“All these years of internet use later, HTML mail still sucks. You may think I mean ‘HTML mail doesn’t work properly in some e-mail clients.’ And that statement is certainly true. Companies spend hours crafting layouts that may not work in Eudora or Gmail, or may no longer work in Outlook.

Even in programs that support the crap code used to create these layouts, all that hard visual work will go unseen if the user has unchecked ‘View HTML Mail’ in their preferences.

As for CSS, it is partially supported in some e-mail applications and in web apps like Gmail, but only if you author in nonsemantic table layouts and bandwidth-wasting inline CSS. Which is like using a broken refrigerator to store food at room temperature.”

“It’s been just over 12 months since I posted our original Guide to CSS Support in Email and quite a bit has changed since. Sadly, the most significant of these changes was in the wrong direction, with Microsoft’s recent decision to use the Word rendering engine instead of Internet Explorer in Outlook 2007. We’ve written plenty about it already including an explanation of the reasoning behind it. More on its impact on CSS support later. It hasn’t all been doom and gloom though, a number of vendors have maintained or improved their support for CSS, especially in the web-based email environment.”

“I had no idea that this form of spam existed. I ran ‘whois amazon.com, and got this…” (Thanks a.wholelottanothing.org!)

“I sign most of my emails with ‘Best’, especially when I don’t know the person particularly well, and I definitely don’t mean it as a brush-off. ‘Sincerely’ is too formal, ‘Warmest regards’ is a lie (you can’t give absolutely everyone your warmest regards), and ‘xoxo’…I’m not a girl. So “Best” it is…don’t take it the wrong way.”

“As we’ve seen before, getting your inbound email under control will give you a huge productivity boost, but what about all the emails you send? If you want to be a good email citizen and ensure the kind of results you’re looking for, you’ll need to craft messages that are concise and easy to deal with.”

“Following the lead of Rabid Squirrel’s g-mailto, I worked up a bookmarklet to pop up a new message window off my browser toolbar. I’ve only tested this on IE6 for Windows, but it’s the standard javascript stuff, so it should work everywhere.”

“You will find tips and tricks [for] Gmail here. Got tips and tricks of your own? Submit your tips and tricks to us for inclusion on this blog.”

“It’s an amazing feat, given the increasing vitriol and hatred on both sides of the conflict. Everyone takes a risk attending these conferences. Anti-spammers have been shunned and despised for consulting with even the most repentant former spammer. And who’d want to be a spammer in a room full of spamhunters? Over the past year, though, a series of meetings arranged by a trusted figure in the American anti-spam community, Anne Mitchell, have been slowly bringing the two sides together. These mini-conferences, held under the banner of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy, have mostly been between the highest-ranking ISPs ó MSN, AOL ó and commercial email marketers of the most squeaky clean kind. Initially in secret, these days the meetings are more public.”

“It’s about a year now since A Plan for Spam. So far, filters are winning. This article analyzes the tricks spammers have tried to beat them, and offers some suggestions for the future. Bayesian filters are now common enough that we’re starting to see spams designed specifically to get past them. So far these tricks aren’t working. My filtering rate is still over 99.7%, and Brian Burton reports an astonishing 99.9% with his multi-word Bayesian SpamProbe.”

“The Collaborative User Experience (CUE) team in IBM Research has spent nearly a decade studying email. Not only has email become one of the most pervasive and successful collaborative tools available, it has also become a key component of IBM’s Lotus Software offerings. In many ways, email can be seen as a victim of its own success — users increasingly suffer from overload and interruptions as well as use email in a manner for which it was not intended. To meet the challenges in researching email, we have taken a multifaceted approach to data collection.”

“IT professionals largely rejected genuine internet email, going with Microsoft instead. They would have you believe that the problems with Outlook/Exchange are inherent, that Exchange is a necessity, that companies could not do without it, that plain old POP/SMTP/IMAP could not suffice.”

“Enjoy email with Knowspam. Knowspam is an easy, effective spam-blocking service that eliminates 100% of spam. It works for anyone with a POP account.”

“The smiley :-) and its many variants are an important (and fun!) part of the worldwide online social culture — allowing emotions to be conveyed in plain text. It has been in widespread use since the early 80s, when it was first proposed. Yet the original message in which the smiley was invented had been lost — until now. After a significant effort to locate it, on September 10, 2002 the original post made by Scott Fahlman on CMU CS general bboard was retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x).”

“Search Before you forward. That story that your brother-in-law just sent to you and forty other people sounds true… Put it to the test here. Take a couple key words from the message, paste or type them into one of the boxes below, and press the Enter key on your keyboard.”

“Objective: To make Ronald Scelson realise that he is pissing on the rest of us from a great height (by somehow rubbing his nose in it and thereby showing him the aura of his wees). Who is Ronald Scelson? Ronald Scelson claims to be the most prolific spammer on the planet.”