Close-up screenshot showing a bit more detail of ad placement.

Note: When I re-entered the email thread, the ad above no longer displayed inside the thread. So I've not been able to re-create this scenario.

Last year Facebook tried to get into the email game. Its Project Titan was dubbed a "Gmail killer" and gave users @facebook.com email addresses. Zuckerberg claimed that it wasn't really about email but still, users didn't bite.

As of right now, Bryan and Bethanye will discontinue the private beta of MailRank for Outlook to focus on their new jobs at Facebook.

But one thing's for sure: People send 294 billion emails every day. And that's a heckuva lot of data.

According a survey conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey, 86% of people use email to "share content", while just 49% said they use Facebook. As you might imagine, however, this is a stat that's strongly split between age groups.

Only the youngest age demographic, 18-24 year-olds, uses Facebook more than email to share content, with Facebook getting 76% and email getting 70%. The next age group, the 25-34 year-olds, are close with the two services flipped - Facebook gets 70% and email gets 78%. From there, the two services split more and more and the age increases, with 97% of those over 65 using email and just 24% using Facebook.

When I first read the headline my reaction, as I noted above, was a sort of "who are these people?" questioning, followed by a moment of self-doubt. As Techmeme editor Mahendra Palsule notes, the real battle is not between Facebook and Google, but Facebook and email, and if you're wondering who's going to win out, "Just ask the 18-24 year olds."

I couldn't tell you a single friend's email address, but I have more than 700 of them easily accessible from my Facebook account... and that number doesn't even compare to those 18- to 24-year olds. Don't get me wrong, email has its place and the whole "death of email" thread can be a bit overplayed, but when I think of sharing something non-work-related, its to Facebook I go.

As Palsule points out, email is inherently private and not really an area Facebook will endeavor to invest in - without social context, your content is a burden and a drain on its resources. The future, indeed, is in public sharing, tagging your friends in status updates, and one-off Facebook messages. The future is not searching through address books full of old, non-functioning email addresses that your friends abandoned because they became overrun with spam.

The way reply-by-email comment support will work is pretty straightforward. After enabling support for emailing comments, and then turning on the 'Enable sending comment replies via email' option (both found on the Settings > Discussion page), you are set. The next time you get a comment, you will be notified by email, and you can respond simply by replying to the email with your text above the original comment.

One of the concerns that I heard most often expressed centered around students' access to and usage of email - concerns about safety, privacy, and acceptable use. Will students mis-use email? Do parents approve of giving students accounts? At what age should a child get an email account?

Locking Down Gmail

As Gmail is arguably the cornerstone of Google Apps, some of the fears about students and email have likely hampered some schools' adoption of Apps for Education. And for its part, Google says that having a better control over email is one of the most requested features from its K-12 users. So Google has made a change to Google Apps (not just for Education but for Business and Government customers too) that will let administrators establish policies specifying who their users can communicate with via email.

These new controls can be be adjusted based on different user groups so, for example, school faculty and staff can have unrestricted email access while students can only email those within the school community.

"Using these new controls finally gives us the ability to provide email to our 40,000 high school students. We are confident that this will help protect our children from inappropriate communications and excited about new class activities and collaboration that email will bring. Not all kids are comfortable speaking up in class and this gives many of them another avenue to approach their teachers," said Laurie Tranmer, Email Services Manager at Prince George's County Public Schools.

The new feature is expected to roll out to Apps for Business, Government, and Education users within the next few days.

Interestingly, while student email is often outsourced, faculty and staff email is generally hosted in-house because of concerns over confidentiality. Only 2.3% of all schools outsource these systems to commercial vendors.

Schools, for the most part, aren't able to keep up with the speed of innovation on the web anyway, and the fact that many college-run email systems have fallen far behind the innovation curve has driven a lot of students to just forward their school email to a commercial account anyway.

Given the cost pressures that schools are under right now, the choice for these colleges is to either spend a lot of money on providing costly email systems that most students hardly ever look at, or to outsource them to a commercial vendor, or even to Google, which will happily offer these services for free.

Next Step: Get Rid of It

The logical next step, then, is to simply stop providing .edu email addresses to students - and a number of schools are actually considering this move. Last month, at The Chronicle of Higher Education's Technology Forum, Steven Zink of the University of Nevada in Reno announced that his campus plans to stop providing students with a college email system altogether.

Most colleges will probably continue to provide students with an official .edu email address, but this will just be used for forwarding mail to another account - something most students prefer over using their college email systems anyway.

In many ways, this makes a lot of sense. Schools won't give up email as their preferred way of communicating with students anytime soon, but the days when colleges provided the most important on-ramp to email and the Internet for their students are long over.

