The three person team behind Rapportive queries data provider Rapleaf for the social media profile data and does some local caching for performance optimization. Let's stop talking about it though - just go download it! Check out the screenshot and details below.

Trusting the Service

You don't need to give Rapportive your Gmail credentials, the service asks you to login via secure Google Federated Login, or OpenID. The startup doesn't have access to your password, but it does access the contents of your email - that's how it builds a service for you to use. Any browser extension has access to everything you do on the web, but I expect some people will feel a little nervous about installing a webmail related extension from a small company. I don't think that concern is warranted enough to justify missing out on this awesome service.

The company says that if your details are inaccurate you can visit Rapleaf and correct them.

Inbox as Platform

Rapportive is developing a platform for the development of custom applets that other companies can integrate within their local data stores so you can look up an email sender on your own system as part of the Rapportive display. Co-founder Rahul Vohra says such integration takes minutes to set up and in the long term the company hopes to create a marketplace for those applets. Team collaboration so notes left on contacts can be shared is also in the works, as is integration with popular paid CRM and customer service systems.

Rapportive was first reported on by The Next Web this morning.

I've been hoping to find something like this for a long time.

While some people wrote scathing blog posts, saying quite simply - and in big, bold lettering - "F*ck You, Google", a Florida woman has gone one logical step further and filed a class action lawsuit against the hapless email-turned-social-network provider. Maybe, if Google had simply asked its users before signing them up for the service, they could have avoided all of this.

According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the complaint filed yesterday in a San Jose federal court alleges that "Google Inc. broke the law when its controversial Google Buzz service shared personal data without the consent of users." The suit accuses Google of breaking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, an online privacy protection group, filed a similar complaint [pdf] earlier this week, asserting the simple idea that "users should have meaningful control over their information."

We got in touch with Google, but the company says it has still yet to be served and cannot comment until it's been able to review the complaint.

It seems that some others think this lawsuit is merely a "pure money grab", but we think that Google's actions can have real-world consequences for the more than 30 million Gmail users it signed up for the service without properly testing it beforehand. And even if they had properly tested it beforehand, those people signed up for an email service, not a social network.

The Gmail Privacy Policy, under the section somewhat ironically entitled "Your Choices", now reads to say that users have the ability to "choose to use additional Gmail features, such as chat, which connects to the Google Talk network, or Google Buzz." We emailed Google asking where in the user agreements one might consent to something like being automatically signed up for Google Buzz, but did not receive a response by press time.

As Harriet Jacobs, the author of the colorfully-titled post cursing Google, points out, anyone from abusive ex-husbands to Internet stalkers were suddenly given information that Google's users had intentionally kept hidden. While this may have been a mistake, a company that has access to as much information about us as Google has needs to have appropriate preventative measures in place for this sort of thing.

Could you imagine the uproar if something like our search habits were suddenly released to the public in a big "Oops!" moment for Google? Would an apologetic blog post suffice then? Somehow, we don't think so and we're not sure it should now either.

The news was announced by ReMail CEO Gabor Cselle on his blog today (we learned about it first via CenterNetworks). Gabor was a former Gmail intern and was YCombinator funded. There are even more interesting elements to this story than that, though.

1. The Reboxed application that sorts your contacts by priority was really interesting. It was like a little game that scrolled through your contacts, displayed two at a time and asked you to prioritize one over the other. Your individual ratings and the aggregate ratings of particular email contacts across all ReBoxed users were then used to bring emails from high-priority senders to the top of your inbox. It was a really fun little feature. While many data-centric startups would have just picked up email prioritization based on implicit behavior (whose emails you open and reply to) there was something to be said for allowing explicit rankings in a game-like setting. Whose emails are more important to you, your boss's or your mom's?
   


2. That Google just bought something that's all about one of the iPhone's core functions, email, is interesting. Sure, the app is shuttered now, but imagine if Apple had decided to buy ReMail instead. If Cselle was working on the iPhone's native email application, that would have been better for Apple than this may turn out to be if he helps make Android's email the best in the mobile world.


3. ReMail's founder was previously a VP of Engineering at the very ambitious Outlook plug-in provider Xobni. He left Xobni and ended up creating something very different. Cselle says he had a "multi-step plan for global email domination" but received advice "that instead I should build something small, simple, and useful." The end result? "It worked," he says.


