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"This status is being tracked. The owners of Facebook have confirmed they will send $1 to the rescue fund for Haiti every time this is cut and paste as a status." Sound familiar? This recent status message hoax has been making its way around the popular social network, duping members into posting the status as their own in the hopes that, by doing so, they've somehow contributed to the Haitian earthquake disaster relief fund without having to actually open their own pocketbook to do so. While that would be nice if it was true, this hoax is just one of many found on Facebook today.

Last July, MySpace decided to get into the email business and launched MySpace Mail. According to the latest data we just received from MySpace, this initiative has turned out to be a success for the social network. In total, over 15 million MySpace users now use the service to receive and send email with an @myspace.com address. MySpace smartly coupled its users' email addresses to their vanity URLs, which surely helped the adoption of the service.

Just in case you were thinking Mafia Wars or Farmville weren't a big enough part of your daily life, Facebook has followed up on its promise and will now offer email notifications from applications. As we foretold in October, Facebook's roadmap for developers contained several key points that would restructure the ways in which applications would be allowed to contact users.

But before you go diving off the deep end worrying about an inbox full of even more Facebook notifications, take a deep breath and remember that 1980s anti-drug campaign slogan and let it become your mantra - "Just Say No."

Google has announced that Gmail will now operate using HTTPS, a secure connection between a browser and a server, by default. Previously, users could turn on HTTPS connections as the default in their settings, but the situation has now been reversed.

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.

In our continuing obsession with all things Facebook, we're looking at a new feature that was just announced by the social networking behemoth that will further enmesh the site into our every waking breath: replying to comments through email.

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."

Outlook users can now use email plug-in Liaise to automatically extract action items, delegation and priority levels from the free text of email conversations. This is software that's so cool it makes me jealous of Windows users.

Liaise launched in September and won the Peoples' Choice Award for Enterprise Products at DEMO but is available to the public at large for the first time today.

The beta launch of Google Wave has once again put the spotlight on the shortcomings of email. Wave tries to be everything for everybody, but others, like the recently launched Nurphy, have opted for a more focused approach. Nurphy, founded by Paul Horsfall and Neil Cauldwell, wants to be a replacement for email conversations with multiple recipients. The result is an interesting mix between email, Twitter, Yammer and IM that is aimed at both business and casual users.

Social media data company Rapleaf has just completed a comprehensive study involving the demographics and behavior of webmail users. In the first part of their study, they looked specifically at age and gender data and revealed some interesting findings. For example, did you know that Gmail has more female users than male? And that Hotmail is the other way around? Meanwhile, AOL users are older...but maybe not as old as you think.

A recent study by industry group the Participatory Marketing Network has unearthed some surprising data on Gen Y behavior. Apparently, the members of this young demographic (ages 18-24) would rather give up their social networking accounts before they would abandon their email. Given that this generation is typically viewed as "plugged in" digital natives who don't have any use for email, the study raises many questions. Have the previous reports about Generation Y's disdain for email simply been wrong? Or has Gen Y grown up a bit now and has learned the necessity of the medium?

Yesterday's phishing attack in which several thousand Hotmail username and password combinations were leaked to the web now appears to be just the beginning of a massive phishing attack affecting users of multiple webmail services including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, and Earthlink. The original list was posted anonymously on pastebin.com, a site generally used by developers sharing code snippets. Again, that site recently saw the addition 20,000 more login details from other webmail service providers, indicating what may the largest scale phishing attack to date.

Looking for a more affordable and more stable hosted email service than Gmail? According to Lotus, that's exactly what their new hosted email system called iNotes can provide. The company isn't being subtle about their desire to compete head-on with the Internet giant, either. Says Sean Poulley, an IBM executive overseeing the new service, "Google has shown itself to be weak. There is a world of difference between supporting a consumer-grade service and a business-grade service."

Should Google be worried? Some analysts think so. "This is trouble for Google," said Matthew Cain of Gartner. Google of course, disagrees.

Liaise is an email add-on launching today that analyzes the free-text contents of your emails as you write them for task-related information, including assignee, deadline and priority. It then helps you manage all your tasks in an interface beside your email inbox, pulling up all the emails associated with a particular task or person you're set to meet with, automatically.

This impressive tool is launching today at the DEMO conference, where it may very well steal the show. Liaise is currently available only for Outlook, but if you're an Outlook user then it's worth your time to download. Outlook user or not, you'll want to check out the video demonstration below.

According to recent analysis by the Online Publishers Association (OPA), more people than ever are spending their time online visiting content sites which provide news, information, and entertainment. Despite the emergence of social networks, and in particular the rapid growth of Facebook, it's content sites which engage web surfers' attention the most these days - time spent on these sites is up 88% from only five years ago. That's not to say social networking community sites haven't grown too, it's just that their growth hasn't come at the expense of content. Instead, people are using traditional communication sites and services (think webmail, IM, and discussion groups) less and less and choosing to use Facebook and other social networks instead.

When we first looked at the personal relationship manager Gist back in October of last year, we were intrigued. Here was an online service that had a real purpose: to help you make sense out of your email's data. Gist does this by analyzing the relationships in the hidden social network that is your inbox and then determines who and what's important. It's like your own personal CRM system. At the time of our initial review, Gist was still in a closed private beta. Today, the closed trial has ended and everyone can now try Gist. The company has also added some new features to coincidence with the launch.

Think desktop email is dead? Not so says the latest entrant to this field, San Francisco-based startup Postbox, who is today revealing the final release of their desktop email application based on Mozilla technology. Originally launched into beta a year ago, Postbox has a heavy focus on search and organization with a primary goal of addressing email users' information overload issues. Like Mozilla's own Thunderbird email application, Postbox exists only as downloadable software. However, unlike other desktop programs, Postbox natively integrates web services into its interface, including Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

The iPhone's email client is pretty good and with the 3.0 update, it can also finally search through email on your server. To do that, though, you have to be online and you can only do basic keyword searches. ReMail 2.0 wants to change this. ReMail's iPhone app (iTunes link), which officially launched today, downloads all your email from any IMAP server and makes it searchable, no matter whether you are online or offline. The app, which costs $4.99, includes advanced search functions as well as a very smart auto-completion feature for speeding up your searches.

Silentale is a soon-to-launch startup whose goal is to consolidate your conversations and contacts from all the platforms you use including webmail, social networks, and even your mobile phone. Running as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform on top of Amazon Web Services, the oddly named Silentale will function not just as an aggregator, but also a searchable archive of all your web communication. While normally we wouldn't dare blog about a company whose product you couldn't try out yet (that's just mean), we just couldn't resist. It's been a long time since we've seen a startup this promising and we can't wait to give it a shot ourselves.

On the internet, data lives forever. Once you post something to the web, you see, you simply can't take it back. Many people have had to learn this lesson the hard way, unfortunately, after discovering that the "delete" button doesn't really work to delete something from the internet as a whole. The embarrassing missive lives on and on, in the web service's archives, in Google's cache, and eventually in the Internet Archive itself.

That may be about to change, though, thanks to a new tool created by researchers at the University of Washington. Called "Vanish," the system places a time limit on any message posted to any web service through a web browser.

Xobni, the makers of an Outlook add-in for a "smarter inbox," have just released a slew of new premium features in a package called "Xobni Plus." For the most part, these new features aim to bring more advanced search tools to your inbox, including the ability to build advanced queries, search within conversations and networks, and create Boolean searches. Also new are auto-suggest and filtering features. The question now is will users pay $29.95 for the upgrade?

Cc:Betty, an email product we reviewed recently, has just announced a a new release with a more robust set of features.

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.