ISP giant America Online (AOL) has announced that their users have seen a dramatic decrease in spam over the course of the past year. According to AOL, spam messages reported by members for this past month, November 2004, numbered about 2.2 million per day, and that’s down from 11 million…

Internet giant America Online (AOL) has said that they are in beta testing with a new free webmail service, along the lines of Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail. Dubbed “AOL Mail on the Web” (AMW? AOLMW?), it is already available to existing AOL members who registered to beta-test the product, and…

There are just so many facets and angles to this story, it’s almost impossible to determine if there is a right and a wrong, let alone who is which. Justin Ellsworth, of Wixom, Michigan, was killed last month while on foot patrol in Iraq. John Ellsworth, the grieving father of…

Microsoft, AOL, Earthlink, and several other industry giants, along with the FBI, the FTC, the U.S. Secret Service, and the USPS announced today the formation of Digital PhishNet, a collaborative initiative designed to take phishers down by arresting and convicting them. “The key to stopping phishers and bringing them to…

Google has announced that their Gmail service is going to start offering POP access to users’ email accounts, meaning that rather than having to log in through Gmail’s web interface, users will be able to download their Gmail to their own computer using Outlook, Eudora, or whatever other email client…

As Aunty reported back in October, Microsoft reintroduced its roundly rejected Sender I.D. proposal, after, it says, reworking it a bit to meet some of the objections which did it in the first time. And true, to their credit, they did address at least one of the technical concerns. However…

There is a new chapter in the debacle which started with Microsoft’s extending and embracing of SPF and its advocate, Meng Weng Wong, and which culiminated in the collapse of an empire (well, ok, of the IETF working group tasked with evaluating Sender I.D.) due to concerns about the scopes…

Microsoft has announced that it will no longer be offering for free its service which allows users to connect to their Hotmail and MSN accounts using Outlook and Outlook Express. Citing exploitation by spammers, Microsoft will begin charging those who want to use the WebDAV technology to connect using Outlook…

Dear Gentle Readers, Remember before everybody had email, and people logged in to private bulletin board systems (“BBS”)? If you long for the days when internal correspondence at the office was hand-delivered in those yellow 8×11 envelopes with 172 names scratched out and yours written in at the bottom like…

Gentle Readers, This week a United States Court of Appeals in Massachusetts held that an ISP may read a customer’s email without the customer’s knowledge or permission. Yes, you read that right. It is not illegal for an ISP to read its customer’s email, even if they do not have…

The BBC reports today that the California Senate has passed SB 1822, aimed at limiting Google’s ability to scan email coming in to the users of their Gmail system, and also limiting Google’s ability to archive and sell the resulting information. Now, Aunty is old enough to remember some real…

I’ve been testing Google’s Gmail for 5 days now, since April 18th. Woohoo. In addition to openly soliciting email to the account, and even posting the address on the web, I’ve forwarded all of my email coming to my other accounts to the Gmail account. I wanted to give Gmail…

Somehow, I lucked into having a Gmail beta account (who knew I had friends in those high places?) Here are my first impressions: First, Gmail doesn’t work with Safari; very annoying. It does, however, work with Firefox. I also found it frustrating that you can’t set up a forward, or…

Much has been made in the past dozen days about Google’s announcement of their new service, Gmail. First, the press release was leaked on April 1st, leading to wide speculation: was it an April Fool’s gag, or was it not? (It wasn’t.) Then nobody could believe that the world’s largest…