4. The man that gave him that advice and invested in his company, was Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail.


5. Finally, Google just acquired a native mobile app, built on another platform. Much has been made of Google's emphasis on moving everything to HTML5 and the mobile web. But here's evidence that you can build an innovative application in an entirely different direction and still capture the company's eye. (Admittedly it probably helps to be super connected like Cselle was.)

Update: Google has now closed this loophole. Here is a statement we just got from a Google spokesperson:

Blogger harmonyguy helped us discover a bug that made it possible to discover a user's email address based on their numeric profile ID. Our engineers worked hard to address this issue and it is now fixed.

Security blogger The Harmony Guy just told us about how this hack works. While the way to reveal these addresses isn't obvious, you can easily follow along and try this method out yourself.

How does it work?

First, you simply copy the numbers from a user's Google profile and then append these numbers to http://picasaweb.google.com/[numbers].

For some users who haven't customized their Picasa page, the username (which is also their Gmail address) will come right up. If the user has customized the account and added a nickname, you simply have to replace the URL in the address bar with javascript:alert(_user.name); and a small pop-up window will show you the username.

Caveats

It's important to note that this only works for Google users who also use the Picasa web service. This, however, is likely a large percentage of Gmail users.

How to Protect Yourself

In Picasa Web Albums, go to the settings page and add a new username. Then, select the new username for your gallery URL. As The Harmony Guy points out, you may also want to edit your nickname.

Is this a major issue for Google? Probably not. But given the ruckus around privacy, Buzz and Google Profiles these days, it is disheartening to see that it is this easy to circumvent the only way to hide your Gmail address from public view. After all, if you want to use Google Buzz, Google forces you to have a public profile.

This sounds brilliant, doesn't it? The only question now is will it actually work?

And yet again, here comes another program promising a solution to information overload, a nut so tough that no one has truly found the way to crack it yet. Will Gtriage be our savior? Or just another service that doesn't live up to its potential?

Gtriage: Machine-Learning for your Gmail

The answer comes from Gtriage's algorithm for measuring importance. The company calls it "powerful machine-learning technology" - they've even cutely nicknamed it Buckminster and Blockhead, represented by two cartoon characters. Blockhead learns the universal characteristics that make email important and Buckminister learns what you specifically find to be important.

This dual approach to measuring importance addresses some of the issues found with other systems - they often don't understand that frequency of communication isn't the only factor in ranking email. A person you email with regularly may be far less important to you than someone who only emails once in a blue moon. But having a machine figure out which of those "rare" emails should rank highly is tricky. Will Gtriage know?

According to the company's website, their system learns about you and improves the longer you use it. Once set up, you continue to use your Gmail as you would normally while Gtriage watches your actions and customizes itself to your behavior. The end result, in theory, is an email ranking program that works without any extra effort on your part. What's more, Gtriage does all this without requiring any extra plugins or apps. It even works on your mobile.

Will Gtriage Solve Info Overload?

If Gtriage works as promised, it could easily be a lifesaver for Gmail users everywhere. So much so that they'll even pay to use the service - or at least, that's what the company hopes. They've lined up multiple pricing programs to cater to users with more than one Gmail or Google Apps account. However, right now the service is offered free to Gmail users assuming you have an invite code to get in (you can beg for yours on Twitter here).

This system isn't the sort of service we could immediately review. It will take time for it to get to know us and our inboxes before we can dub it a winner, a failure or something in between. But the promise it holds has us hoping for the best.

To enable Google Search in Gmail, go to Gmail Labs and look for "Google Search" (around the middle of the page).

Google said that after taking a look at the trade-off between speed and security - the primary concern in this case - they decided that it was worth it to the end-user to automatically use a secure connection.

For all of you sitting at a coffee shop all day, using its unsecured wireless network, Google may have saved you some serious headaches. That extra couple of seconds of load-time may just be worth it. Of course, if you don't use Gmail or your service doesn't offer HTTPS, there are always solutions like Pretty Good Privacy to keep your private emails secure.

MailBrowser is currently only compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox on the Mac (OSX 10.5 and higher) and Windows, though the team is working on Safari and Chrome versions as well.

