If you use Apple’s Mac Mail app, and particularly if you are on more recent versions of OS X, such as Snow Leopard, Lion, and Mountain Lion, you may have found that the search function is not working properly (or, as you think it should) when you search for email within the Mac email program. It used to be that searching your Mac email archive was dead easy; now there are hundreds of threads in forums seeking help with Mac mail trouble shooting – many of them related to the search function. The Internet Patrol is happy to share with you the least well-documented feature of searching your Mac email archives. It is a game-changer, particularly if you have a huge body of email (as do we). Here it is: the Mac mail search function uses Boolean operators.

Harvard University figured prominently this week in the news, as the fact that Harvard had been secretly snooping on faculty email came to light. The incident that some consider an invasion of privacy, and others consider ‘business as usual’, was precipitated by a leak to the media regarding another scandal – students caught cheating – that developed several months ago.

A councilman in Berkeley, California, Gordon Wozniak, has proposed a new email tax as a way to help subsidize the U.S. postal service. The post office has bled red ink for several years, and in part this is being blamed on the rise of the use of email, instead of regular paper mail or, as it has come to be known, ‘snailmail’. Wozniak’s (no word on whether he is related to Steve Wozniak of Apple fame) idea is that a tiny tax on the billions of emails that are sent could help to bolster the failing postal service.

Whether you call it spear phishing, spear fishing, or spearphishing, it’s a computer hack of your email in a way that’s targeted toward you, where you work, or a group you belong to. And, it masquerades as coming from someone you know and trust from your family, friends, workplace, or social group.

A hacker, who goes by the name “Guccifer”, has hacked the email accounts of former president George W. Bush, as well as the accounts of his family and friends, and has taken to posting his findings online, including private photos, emails and private home addresses. Guccifer told The Smoking Gun, who broke the story, that he isn’t worried about the feds coming after him because they have actually been investigating him for awhile and this latest stunt is “just another chapter in the game.”

The United States Postal Service (USPS) announced that it is ending Saturday delivery in August of this year. While your local post office will still deliver packages, letters will only be delivered Monday through Friday, leaving many to turn to alternatives such as email and Internet faxing services. Email is already the alternative that has led to a huge decline in traditional snail mail, crippling USPS with a loss of tens of billions of dollars in most recent years. USPS estimates that it will save approximately $2 billion annually with this plan.

If you, like many, have been using Amazon.com for some of your Christmas shopping, then your account may be vulnerable to a scam using your order number that is genius in its execution, and uncovers some of Amazon’s failings in inventory control. It all comes down to the individual order numbers assigned to your orders. Those order numbers are for sale, along with the corresponding email address (as in your email address), and scam artists are using that information to get duplicates of your orders sent to them.

Update: We have just learned that Senator Leahy has withdrawn his support for the amendments to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). He received resounding criticism from many groups and private citizens who felt that the revisions are unconstitutional and a gross invasion of privacy. In a series of tweets, below, Senator Leahy said that he did not support the bill amendments, and seems to deny that he ever did.

From the BlackBerry outage, to Yahoo giving it the boot, BlackBerry makers Research in Motion (RIM) have not been having the best week, and many are concluding that it is the beginning of the end for the beleaguered company. Whether it is the end, or just a series of unfortunate events, there is no doubt that they’re are struggling fiercely to stay afloat amidst market-dominating Apple, and their runner-up, the Android market.

Well, Facebook has finally done it, they’ve found a way to allow unscrupulous marketers to spam your Facebook account. Facebook will allow advertisers to target users based on personal information such as phone numbers, user IDs, and email addresses. In a confirmation to PCMag.com, Facebook relayed their new marketing program which will begin next week, targeting ads to their “existing customers.”

Be prepared for a series of virtual hand slaps if your ISP is saying that you downloaded copyrighted or infringing material or files. A “graduated response” program, aimed at cutting down on illegally downloaded files, was rolled out at the beginning of July and has drawn widespread criticism for both its intent, and execution. Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) CEO, Cary Sherman, is at the helm of a new initiative that aims to punish those accused of illegal downloading.

It seems like every week brings news of a new hacking, which in turn means that usernames, email addresses, and passwords are constantly being posted online by hackers, and this inevitably leads to a simple question: when should you change your password? Or, to frame the question in a slightly different way, how often should you change your password? In general, you should change your password about as frequently as you can tolerate changing your password. As long as you can keep track of your various passwords, there isn’t any disadvantage associated with changing it (besides the fact that changing your password can be a bit of a pain). Now, however, there is at least one definite answer to the question posed above: you should change your password when ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com tells you to.

In a move that is not unheard of, but completely reprehensible, defeated Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is selling off his campaign’s donor and activist email list as the campaign attempts to crawl out of their $4 million hole of debt. And perhaps “slithering” is a better word as Newt is slapping his donors right in the face by not just selling their email addresses to other political campaigns, but to any unscrupulous company with equally slippery ethics.

One of the biggest (and indeed only) frustrations for people who use the iPad (be it iPad 2, iPad 3, or originally flavor iPad) for business, or even for personal email use if you don’t use a Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or other webmail address) is that the native mail app on the iPad will only use your webmail address as your “From” address, even if you have a different default email address set within your webmail app. For example, your Gmail address may be example@gmail.com, but you may have example@yourdomain.com set as your default “From:” address in Gmail, and Gmail will honor that, but the mail app on your iPad will insist on sending your email ‘from’ your example@gmail.com address instead of your default example@yourdomain.com address. There is no way to change that default “from” address on your iPad. But it turns out that there is a way to beat your iPad into submission, and to set your default “from” address to whatever you would prefer it to be. Here’s how.

Microsoft Hotmail, the world’s largest email provider, is better at blocking spam than Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail, according to a study released by the independent research firm Cascade Insights. The study only tested these companies – the so-called big three email providers – and was sponsored by Microsoft, which funded the research to combat their bad reputation for allowing loads of spam into users’ inboxes.