStore Home.

MailStore Home is a wonderful solution for people who have a need to backup their emails in a straightforward and simple fashion (read: everybody). Best of all, it's free. As in 100% free. It works with all POP3 and IMAP accounts (as in Gmail), as well as Thunderbird, Outlook, Exchange Server, Windows Mail, and many others.

MailStore Home offers a simple three step process for backing up your email accounts. Once you've downloaded and installed the free program (12 MB), open it up, click on import, enter the settings for your particular account, and double-click your newly created email profile. Wham! It's done. But unlike the 80's band of that same name, it won't wake you up before you go-go.

Once the backup is created, you can leave it in MailStore, export it to .eml, or burn it to a CD or DVD. Or, like me, you can lean back in your chair, lock your hands behind your head, and feel pretty good about yourself for backing up what really are your most important files (regardless of that picture of you and the Prime Minister of Malaysia).

[Via Cybernet]

Yahoo! has added a new feature to Yahoo! Mail that will make the webmail application more accessible to visually impared users.

Yahoo!'s R&D team in India has been developing Yahoo! Mail Classic to be accessible to everyone. The new developments include visually impaired access to mail on all standard screen readers with text to speech, sound icons and special Braille output.

Yahoo! has a team of accessibility experts that ensure their products benefit all users with disabilities which is expected from a company their size. However, where is Google? Are they working on a version of Gmail for the visually impaired? People out there are interested. IBM has been working on a special web browser for the visually impaired under the code name A-Browser.

It looks like Microsoft is preparing to launch the latest versions of Windows Live Mail, Messenger, Writer, Photo Gallery, and Family Safety.

If you've been keeping track, you probably know that Microsoft has already released beta versions of most of these applications, and a nice little unified installer app that lets you install a bunch of Microsoft services all at once, if that's the kind of thing you're inclined to do. We'd like to think that each service will work a bit more reliably once they emerge from beta, but having spent the last few months with Windows Vista, we've learned to temper our hopes.

[via LiveSide]

We usually think of email as a way to instantly communicate, but what happens when all that goes out the window and we can freeze email to send at a later date?

MailFreezr is a website where people can fill out a form and send an email, in the future. The service stores your email for up to 100 years then finally sends it out. If we still have email then. t's a great way to ensure you send those special birthday or anniversary notes, or even a way to send a shout out to someone that you don't want to loose touch with but have nothing important to say.

You can freeze an email for one year, a hundred years, or any number in between. But the only choice you have is years, not months, weeks, or days. In other words, if you send a message today, it can be delivered next Halloween, but not next week.
It would be nice to see a date selector to pick the exact month, day and year you would like to send the email.

MailFreezr's creator says that messages are secure and confidential and will be sent on time. However, with any service that requires an email address stay cautious for spam harvesters.

Yahoo! has made a couple new major updates to its Yahoo! Mail application that enables people to connect in a few more ways.

The new version of Yahoo! Mail now includes some intuitive communication features that make it a little easier for contacts to stay in touch. The first is the ability to send instant messages from Yahoo! Mail to mobile phone numbers. Mail users can now choose to send IM's to mobile numbers in the US, Canada, India and the Philippines without leaving Yahoo!'s web mail interface. Users simply enter a mobile phone number, type a message and send it.

The second Mail integration is the ability to send instant messaging straight from Yahoo! Mail to Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger users. This opens up chatting to millions of other IM users, straight from the Yahoo! Mail interface possible. These new features make it easier to connect with friends by converting emails to instant messages to text messages.

Yahoo! Mail IM and mobile feature enhancements will begin rolling out to users worldwide today. And if you are into adding a few new colors to the interface to spice things up, there are six customizable color themes available.

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Why send postal mail? We have gone over that question when we posted about EasyPost and Postful. Sending physical letters just isn't cool anymore, and it takes too much time to print, stick it in an envelope, and walk to the store to get a postage stamp. Companies seem to really be acknowledging that and building their businesses around it.

eSnailer is the latest to the market. The interface is clean, and extremely easy to understand. Start by filling out the envelope from the fields in the top left, then move on to the recipient's field in the center, and continue with a full fledged text editor. When your letter is complete, eSnailer will print, envelope, stamp and send it via regular US postal mail, all for free.

So, what's the catch? eSnailer is ad supported. They ask that as soon as you send the letter that you accept one of the free offers you are presented with, using the address you supplied as a junk mail receptacle. Nice. Is it worth it? You decide.

Text just not good enough for sending your important email? How about some video for the tired eyes in the morning that just don't feel like reading!

Azooca, a new video email service that has just launched, provides users with a new way to send email. Azooca's video emails let users send, receive and organize video messages through its video email inbox. The Azooca email inbox can hold up to a 250MB for attachments and incoming video messages.

To start recording video messages users get just the basics, record, play and stop in their email composition window. Video clips are unfortunately capped at one minute in length, but can be saved in draft format and sent at a later time. It is a simple enough to use application, just watch out because there have been numerous reports about messages getting dumped into junk and spam folders.

Take a look at EyeJot for a similar service.



[via webware]

AOL Mail users were able to unlock a little surprise that started yesterday evening when they logged in, a new chat feature.

Yes, I'm sure people do still use AOL Mail. This new feature allows people to instantly chat with people from their contact list without opening up another application. While this feature has been around for quite a while from Google and Yahoo, AOL has managed to beat out Microsoft at least.

The new AOL Mail with chat can be accessed at http://beta.webmail.aol.com.

Still have some friends who aren't hooked up with email yet? Maybe your Grandparents or Parents are a little behind the times? Or maybe you just want to send some paper to someone?

EasyPost has opened the doors and made it possible for anyone to send paper letters to any mailbox in Canada via a simple online form. The letters that are submitted through the online form gets printed out via high quality laser printers and premium white paper, packaged up and sent out at the end of each day in regular mail through the Canada Post system. Quite a promising system for Canadians who want an alternative to sending postal mail, but don't want the hassle of printing and running out to buy stamps and envelopes.

EasyPost is free for a limited time and available anywhere in Canada.

Similar to the Postful service.