The plugin offers a rich set of features, including support for multiple Gmail and Google Apps accounts and rich previews of attachments. Another nice feature is the "trend" section that appears at the bottom of the sidebar. Here, two graphs show a timeline view of how many emails you sent and received from any given contact.

MailBrowser stores all your data locally on your hard disk, so no information is ever shared with the service. Because all the data is stored locally, MailBrowser also keeps a copy of all your attachments on your machine. The application also syncs all the data back to Google Contacts in the cloud, so any changes you make on one computer will automatically appear on another machine.

Xobni for Gmail

In many respects, MailBrowser is very similar to Xobni - a popular Outlook addon. Xobni, however, puts a stronger emphasis on giving you additional information about a contact by looking at the contact's social networking profiles. MailBrowser plans to add this functionality in a future version. Currently, the service can only display details about a contact's domain and website.

More Features Coming Soon

MailBrowser has big plans for the future. The company plans to offer support for more services (Yahoo Mail, Live Mail, etc.), integration with enterprise apps like Salesforce and integration with social media services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Verdict

For now, MailBrowser works just as advertised. It doesn't yet offer the rich feature set of Xobni, but the company is clearly working on that.

If you have a very large mailbox, it can take a while for MailBrowser to download and index your information. Luckily, the download process starts with your most recent email, so that you can be up and running long before your last email has been downloaded.

As of today, all Gmail users will now have this feature turned on by default, however those who have never used it before will need to configure it first in order to take advantage of the enhanced functionality.

The Labs section of Gmail is where experimental and in-development programs, add-ons, and extra features are housed, allowing Gmail users to switch them on or off as desired. Offline Gmail was one of those experiments, launched back in January of this year. Using Gears, an open source plug-in technology designed by Google, email messages are downloaded to your local machine when you switch to offline mode. Also, if your internet connection is dropped unexpectedly, offline Gmail is automatically enabled.

In the year in which offline Gmail has been in testing, the company says they received a lot of feedback from users. Some of the requested features have already been implemented, including the ability to choose which messages get downloaded for offline use and the ability to send attachments while offline.

According to the Google blog post, anyone who was already running the Labs version of offline Gmail won't have to make any changes but those who had never turned on the setting will need to do the following:

1. Click the "Settings" link in the top-right corner of Gmail.
2. Click the "Offline" tab.
3. Select "Enable Offline Mail for this computer."
4. Click "Save Changes" and follow the directions from there.

But Isn't Google Switching to HTML5?

At first it seems like "graduating" offline Gmail from Labs is step in preparation for next year's launch of Google Chrome OS, the web-based operating system that ditches the desktop, the hard drive, and computer applications for a web browser where everything users access lives online. Because online applications require an internet connection to work, there have been some concerns as to how functional this OS will be in a world that is not yet blanketed in Wi-Fi or 3G. Since Google has made no mention of built-in hardware providing 3G and cellular access as a backup to Wi-Fi, there will be a lot of programs that simply don't work when you go offline... that is, except for the programs that Google develops itself.

The company has already implemented its Gears plug-in on two other products in addition to Gmail: Google Reader and Google Docs. Meanwhile, other companies have also adopted the technology including online office suite Zoho and to-do list app Remember the Milk.

What's odd about this launch of Google Gears into primetime via Gmail is that this seems to conflict a bit with what Google execs announced last month regarding the company's plans for its upcoming operating system, Chrome OS. During the Q&A session at the end of the press event, an audience member asked about Google Gears support to which Google's vice president of product management, Sundar Pichai, replied by saying that Chrome OS will take advantage of HTML5 for local storage. He made no mention of Gears.

HTML5, a proposed revision to HTML, the markup language of the World Wide Web, includes offline storage as one of its many new features. And it's this specification that Google plans to support in the future, not Gears, according to numerous reports.

For example, in a recent article in the L.A. Times, a Google spokesperson was quoted as saying: "We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites."

