"email" entries

Diagnosis: Email Apnea?

I've just opened my email and there's nothing out of the ordinary there. It's the usual daily flood of schedule, project, travel, information, and junk mail. Then I notice. I'm holding my breath. As the email spills onto my screen, as my mind races with thoughts of what I'll answer first, what can wait, who I should call, what should…

Stuffing Six Million Pages Down Google's Throat

I got two fascinating emails from Jason Hunter over the weekend, both concerning MarkMail, the open source mailing list search engine created by Ryan Grimm and Jason over at MarkLogic. I thought I'd share them, with Jason's permission. The first was a fairly prosaic announcement: In the last few weeks we loaded the PHP and PEAR mailing lists, a sum…

Reducing Email Volume

It's unfashionable to admit these days, but 14 years after getting my first account, I still like email. Of course, the volume is crushing, and so lately, I've been experimenting with email reduction. I'm getting good results with two key concepts that hardly anyone talks about and that focus on your sending habits rather than your inbox management. First, send…

Could Open Email Work for You?

Recently I had a case of walking pneumonia that quickly turned into flat-on-my-back pneumonia. The only good thing that came out of it was that I spent a few days away from email. When I returned, there were the better part of 1,000 missives waiting for me (and that's not counting what the spam filter held), but it was reassuring…

Better Gmail

Lifehacker's Better Gmail extension shows how open source is winning the browser wars.

Another War We're Not Winning: Us vs Spam

Are we losing the war on spam? Is the war on spam a war we can win? Is there any reason for hope? When I learned how much spam was hitting our servers at O'Reilly, I decided to ask several long-time Internet luminaries these questions. Was the situation as bad as I thought it might be? In short, the answer…