One of the key ways I get around the spam scourge is to use a separate email address for close friends, family and important business contacts. I don’t use this address for anything else. As a result, the people closest to me don’t have to worry about their messages getting caught in spam filters and I can easily zero in on the most important messages.
I’ve started getting spam to this address. It’s a complex address, so it’s not really prone to dictionary attacks. As far as I can tell, someone entered my address on a third-party site.
A lot of sites are pushing users to email a link or to invite their friends as part of the sign up process. Some even go so far as to offer to import your address book from Outlook, Gmail or AOL.
Please just say no. When you’re signing up for a service, you often have very little information about how that site will use the data. If you want me to read a story or sign up for something, just shoot me an email or IM the old-fashioned way.
You wouldn’t write your friend’s email address on a bathroom wall, would you? Giving it to a Web site operator is even worse. You don’t know where that address will end up.
I’ve noticed lately how many of my friends and colleagues have adopted Gmail addresses. Although Gmail is still a very distant 4th place (after Yahoo!, MSN and AOL) when it comes to the broad Internet audience, it seems to have taken off among the geek set.
I took a look at my LinkedIn contacts. Here are the sources of email addresses among my professional contacts:
- Employer – 40%
- Gmail – 15%
- Yahoo! – 12%
- AOL – 12%*
- Vanity (custom domain name) – 8%
- School alumni association – 4%
- ISP – 2%
- Hotmail – 2%
Some things I found interesting in the data:
- Most people (60%) don’t use their employer’s email address on LinkedIn.
- Gmail has developed a following, despite having come to the email game much later than the others. This share most likely came at the expense of other providers; it’s unlikely that this group just adopted email when Gmail came out.
- Hotmail, which was once synonymous with Web mail, is no longer cool.
- My contacts know better than to tie their email address to their ISP.
Of course, this is all based on a sample of 1.
* Because AOL does not distinguish between employee and non-employee email addresses, I divided the AOL addresses into two groups: those that still work at AOL were counted as employer, the others were counted as AOL. All of the contacts counted as AOL are ex-AOLers who converted their business account.
David Pogue in The Times has a great roundup today of many of the new freebies from AOL.
He mentions three of my favorites – My eAddress, XM Radio and AOL Search – but not AIM Phoneline.
I have to disagree with his characterization of Bubble 2.0. While there is likely a bubble in the venture capital market, I don’t think the AOL services are the result of a bubble. AOL Search is a tremendously profitable business with margins The New York Times Co. would kill for.
Other services, like My eAddress and Phoneline do have more substantial costs. But those costs are low in comparison to the value of a unique user attracted by one of those.
Disclosure: I work at AOL Search.
Google introduced a new Java-based mobile email application today. It has instantly become my second-favorite mobile application, after Google Maps.
I’ve been using Google’s mail on my cell phone with my phone’s Web browser for a while now. It has worked reasonably well, but compared with the new app, WAP is crap.
Gmail mobile provides an easy-to-use interface that minimizes the number of keystrokes required to perform basic tasks like checking and responding to email. Thoughtful keyboard shortcuts are available for common tasks like going back to the Inbox, composing a message and searching. It also renders common attachment types, such as PDFs and Word docs.
Search is definitely the killer feature. I can quickly search across more than 10,000 messages. I often use Gmail to send notes to myself. With mobile search access, I’ll be doing this more often. (The WAP application has offered this, but the search feature has been broken for the last few months.)
Google is to be applauded for bucking the wireless carriers’ Gouge First pricing models for wireless applications, instead choosing to go over the top of the data services. Gmail and Maps are both available as free downloads without monthly service fees.
Some of the things I’d like to see:
- Tighter address book integration. I’d like to be able to look up contacts in my address book and call them right from the application. If I’m reading an email from someone in my address book, I want the option to call.