Also, Linus Upson, the engineering director at Google told PC Magazine that the company was abandoning its work on Gears 2, the next version of the plug-in, and will be focused on HTML5 instead. "You can almost think of what's in HTML5, with app cache, and database, and those things, as essentially Gears [version] 2," he said. "That's how we view it." Upson noted, too, that the company would be able to influence the adoption of HTML5 through their web browser, Google Chrome, the foundation of the new Chrome OS. "Now that we're a browser vendor, we can help move HTML5 forward not as a plug-in, but as part of Chrome," Upson said.

So in other words, the Gears functionality being switched on now in Gmail may not be the same technology used a year from now when Google Chrome OS hits the market. That begs the question: why bother? If Google plans to replace Gears with HTML5 in the near future what's the point of rolling out the soon-to-be abandoned plug-in to all its users now? Will Gears and HTML5 converge somehow or will Google just rip out the plug-in in favor of HTML5's "plug-in-less" technology instead? Let us know what you think in the comments.

In the latter parts of the study, the company looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services. Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board. What's more interesting is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services, Facebook only had a small lead. Here, around 20% of all Hotmail and Yahoo webmail users were found to be on Facebook and MySpace. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Or that they've been around on the net longer and at one time had created (and possibly now abandoned) their MySpace pages? Unfortunately, the study can't provide us with these sorts of answers.

The study also showed that Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than anyone else. In fact, on the other services, it's 4-5 times less popular than Facebook. We would like to think that's because Gmail users are just more web-savvy and cool, but it's possible that it's because they're just younger than everyone else.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the least popular social network, but as Rapleaf points out, many LinkedIn users may have registered with their business email instead.

Participation Levels - Hotmail Users have Most Profiles, Gmail Users Better-Connected

When it comes to how the webmail users participate on social networks, Rapleaf found that the majority of the users have only one social media profile. But the service where the average number of profiles is the highest might surprise you - it's Hotmail. There the average is 2.5 profiles per user. Hotmail is followed by Yahoo, then AOL, and it's Gmail users who have the least number of social media profiles. That finding seems odd considering that Gmail users are younger and more likely to use Twitter in addition to Facebook. In fact, it almost seems like this data doesn't even fit with the rest of the study.

However, the discovery that Gmail users are better-connected than the other users makes more sense. On average, Gmail users have the most friends on social networks with 46.2 friends while Yahoo users have the least with 40.0.

Since again, Gmail users tend to be younger than the rest, it goes to reason that they would be in a demographic where their peers are more likely to have social membership profiles. Older webmail users, meanwhile, are still signing up for these sites. Although baby boomers and other middle-aged folks are joining sites like Facebook in droves these days, social networks are still dominated by the young.

Methodology

For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age, gender and social networking data by collecting information from public social media profiles. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their original blog post. However, the sample size is large enough to form some conclusions about the members of these services, even if it relied on a particular subset of users.

However, the system still only works with Gmail and the photo-sharing service Picasa. There's no mention of it expanding to encompass other Google services like Google Docs, for example. And there's definitely no mention of the seemingly mythical GDrive, the long-rumored online storage system supposedly under development which would allow for the upload of any file type for safe storage in the cloud. We're beginning to wonder: will Google ever offer us a real cloud storage solution?

Over on The Next Web, blogger Alex Wilhelm thinks the increased storage space hints at Google's future plans with their upcoming netbook operating system, Google Chrome OS. We have to admit, the same thought occurred to us as well. After all, netbooks don't typically have the same hard disk space as their larger, less totable counterparts. However, that's not always the case these days given the new middle-of-the-road offerings like the HP Mini 311, for example, which falls somewhere between an ultra-portable netbook and full-sized notebook with its 350 GB hard drive option.

But Alex has a point: by providing this type of cloud storage solution, netbooks can remain basic machines which are smaller and cost less. That would pave the way for the Google Chrome OS line of netbooks to be even more affordable devices than what's on the market today since they wouldn't need to come equipped with large hard drives.

Obviously, an OS-integrated cloud storage system of this nature would be a natural fit for Google's cloud operating system designed specifically for netbooks. And yet, it still seems to be an incomplete offering at this time.

But Still So Limited!

As much as we want to believe that the new changes are a sign of Google's plans for Chrome OS, it's just as possible that they're nothing more than the great discounts they appear to be. There's nothing all that new being introduced here - just better rates and more available space.

