Tag Archives: email

New Gmail Feature: Inline Action Popups

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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One of the few products at Google that doesn’t stagnate and is always seeing new features, improvements, and changes (sometimes so often that it gives the appearance of being change for the sake of change to the furor and anger of some extremely-vocal hard-core users) is Gmail.

Today, Google is apparently rolling out a new feature that we haven’t seen before, and are actually at a loss when it comes to giving it an appropriate name.

Gmail is now showing “inlined action popups” based on the content of the emails (esp. automated written-by-robot emails), not too unlike some of the context-derived links/summaries in the sidebar that have been around for years now, except you don’t have to open the emails to gain access to them, and they’re just a convenient mouse click away. Pictures after the jump.

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The Death of BCC?

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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In the age of Facebook, in an era where privacy and anonymity are a thing of the very distant past, quite a few “features” of technology have been banished from daily use, forced to languish in the corner in a sad state of disuse and disrepair. But perhaps none have suffered such a miserable and regrettable fate as the BCC.

Quick: if you’re fighting with a friend and want to let your BFF know what’s going on as you send your frenemy a nasty messsage — what’s the best way to pull that off?

If you’ve completed the switch to Facebook mindset, your convoluted answer would consist of something to effect “Send a message to X, copy and paste it, and send it to Y.” And you’d be right – Facebook doesn’t give you another way of pulling this off. FAIL!

Let’s say your technical skills are not in such a pitiful state and you have enough sense to still use email for day-to-day communications. What’s your answer then? “I’ll just send X an email, then forward my result to Y.” aaaaaaaaand that’s another fail.

See, there’s this oft-overlooked feature my commandline mail client from the 80s has that solves this. It’s called “Blind Carbon Copy,” or BCC for short. You can send an email to more than one person without all your recipients knowing who you sent it to!

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Does Net-non-Neutrality Already Exist?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Net-Neutrality is without a doubt the biggest techno-political debate of the year. The entire issue has spun out of control since mid-2006, and here on the eve of 2007 it has yet to be resolved. The only question is, has net-neutrality already been destroyed and hacked-to-pieces to a greater extent than anyone thought already existed?

Earlier today, Slashdot featured a story on EarthLink’s “random” dropping of email messages. We just concluded a test of our own, and we find the results may not be as random as they seem. In fact, the results point directly to a big spider of sorts, sitting in the middle of all the tubes and picking what goes through and what doesn’t.

According to EarthLink themselves, “EarthLink’s mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail.” But what they don’t mention is, it isn’t random. As a matter of fact, our tests lead us to believe that EarthLink is indeed prioritizing not only message delivery time but also whether the messages ever get there or not.

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