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.

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.

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!

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.

"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? ;-)

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.

Once you have registered your sub-domain, you don't have to register the actual email addresses you want to use. Instead, any email sent to your sub-domain, no matter the part before the '@,' will arrive in your inbox. By default, OtherInbox filters incoming email by sender, but it also makes sense to sign up for new services with addresses like "123onlinestore@xxx.otherinbox.com" so that you can keep track on who is potentially selling your email address to spammers.

By default, OtherInbox will email the first message that comes in from a new address to your standard email account. Every forwarded message is prefaced by a number of links that allow you to turn of forwarding messages from this address or to block further messages from this sender. You can also have Otherinbox send you a daily digest of new messages. IMAP support is forthcoming.

Controlling Spam

There are a large number of potential uses for OtherInbox, but the most straightforward is to use it for signing up for new services online. If a company starts sending you spam, you can just block every email from this service or to this email address with just one click.

The OtherInbox interface is similar to that of pretty much every other online email service (and actually quite reminiscent of Apple's MobileMe), but the main difference is that OtherInbox automatically filters your mail by sender and creates a folder for every sender (see screenshot).

What About Gmail?

If you are already using Gmail, you could, of course, make use of the "+" feature, which allows you to create email address like "john123+facebook@gmail.com," but Gmail does not filter those out automatically like OtherInbox would, which means you would still have to create a filter for every one of those addresses. Over time, that simply takes too much time and work.

Verdict

Overall, OtherInbox is the slickest disposable address service we have seen so far. While other services like GuerillaMail, MintEmail, or e4ward offer similar services, none of them feature the simple user interface and complete set of features that OtherInbox does.

Invites

We quickly ran out of our first batch of invites, Otherinbox gave us a few more to hand out to our readers. Just click here to claim yours.

To Get the Most Out of the App, Set Up a New Gmail Account

It is important to note that while the app is extremely easy to use, it is also somewhat limited. You can't, for example, set up filters so that only certain emails will be pushed to the phone.

To bypass this limitation, we recommend that you set up an additional Gmail account and forward all the messages you want to be pushed to the iPhone to this account. This way, you can use Gmail's own filters to manage which messages you want to be notified of. As the app itself doesn't actually take you to the email client and works completely independent of the email accounts you have set up on your phone, it really doesn't matter which email account it checks.

Limitations: Only One Account, No Quiet Time

The app also supports only one email account, making it even more of a necessity to open up a separate email account just for push notifications.

Sadly, the developers didn't include a 'quiet time' setting, so messages will be pushed to the phone at all times.

Of course, Apple should simply include these notifications in the iPhone by default. However, for the time being, GPush is the best alternative to built-in email notifications, and given that it costs only $0.99, it's hard to say no to such a useful application that will surely be updated with new features over time.

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Last month we reported on a study from research firm IDC that predicted that 2007 would be the first time that spam out numbered legit email. Our readers didn't think that sounded right: surely spam outnumbered legit email years ago. "Spam sure as hell surpassed legit emails in my inbox -- years ago. Mine. My mom, dad, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, every single friend I've talked to about it, my cat and dog, Boobo my hamster, everyone..." wrote one commenter.

Barracuda's report corroborates those feelings and calls into question the IDC report. Certainly, from my own personal experience, it is a lot easier to believe Barracuda. I use three email accounts on a regular basis, and across them, I get about 2500-3000 pieces of spam each week. I get a lot of legit email, as well, but not enough to outnumber the unsolicited stuff. Luckily (for most users), I am in the minority. According to the report, 65% of email users get less than 10 pieces of junk mail per day (half get less than 5). Just 13% find themselves in the unhappy position of receiving more than 50 spam emails per day.

Barracuda's report also found that spam is not only annoying, but it is the most annoying form of junk advertising. 57% of respondents to a survey question asking what the worst form unsolicited advertising was said spam, compared to just 31% for postal junk mail and 12% for telemarketers.

Unfortunately, spammers continue to evolve their tactics to beat the filters. In 2006 there was a rise of image spam and botnets. This past year, spammers were seen using attachments (like PDF files) as well as using more advanced identity obfuscation techniques.

The good news is that spam filtering technology is evolving right along with the spammers, and it works well. Thanks to filters, I only see about 3-4% of the spam I get (which is still a lot given the immense volume). Here's to a spam free 2008 -- hey, a guy can dream, right?

Blogger and PR guy Steve Rubel has a solution: use Gmail. In a post yesterday Steve outlined how to turn Gmail into what he calls a "Social Network Hub" which aggregates activity from friends across multiple networks and even lets him post status messages via email.

These are good tips and a nice way to organize much of your social networking activity around a single hub that you already use. Do you have any tips for cutting through the social network overload? Leave your ideas in the comments below.

Photo credit: wiseacre

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