"We didn't want to simply bolt new features onto old interfaces. We needed to rethink email, but at the same time we needed to respect that email already had over 30 years of history, thousands of existing programs, and nearly a billion users. So we started by learning which features were most important, and which problems were most aggravating. We also realized that solving everyone's problems was too big of a challenge for the first release. It would be better to build a product that a lot of people love, than one that everyone tolerates, and so that was our goal."

Gmail was released on 1 April, 2004. Apart from the gimmick of offering 1000MB of storage, Gmail had these innovations:

"Gmail included a quick and accurate search. It introduced powerful new concepts to organize email, such as the conversation view (so now I can finally see all those replies at once). It provided a fast and dynamic interface from web browsers everywhere, popularizing the techniques that have since become known as AJAX."

I'm a big fan of Gmail. Even though it's not perfect and the occasional "oops please check back later" messages can be annoying, Gmail is to my mind the first email system that was built purely for the Web. There were earlier web email systems, of course - Hotmail and Oddpost for example. But it wasn't until Gmail came along that I felt comfortable using a Web email system as my main and preferred method of email (I hardly touch Outlook now). That's because Gmail is in the same class of functionality as Outlook, only it has Web-native features such as the ability to check your email from multiple computers.

Some people prefer their Web email systems to mimic the functionality of desktop email systems. Sure it's easier for people to adjust to Web email if it's the same paradigm as desktop email, but the Web era is different in many ways to the PC era and so Web email should reflect that. Gmail was an outstanding attempt at introducing new concepts to Web email and they've largely been successful.

Say what you like about Google's stand-offish nature and perceived arrogance, one thing I admire about Google is that they continually look to disrupt (there's that word again) traditional computing paradigms and markets.

I'm looking forward to the next round of Gmail innovations. Thanks Paul for the great post!

Wouldn't it be great if you could have one email address for all your friends, one email address you use to sign up for potentially spammy services and sites you don't really want to get in touch with you, another for business and then one more for all your gamer friends?

That's exactly the idea behind the new aliases feature announced this afternoon for Microsoft Hotmail's 350 million users.

The email address a person uses is a big part of their online identity. The average person maintains three different email addresses in order to organize different types of email, maintain different personas, or keep junk mail away from a primary email address. So there are many good reasons that people want multiple email addresses, but maintaining multiple accounts, with different user names and passwords that require you to check multiple inboxes, is inefficient.

Mehta offers the example of searching for a car. You may have to sign up for several sites, but once you've found the car, you now have all this email still coming. With aliases, you can simply turn off the alias and - voilà ! - the emails stop.

As you can see in the screenshot, when you set up the alias, you are also given the chance to direct all that alias's email to a specific directory. This makes it simple to keep email separated so you can easily ignore pay attention to what's important.

The Email Standards Project (ESP) is a campaign working to bring all the major email clients into compliance with a subset of HTML standards so that HTML emails will render appropriately everywhere.

Why Standards in Email?

The group acknowledges that many designers condemn HTML emails all together but says that it's clear they are here to stay. They are too effective for marketing purposes and too compelling for users for the practice to disappear.

Unfortunately, the lack of standards compliance in receiving clients means that special design work is required beyond existing web design and HTML email regularly arrives looking ugly anyway. It's technically non-trivial for clients to deal with incoming HTML emails and spam is an issue faced more in the email world than in the standards-loving web design community at large.

Bad Google, Bad!

GMail and the other Google apps have been revolutionary in many ways. Standards compliance has not been one of them, however. My #1 question about OpenSocial has always been "why can't Google just play nicely with existing standards already under development?" Sometimes they do, OAuth for example is being supported in OpenSocial and Blogger now supports OpenID login for commenting. By and large, though, Google seems like a big bully who won't play nicely with others because they don't have to. The question of email standards seems just one more example of that.

I may be reading too much into GMail's relationship with this group (ESP) but I do know that the campaign for standards complaince in email is as worthy an effort as other standards movements. Standards are the a key foundation for innovation. We've written here before about the Inbox 2.0 of the future - I hope that standards compliance can be a part of that.

The original product created collaborative, online work environments called "mailspaces" to contain email messages, both text and multimedia. In the latest release, issued this past Wednesday, the company has significantly enhanced the UX, making it easier for users to track their email threads, know who said what when, and use email in a modern, collaborative way rather than the static fashion to which we've become accustomed.

"People are getting used to all the great social platforms and tools available, and email isn't one of them," said Cc:Betty CEO and co-founder Michael Cerda. "Betty was designed to transport people out of old-school email into a modern day mailspace where they can easily communicate, collaborate, share, and engage in an organized and interconnected environment. Our goal is to make communicating simple and productive again. Our beta users are responding with great input and feedback, which is represented in this latest iteration."

