If you're reading this, you're online and, as such, you probably have an email account. But have you ever wondered about the origins of email? It's not exactly a cut-and-dried case, as various forms of electronic messaging have been around since the humble telegraph. I had the opportunity to sit down with V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who holds the first copyright for "EMAIL"—a system he began building in 1978 at just 14 years of age. It was modeled after the communication system being used at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, New Jersey. His task: replicate the University's traditional mail system electronically.
The U.S. Postal Service, near bankruptcy and losing billions of dollars every quarter pushing a product no one wants, unveiled today its new strategy to regain some relevance. That strategy involves scaring consumers about the dangers of email and online bill payment in several new 30-second TV commercials.
This might be the best Google-related news of 2011, so far: Gmail just added an optional feature in its Labs section that gives you a preview pane that puts the content of messages on the same screen as your inbox, letting you bop efficiently between messages without having to leave the inbox.
This post originally appeared on Technologizer.
So Gmail has a mute function—THIS IS NOT NEWS! What’s newsworthy is that there’s a new experimental Gmail Labs feature called Smart Mute that makes the mute function actually work well.
If you’re bombarded with e-mail all day, a totally empty inbox is one of life’s little pleasures. Ever cleared out your inbox late on a Friday afternoon? I bet you did that thing where you lean back in your chair and put your hands behind your head. Or is that just me?
Remember Yahoo? Some say it’s lost its way.
If you’ve been looking for a simple way to send HTML e-mail from your iPhone, MarkdownMail ($1.99) may be the answer. The application makes use of a simplified coding syntax developed by John Gruber known as Markdown, which it leverages to quickly create things like hyperlinks, bolded words, italicized words, bulleted lists, headings, and more.
This is “They Should Make It.” It’ll appear here every Tuesday and will contain some really mind-bending ideas for products and services that don’t yet exist—but should! You may not agree with my ideas, and that’s okay. It’s not like we’re taking a road trip together or anything.
