Tag: email

Dreading email

Virginia Heffernan and Paul Ford have never met, but have often crossed paths—we live in New York City; were editors at Harper’s Magazine; write about technology; and write for The Message on Medium. For no particular reason we’ve started sending emails to see who can make the other person experience the most profound sense of dread and panic.

From: Virginia Heffernan
To: Paul Ford
Subject: can you watch my kids tonight?
I know it’s short notice but you’d really be saving us. I’ve got a pre-Oscars bookmaking pow-wow at Candace Bushnell’s (eyeroll!) and they just need dinner, baths and for you to kind of lie with them in their loft beds while they go to sleep. The sleep part takes an hour, tops. I usually fall asleep then! But no then just clean up dinner stuff and quickly rub down the tub, and you’re free to have burritos, whatever’s in the freezer. YOU ARE A GODSEND ROCKSTAR. See you in 20 mins?

Appear smart in emails

Feature launched? Respond: W00t way to go! Baby on the way? Respond: Mazel tov! Peanut brittle on Brian’s desk? Respond: This is delicious! Whenever something good happens, always be the first to respond and always reply all. This will make you seem like a highly engaged team player.

Email disclaimers

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: This email does not create an attorney-client relationship. Probably. If it does, it will have said it does. Although it could have created an attorney-client relationship without explicitly saying so, because the law is tricky like that, and the authoritative statements in this disclaimer are not as authoritative as they look. Suffice it to say, if you aren’t absolutely certain about whether or not an attorney-client relationship exists between yourself and the sender of this email, you should probably hit “reply” and ask for some clarity.

Taliban decloak

Taliban Reveal Identities of Their Mailing List. bcc, how does it work?

A Taliban spokesperson sent out a email with 1 notable difference. He CC’d everyone on his mailing list.

But her emails

And in his first 40 days on the job, the White House email system was down 23% of the time.

more technological illiteracy / amateur hour. and these people are fit to shape technology policy?

from a thread at work

“XXX,

I’d like to offer you some contract work at my funeral. You’re the best gravedigger I’ve ever seen, and I lived next to a cemetery for most of 10 years. Seriously, stop posting to yyy at all for a while. Don’t read the replies. Don’t respond to posts. Let it go.”

Hotmail surveillance

Microsoft appears to have turned off the always-use-HTTPS option in Hotmail for users in Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.

the fix is easy: use a real email provider.

Gmail Filters

procmail culture is back.

Email stagnation

While Google has delivered solutions that make email less excruciating, Apple, Mozilla and Microsoft are twiddling their thumbs and staring at the ceiling.

Palin Email

a discreet e-mail system was created from an old campaign account, with access confined to “a group of people, her closest confidants and co-workers and advisers and the person she sleeps with.”