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Email Providers Unite to Fight Spam and Fraudulent Messages

Several email providers that normally compete with one another, like Google Gmail and Microsoft Hotmail, have teamed up in an effort to better protect email users from spam and fraudulent messages. The new system is called DMARC, short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. With a united front, the war against spam may have a powerful new weapon.

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Post Office Advertisement Says Snail Mail Safer Than Email

The United States Postal Service (USPS) is in deep financial trouble, in large part due to the advent of email, and online bill paying and other services. Now, in what can only be described as the Post Office taking a page from election year partisan smear campaigns, the USPS is attacking the Internet as dangerous and unreliable, and touting postal mail as safe and good for business. “A refrigerator has never been hacked,” starts the television advertisement, which is primarily aimed at businesses.

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About the Gmail “Recently Accessed From” Warning

It can be a pretty scary thing to log into your Gmail account and be met with a blazing red banner that says “Warning: We believe your account was recently accessed from:” followed by a geographic location that you decidedly aren’t, often a place such as Russia, Poland or China, and that followed by the options “Show details and preferences” and “Ignore”. Usually you can be certain that at that moment, the first thing you need to do is change your password, because your account was almost certainly hacked or otherwise compromised. However, that’s not always true if you get a warning of a remote access in the U.S., such as “We believe your account was recently accessed from: United States (CA).”

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Post Office to Close Up to 3700 Locations – Here’s the List

The United States Postal Service (USPS) has said that they will be closing up to 3700 regional post offices in an effort to stem a financial hemorrhage that will see them as much as $8.3 billion in the hole this year alone. The post office closing list includes possible post office closures in nearly every state, although most of the locations on the post office closure list are considered to be poorly performing branches.

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Why Contact Pictures in Your Email Address Book Can Be Dangerous

It’s kind of fun to see a friend’s smiling face as their email address picture when you open an email from them. But there is a little-known danger to having a contact picture associated with someone who sends you email. That’s because those contact images are displayed even if the email is from someone who has hijacked your friend’s email address, which happens all the time with phishing, scamming and spamming. It’s called “spoofing”, and any scammer or spammer can put your friend’s email address as their own “from” address. What this means is that any scammer can send you email “from” your friend’s email address, and your email program will display the address book picture you have set as the contact image. And many, if not most, people, seeing their friend’s email address image in that email, will have a false sense of security that the email really is from their friend. It’s as if the address book image being present in the email somehow proves it’s really from their friend. Well, it doesn’t. And here are real-life examples to prove it.

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Goodmail Closes, Leaving Just Two Main Email Deliverability Services

For those of you who follow email deliverability, whitelisting, etc., you may be surprised to learn that Goodmail is closing up shop. This means that there are just two main email deliverability services out there now – Return Path, and SuretyMail email accreditation and deliverability services (the latter of which is provided by our parent company, ISIPP).

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Jazz Up Your Gmail Account with Gmail Themes – Free from Google!

If you haven’t visited your Gmail settings in your Gmail account for a while, then you may have missed the fact that you can now apply Gmail themes to your Google gmail email account! Instead of that plain old default theme, you can have zen stones, a sunset on the beach, or glorious mountain views – and many, many more themes, all available at the touch of a mouse-click!

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New Facebook Feature: Reply by Email to Status Comments!

Facebook quietly implemented a brand new feature this week – and it’s a feature that many of us are very happy to see! While there was no official announcement, yesterday people started seeing this in the email notifications of comments to their Facebook status: “New Feature: Reply to this email to comment on this status.”

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22 Million Pieces of “Missing” Email from Bush Administration Discovered by Obama Computer Technicians

Two watchdog groups – Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive – have announced that the Obama administration has uncovered 22 million pieces of email that were sent under the Bush administration, and that had gone ‘missing’. The discovery was made pursuant to – and has lead to the settling of – lawsuits filed by both groups against the Executive Office of the President over the Bush administration’s alleged failure to install an adequate record-keeping system for electronic records, including email, as required by Federal law.

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Post Office Begs to Cut Saturday Delivery as Email Further Impacts USPS Income

The Postmaster General has said that the United States Postal Service may have to cut out one day’s delivery a week as more and more people turn to the email inbox, instead of the post office, to deliver their correspondence.

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Email Inbox of Virginia Tech Massacre Killer Seung-Hui Cho Released

It’s been a year and a half, almost to the day, that the Virginia Tech Massacre happened. On April 16th, 2007, VA Tech student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 innocent students and faculty over the course of two hours. Now emails released from Cho’s email account at VA Tech – both emails to Cho, and his own email responses – have been released and are available to read. These emails show cries for help, and an insight into a troubled students. Could the VA Tech massacre have been avoided with the right intervention?

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What Your Email Address Says About You

Researchers in Germany have come out with a very interesting study about what your choice of email address says about you. We’ve already talked about what the domain of your email address says about you (such as do you send from aol.com, hotmail.com, yourowndomain.com, etc.), but this new study looks specifically at the username side of your email address. Such as, are you “onehottie@”, “buttoneddown@”, or “uptight@”? In fact, the title subject is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de (that is the German arm of Hotmail).

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How to ReDownload Email from Gmail After You’ve Already Downloaded It

Did you know that if you lose some of your email from your mail client, and you pop your mail from Gmail, that you can actually re-download your email from Gmail again? Not only that, but with this trick you can redownload email from specific dates – meaning you can re-download from Gmail just the email received on the dates that you want!

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Is Gmail Rejecting Your POP Password? You’re Not Crazy and You’re Not Alone

If you retrieve your email via POP from Gmail, you may on occasion find that Gmail completely rejects your password. Now, having Gmail rejecting your POP password can be very disconcerting, not to mention frustrating! Your mail client keeps prompting you for your Gmail password, you keep entering the password that you know is the right password, and Gmail keeps rejecting it. It’s enough to drive you crazy.

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Employees with Mobile Work Email Can Sue for Overtime, Warn Legal Experts

Employees who read and send work email after hours – particularly using an employer-provided mobile device such as a Blackberry – may end up suing their employer for overtime hours incurred while performing work-related email tasks on the devices, outside of the course of the normal business day.