ReadWriteEnterprise

Those of us who have used email alot, (see my email memories story here) have often wished we could know if our recipients have opened and read our messages. And while there have been read-receipts on various email services for many years, until now there hasn't been a general-purpose tool that can track when someone actually opens your messages. Enter Zendio with their plug-in for Outlook. And while it works, it is probably the creepiest solution that I've seen.

You wouldn't think that Hotmail users can teach you much about email management - after all, the service has been around for many years and was one of the first Webmail products - but there are some interesting insights on Microsoft's What's Your Inbox Like blog that splits you into one of three basic types of email users: filers, pilers and deleters.

Tally up the total number of searches on Google, Yahoo and Bing and you have about 3.5 billion searches per day. It's estimated that Twitter has about 300 million accounts and Facebook claims more than 750 million active users.As impressive as those numbers are, though, they're a drop in a bucket compared to email – which is estimated at 294 billion per day.

The Google Apps team announced today a new feature for the Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Government versions of Gmail: read receipts. If enabled by your Google Apps admin, you can now monitor the read status of sent e-mails.

This brings Google Apps a little closer to feature parity with Microsoft Outlook, which offers a similar feature.

This week the email management company Mimecast released the results of a survey of more than 2,400 corporate email users. The survey found that 85% of what Mimecast dubs "Generation Gmail" - employees 25 years old and younger - have used personal email accounts to send work-related documents.

The main reason these workers turn to personal email seems to be the attachment size limits of their official work email accounts. As we've reported, Palo Alto Networks found that Web-based file sharing such as Megaupload is also very popular in the workplace.

In May, email management company Xobni introduced a new platform which allowed developers to port their contextual Gmail gadgets to Outlook. Using the APIs (application programming interfaces) provided by Google, third-party developers were able to integrate their services into the inboxes of Google Apps users. Xobni, as one of participating developers in Google's new initiative, took Gmail's Gadget platform a step further: it allowed developers to piggyback on the Xobni Outlook plugin to port those Gmail gadgets to Outlook, too.

Today, the company is announcing that the first Outlook gadgets have now gone live.

Google Apps Marketplace has hit the six month mark. It has 200 apps and about four million users with access to the service.

It has provided another example for for how marketplaces can help create services that extend what a SaaS can offer. It's a model that has worked for Salesforce.com and other services such as Sugar CRM.

But what is proving hot on Google Apps Marketplace?

The effort to bring Facebook into the enterprise continues with more services using Outlook as a gateway to extend a contact network and use as a foundations for a CRM environment.

SenderOK is one of the latest effiorts to give more context to email by showing a picture of the sender in an email message. Too bad it only works on Windows XP or Vista. Ugh.

Syncing with BlackBerry Enterprise server has long been one of the most requested features among Google Apps customers. Especially within the BlackBerry-dominated enterprise space, the fact that there was no way to easily integrate the two platforms was a huge disadvantage.

But starting today customers can get their hands on a Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise. This means that for the first time, users can get good synchronization of core applications like Gmail and Google Calendar for the first time.

When Google Apps left beta back in July, Google announced that it would be adding a set of enterprise-specific features to make Premier Edition more attractive to businesses. Today Google has made good on that promise by supporting email retention and delegation for Apps customers.

Gmail is an awesome Web mail program, but it was missing some functionality essential for adoption in larger enterprises. One of those aspects was the ability for businesses to set company-wide retention policies in order to comply with regulatory requirements. Another one, the icing on the cake really, was email delegation that allows users to let others manage email for them.