40Tech

People have been talking about the death of email for a while now. Every time there’s a new, communications-focused technology, most notably Google Wave — and we all know how that went – email eulogies pop up all over the internet. It seems likely to me that email is here to stay, at least for a while longer, but if other companies follow the example of Atos, a 74,000 employee French tech company spanning 42 countries, email may actually begin its prophesied decline.

Atos has banned email.

Most email services place a limit on the size of attachments, which can make sending larger files a bit difficult. File sending services abound to get around this limit. One of the easier ones we’ve seen – as long as you don’t mind registering for an account – is Kicksend. Kicksend allows you to send large files for free, although the limitations are different depending on whether you use the web client or the desktop client. While you have to register for an account to use Kicksend, your recipients do not.

Some Mac task management apps allow you to use a keystroke to create a task from an Apple Mail message, and then have that task link back to the Mail message. This is particularly handy if, like me, many of your tasks originate from Mail messages. If you’re a Toodledo user, you can do this as well, although it will require you to purchase a third-party Mail plugin.

Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but I’ve had a couple of people that I know who have had their email accounts hacked recently. Given all of the personal information we send and receive in email messages, that can be a traumatic experience. One victim wondered if she should take a scorched earth policy, and move completely to a new email account. That’s normally not necessary. If you still have access to your account, you can take some steps to secure it, and keep the slimy criminal out.

Posting your email on a website, or in a blog, social media, or forum comment, opens you up to a world of messages about making money online, viagra, the enlargement of specific body parts, and a host of other fun solicitations and potential virus links. We all know this, and we all know that the safest way to post an email link is this: don’t. If you absolutely have to, you can always try to beat the bots by posting it as an image (time consuming), or by killing the link and adding some brackets and such like this: myemail (at) adomain (dot) com. The trouble with this approach is that you are also making trying to contact you annoying for the people you want to connect with.

Here are three ways you can share your email safely and easily:

Have you noticed a decrease in spam in your email inbox recently? I haven’t, but that may be due to Gmail’s excellent spam filters. According to Symantec, though, worldwide spam has decreased 90% in the last year. How? Two of the world’s largest botnets were knocked offline, accounting for much of the reduction. Those botnets controlled millions of infected computers, sending out billions of spam email messages a day. With the botnets out of the picture, spam has fallen dramatically. Here’s how the botnets were taken offline.

We’ve written a good bit about email overload, and given a few tips on how to deal with it. These tips included using Gmail to manage all of your accounts (and even how to avoid Gmail’s infamous delay in checking external accounts), and how to turn the managing of your inbox into a game. When it gets down to the nuts and bolts, how do you manage your account? Labels? Folders? Search?

A 40Tech reader recently observed that he counted 9 email addresses that go directly to him, plus two others that he monitored. That got me wondering, so I took a look at the Accounts tab in my Gmail settings, and my eyes popped out of my head. I had 17 email addresses there. What about you? How many email addresses do you use? How many do you use regularly? How many do you access from one place?

Last week we conducted a survey, asking you whether you preferred your apps in the cloud, or on your desktop. I’ve been a big fan of the cloud, but lately I’ve gone retro, enjoying a few desktop apps. One of the apps that has fostered my growing love of desktop apps is Sparrow, a desktop email app for Mac OS X. The beauty of Sparrow is how well it integrates with Gmail, and how fast it operates.

Last week we wrote of an important step that you should take to secure your Gmail account – associating a cell phone number with your Gmail account, so that you can receive a recovery code via text message.  As we pointed out, that’s not foolproof – a savvy hacker could change the cell phone number associated with your account.  Then what?  Google does offer an account recovery process, but it requires you to know the answer to several questions.  Here’s here to find out the answers to those questions, BEFORE your account gets hacked.