Sadly, the core storage offering itself is unchanged. It's still very limited, only encompassing Gmail and Picasa photos. What about the rest of our files - like the ones stored in Google Docs? What about our music and movie collections? What about the hundred or so of home videos we can't bear to delete from our hard drives? Google has no centralized solution for any of this yet. And many are beginning to wonder if they ever will.

In the tech community, there have been rumors about an all-encompassing online storage service called GDrive for years on end now, and yet, nothing has ever come of it. According to speculation (and wishful thinking), the supposed system would allow for the upload of all types of files and would tie together all of Google's services.

In our imaginations, we envision a dashboard that links us to our online Google Docs, our photos, our Gmail, our Google Sites, and our multimedia content. The GDrive of our dreams would be accessible from any computer, keeping in sync all our user data, preferences, and settings. You can see a hint of how this sync could work with the way the Google Chrome web browser stores your favorites. Your bookmarked sites are now available in the browser no matter what PC you use while a backup copy sits in Google Docs. GDrive should do the same, but not just for web browser favorites - for everything. That would be the final step for making a cloud OS a reality.

It's almost strange at this point that Google hasn't released something of the sort yet. In fact, they've let Microsoft beat them to the punch in this instance courtesy of Microsoft's SkyDrive service which launched back in early 2008. SkyDrive offers a free 25 GB of online storage for your files and also serves as the central repository for Windows Live Photos as well as the documents created via the new Office Web Applications service, Microsoft's challenge to Google Docs. But where's Google's answer to this? When will it come? Will it ever?

Perhaps the company is waiting for the release of Google Chrome OS to dazzle us with some sort of revamped interface for a game-changing cloud computing operating system. Or perhaps the company is just doing what it does best: offering solutions that are simply good enough.

Users are required to give TrueSwitch (through a Gmail interface) the username and password for the old account, then import can take a few hours or days. I pulled in contacts from an old Hotmail account and am now waiting to have them arrive in my Gmail contacts list.

Dear Internet, please offer features like this at every website. The ability to pull in contacts and data from one service provider to another is the dream of data portability. It enables users to try new services, prevents them from being locked-in to old ones, promotes competition between service providers and generally makes the world a better place.

Not all Gmail users can see the new Import feature but over the next few weeks that will probably change.

Rapleaf says that despite their collection methods, their findings can offer insight into these different userbases. To some extent, that may be true, but we're left wondering how different these findings would be if they hadn't relied on public social media data and rather went with a true random sample.

Gmail Skews Young, AOL Older

That being said, here's what Rapleaf came up with. In terms of age:

It's not all that surprising that Gmail users tend to be young. After all, the service was established years after AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Some of those who already had webmail accounts on other services were hesitant to switch at first (and some still are) since the process of changing email accounts is never entirely painless and often leads to months of checking dual inboxes for emails that may have been missed. Instead, Google's growth likely came from more webmail first-timers looking to set up their brand-new online accounts in addition to the braver "email switchers," a group that also probably skews younger...especially since an effective switchover often requires a bit of technical savvy involving setting up forwarding, auto-responders, etc.

As for AOL being comprised of older users, that too, is relatively unsurprising. Where Google is the newest service, AOL is one of the oldest. Its core user base has aged with it over the years and those who haven't jumped shipped yet are bound to be the older members who don't stay as current with changing technology trends. Still, setting the bar for "old" at 36 is a little humbling - especially for those of us getting up in our years. (That's not old, is it?) It would be interesting to see further breakdowns of this demographic into age segments including 40+, 50+, and so on, but that data was not available.

Gmail Has More Females, Hotmail Has More Males

Perhaps more interesting is the gender variations between the services. Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it "too close to call," but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences have meaning.

Why would Gmail attract more females? And conversely, why does Hotmail have more males? (It's 57% male.) Is there something about the aesthetics, workflow or features in those services that appeal more to women than men or vice versa? And if so, what? Unfortunately, raw data can't provide these sorts of answers, but they're definitely intriguing to us. We would imagine they are intriguing to the user interface designers and engineers behind the products, too.

Do women like Gmail's drag-and-drop features or its themes? Do men prefer Hotmail's efficient "quick adds" which allow for one-click additions of Bing content to messages? We doubt those are the reasons for the discrepancy, but it makes us wonder what are. Try as we might, we can't come up with an easy theory to explain this. (If you can, please share in the comments.)