Features

One nice feature of WordPress' Post By Email feature is that the service automatically creates a gallery for posts with multiple pictures. Users can also easily post YouTube videos by email, as the service automatically creates an embed when it sees a YouTube URL in an email. WordPress also supports a number of additional short codes that give users more control over the formatting of their posts.

WordPress vs. Posterous

Of course, Posterous is probably the most well-known post-by-email service. Just like WordPress, Posterous allows users to quickly post text, images, and videos by email. Posterous, though, puts a stronger emphasis on sharing content from other sites, especially since the service introduced its bookmarklet in February. Unlike on WordPress, though, users on Posterous have no other option but to post by email or through the bookmarklet. The simplicity of Posterous is definitely one of the main draws of the service, but it looks like WordPress now offers a very similar degree of functionality, with, of course, the whole feature set of the WordPress blogging platform thrown in for good measure.

Shiva Ayyadurai, who was the first to copyright the term "EMAIL," is working on a proposal for the USPS to enter the email management industry, reports The Tech, MIT's student-run newspaper. Ayyadurai says the typical flood of daily email is too much for the typical company to handle, meaning important messages get lost or misdelivered.

USPS is facing the prospect of cutting 35,000 jobs to avoid bankruptcy. Ayyadurai was contacted by USPS officials after discussing his ideas for the service in a FastCompany interview in September.

"Email was right there for them to own, if they wanted it. It was mail in electronic form being received, sorted, transmitted, and had to be done with reliability, speed and efficiency - all the core rubric of their entire model of transmitting mail," Ayyadurai said in an email interview with the magazine. "Instead, the USPS saw themselves not as a communications organization but a paper mail delivery company, and this was and is the source of their downfall, and at least the source of lost opportunities."

In 1996 Ayyadurai founded EchoMail, which used an algorithm to sort email for businesses. Ayyadurai said that he eventually discovered that humans were more efficient at sorting email than an algoritm, given birth to the thinking that led to his current, USPS-saving proposal.

"The new Yahoo Mail is far superior to Gmail. Yahoo more closely matches the desktop experience most serious email users have come to expect. Gmail, by contrast, is quirky and limited."

He goes on to say:

"On several key issues, Google's engineers have decreed that familiar email practices are no longer useful, and have substituted approaches they prefer, arrogantly denying users any choice."

He cites the lack of choice around the 'conversation' mode that Gmail uses to display emails. Personally I really like that mode, because it produces a less cluttered interface and I can keep track of conversations far easier. Also I think Gmail's search functionality is a brilliant implementation of Google's famous Web search user experience, only with email data.

Paul Kedrosky agreed with Mossberg - he thinks there's an "arrogant software design ethos underlying Gmail".

But I think Mossberg takes his premise that web email must "look and work like regular desktop programs" a bit too far. Gmail was responsible for some fantastic innovation in how email can be experienced on the Web, so I don't think we should knock Google for that. Is it arrogant to experiment with new forms of Web functionality in an email application, rather than try and replicate desktop app functionality? I prefer to think it's innovative. I'm not one to defend Google that often, but I really can't see much evidence of a lack of user choice in Gmail.

Having said that, I haven't yet tried the new Yahoo Mail. So perhaps it is better than Gmail. Anyone from Yahoo care to send me a beta invite? ;-)

Unless you have changed your settings to stop email notifications, it's likely that you receive an email every time someone comments on your status updates, photos, videos and Wall posts. Before now, the email contained a link that you had to follow, which logged you into Facebook where you could reply. You'll now notice that the email contains a line reading "New Feature: Reply to this email to comment on this link."

This is big news for all those Facebook junkies out there who can't get their daytime fix while at work because of a company firewall, not to mention all the students who can't check their Facebook for several hours every day. We'll see where productivity levels go after this.

We'd love it if you'd become a friend of ReadWriteWeb on our Facebook Page.

Now WordPress.com has embraced email for exactly that purpose. A new WordPress.com feature - currently in closed beta - adds actual utility to those "You've got a comment" emails: Reply via Email.

Voila! No more logging into the Web site to participate in the conversation.

As part of the announcement, the WordPress team has also hinted that threaded commenting may soon be part of the WordPress.com offering, as well.

WordPress.com users who are interested in test driving this new functionality can - ironically - head to the post on the topic and leave a comment to be included in the beta. But they'll have to act fast. Participants will only be accepted until 6 PM PT (UTC-8) on October 24.

It's safe to assume that this simple improvement to the current commenting workflow will be met with a favorable response. The comment thread for beta participants is already filling with people interested in using the new feature. No doubt threaded comments will be equally welcome. Although I have to admit, I'm curious as to how the threaded concept and this new email reply concept will mesh. Also on my mind? How the commenting features of Automattic's Intense Debate acquisition will be folded into the WordPress family.

Perhaps we'll hear more about all of this as we draw closer to the launch of WordPress 2.7 on November 10.