- Easier searching of contacts when I’m addressing an email. If I’m searching for Robert, I want to be able to enter 7-6-2-3-7-8 instead of 7-7-7-6-6-6-2-2-3-3-7-7-7-8. (This is one of my pet peeves about mobile apps.) I also would like to see Google carry over the list of most frequently used contacts to the mobile app.
- Saved searches. I’d like to be able to have my most frequent searches stored so I don’t have to keep entering them.
- A view that shows me email only from people in my address book.
One of my favorite new products is AOL’s My eAddress. It’s the simplest way I’ve found to get your own domain name tied to an email address.
I’ve had my own domain name for years and it’s definitely a process only a geek can love.
My eAddress lets you register a .com or .net domain and tie it to a 2 GB AIM mail account seamlessly and in a matter of minutes. From there, you can access your account through Web mail or IMAP. And all of this is free, including the ICANN registration fees. You can also create sub-accounts for 100 of your closest friends, making it useful for families.
One thing that’s currently missing is the ability to forward Web traffic for that domain to a blog or Web site. I’m hoping to see that soon.
I was in my Gmail account and noticed a new addition to the Sponsored Links that appear along side the email: the option to get more sponsored links.
Clicking any of the links under “More about…” gets you a page of sponsored links about that topic.
The emails that triggered the above SL were an email on a bonus miles promotion from US Airways and a Dilbert comic strip.
I’ve never found the SL in Gmail to be particularly relevant. It’s interesting to see that they get the general concepts of the emails right. This points to a dearth of quality ad inventory in the topics that people email me about.
I use Plaxo (not to be confused with Paxil) to manage many of my contacts. It’s an online address book that can automatically sync with many PC-based address books. One of the features is the ability to send your contacts revised contact information when things change in your life.
I recently updated my information and sent the information out to my contacts using Plaxo. As is often the case, a bunch of the emails bounced as people left companies, changed ISPs, etc.
But instead of sending all of the jargony error messages to me and flooding my Inbox, Plaxo collected the errors and sent a summary email of the email addresses that failed, the reasons they failed and a link to see the actual error message. There’s even a useful help file that explains the various reasons an email address can fail.
The email addresses that fail are also flagged in the contact record.
People who receive the email can also click to say that they don’t care about me and don’t want to get updates about me again. This is not reflected in the contact’s record.
It’s a very elegant, user-focused design.
Today’s crash of ComAir Flight 5191 reminds me how poor a job online news sites (especially those from the mainstream media) do in using the Web.
Instead of the plain graphic on the USA Today article referenced above, how about linking to the satellite view of the airport on Google Maps? You can clearly see the runway in question.
Wikipedia, which is ridiculed by many in the mainstream media, had a better graphic than most traditional news sources.
You could also link to the NTSB Aviation Accident Database. Or details about the CRJ-100. The Wikipedia page on the crash is loaded with links to such primary sources. (And I didn’t put them in.)
An op-ed piece in the Washington Post a few weeks ago talked about how federal government employees are overpaid compared to employees of private firms. The piece would have been enhanced with a link to the report so that curious readers could do their own analysis. (I haven’t been able to find the report.)
In many cases, linking to primary and supplementary sources would help build credibility and give interested users more depth. In other cases, readers would quickly discover that many stories are patched together from two press releases or that the writer selectively used facts to support his conclusion.
Note: Since this post was written, USA Today updated their graphic to use a version of the Google Maps satellite view. However, it is a static image; there is no link for people who want to explore the Google Map of the area.
When I check my email, I scan the list of new messages for names of people I know.
This is something that machines can do much faster and better. With the volume of spam and bulk mail these days, some of the vast effort spent on reducing spam should be spent on showing users the good stuff.
You can do this the hard way today with many mail services by creating filters for each person you want to highlight (or move to a different folder). This is usually a multi-step process; few people will create and update these filters.
There’s a simple, high value way to accomplish this: Check the messages against the email addresses the user has sent email to and the user’s address book, then highlight the ones that match.
If the user has categorized the address book, you could also color code the highlighting to indicate whether the message is from friends, family, co-workers, etc.