Future details about the study will focus on other data including online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships. Stay tuned to Rapleaf's site for more information.

In yesterday's attack, the list of comprised Hotmail accounts were limited to those where the usernames started with the letter "A" or "B." However, that seemed to imply that the posted portion might actually be a part of a bigger list containing even more login/password combinations. At the time, a Microsoft spokesperson said that the company determined "this was not a breach of internal Microsoft data and initiated our standard process of working to help customers regain control of their accounts." Instead, claimed the spokesperson, those users whose credentials were revealed were likely to be victims of an online phishing attack where a third-party website was involved.

Phishing attacks are typically carried out via email messages where the attacker tricks the recipient into revealing their username and password by pretending to be some sort of trustworthy entity such as the user's bank, IT administrator, a popular website, or an online service. In the case of the stolen Hotmail passwords, it's possible that the attacker sent emails which claimed to be from the end user's email provider. If the user then followed the link contained within the malicious email, they would have ended up not on the actual email provider's site, but on a third-party site whose sole purpose was to capture their username and password when entered.

Beyond Hotmail: More Webmail Providers Affected

According to a story in today's BBC News, the most recent list of compromised accounts, which includes login credentials for Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, and Comcast users, contains some accounts that appear to be old, unused, or fake. However, many others listed are, in fact, genuine.

There's no way to be sure at this point that the new list is a part of the same phishing attack as yesterday's or if it's a new and separate scam.

The website where the accounts were posted - pastebin.com - is now "down for maintenance." Visitors to the site today will receive a message that reads:

Pastebin.com is getting an unprecedented amount of traffic due to a news story in which some leaked Hotmail passwords have been pasted on this site

Pastebin.com was intended as a tool to aid software developers, not for distributing this sort of material. Filters have been put in place to prevent reoccurrence, but the current traffic level is unsustainable.

Pastebin.com is just a fun side project for me, and today it's not fun. It will remain offline all day while I make some further modifications

Paul Dixon

Regardless of whether or not you think your account was compromised, today would be a good day to change the password on whichever webmail service you currently use. Better safe than sorry!

This new feature is not just a simple productivity enhancement or advertisement. The icons are there to indicate which messages include "enhanced content" - real-time updates within the body of the email messages, from companies sending the emails.

Apparently this feature has been in the works for some time, at least according to the timestamp on the Google Help explanation about "enhanced content," which shows its last update was in July of this year. The explanation reads:

If you're subscribed to receive email from certain senders, the messages you receive from them will be enhanced with an interactive gadget that has up-to-date content from their website (you'll also see an icon in your inbox identifying these messages).

For example, if you receive a Pregnancy Bulletin newsletter from Babycenter, you'll be able to view up-to-date content, including the baby name of the day, and browse though the current top 100 baby names within the message. Aside from the convenience of being able to interact with certain websites from inside Gmail, the branded content will help identify that your messages are legitimate and not spoofed (we'll only show branded content when the sender authenticates their mail). We're currently testing this with a small number of senders and will decide whether to make it widely available based on user and partner feedback.

A Marketer's Dream

Real-time content updates within Gmail messages sound like a great idea as long as it doesn't slow down the loading of the message, replying, forwarding and the like. Just imagine the possibilities! In the enhanced Netflix emails, for example, you not only view your recent recommendations - you can actually add them to your queue right from within the message itself.

This sort of interactivity is sure to be an email marketer's dream as it allows for whole new levels of user engagement with the brand. Instead of simply dismissing the email with a click of the "delete" button, recipients might find themselves actually taking the time to read through what were once thought of as "throwaway" messages. In this information-overloaded era where out-of-control inboxes have many email users declaring email bankruptcy, doing mass deletes, and filtering all non-personal email to other folders, any extra incentive to not delete or ignore an email is a feature which marketers are sure to take notice of.

But a little in-email interactivity may only be scratching the surface of what this enhanced content makes possible. What could come next? Perhaps you'll soon be able to make purchases without ever leaving the confines of your inbox? As McGee writes in his post - wait until Amazon gets on board with that idea - our wallets are sure to take a beating!