ReadWriteWeb

Yes, it is hard to believe, but email turned 40 last month. No one can question that email has transformed the way business is conducted. According to Radicati group, the average worker processes more than a hundred daily emails, and business email accounts make up only about a quarter of the total of more than 3 billion. Sometime in the next few years, Radicati predicts that the number of IM accounts will exceed email for the first time.

Email and my own working life have been closely intertwined as well. I started using email in 1983 and over the years I have used more than three dozen different systems and sent thousands of messages. So I thought I would put together some important milestones of my own usage and show you how email has changed from those early days. In my working life, I published my first book on corporate email use (seen at left), published a weekly email newsletter and wrote many articles about various email products for dozens of publications, including this one.

Today the Official Gmail Blog posted a video and screengrabs of the new Gmail look, which will be rolling out soon. If you're jonesing to update now, click on the "switch to the new look" link in the bottom-right of your Gmail, which will appear in the next few days. News of the updated Gmail interface first hit the Web on October 20, after watchdog Alex Chitu spotted a leaked video on YouTube. This new Gmail rollout comes right on the heels of Google Reader, which got the Google Plus treatment.

The latest version of Sparrow's Gmail client for Mac users is now live in the Mac App Store. Although it's not a major release of the product, it does attempt to take a new approach to an old idea: email attachments.

Sparrow 1.4 integrates with quicky-and-easy filesharing service CloudApp to enable user to include links to files without using the traditional email attachment functionality (which is still included in Sparrow for those who want to use it).

Litmus, a company that tracks and tests email campaigns has taken a close look at where people are viewing their email. The stats, at least according to Litmus, provide some interesting insights into email habits. Outlook is still king, Webmail is in sharp decline, and Google Chrome is gaining share very rapidly.

The comparison is from July 2010 to July 2011. According to Litmus, use of mobile devices to read email is cutting into Webmail severely. Opens in mobile devices have jumped from 7% to 15% in one year. Desktop opens dropped from 55% to 53%, and Webmail dropped from 38% to 32%.

There are few products in the computer industry that have been around for 25 years, and fewer still that have their creator at the helm of the original company still selling the product. I am talking about the Listserv email list management tool. (Warning: loud audio embed in that link!) The name is almost synonymous with the task, and many of you might be surprised that Eric Thomas released Listserv on June 23, 1986 on his 20th birthday.

Dominique Leca doesn't know if Apple will approve his iPhone app, but he's building it anyway.

The co-founder of Sparrow, a popular Mac desktop client for Gmail, is working on an iOS version of the app, he told Business Insider recently.

Well, this week marks the tenth anniversary of identity-based message encryption with more than a billion secure messages being exchanged annually, according to Voltage, one of the leaders in this space.

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.

I think I could live quite happily without the "phone" part of my mobile phone. Other than taking press briefings and calling my parents, I rarely use my iPhone for actual calls. I'd rather text or IM. But according to survey results released today, it looks like my preferred methods of communication don't match most Americans'.

A survey of 2300 adults, conducted by Harris Interactive and sponsored by the VOIP service Rebtel, found that Americans still overwhelmingly prefer to communicate by voice. 74% of respondents said that the phone was how they keep in touch with friends and 81% said it's their preferred method of communicating with family members.

Six months after announcing a redesign, the newest version of Yahoo Mail is ready to come out of beta today, promising more social integration, faster load times, better spam filtering, cross-device operability and better search. Yahoo announced the beta version in October 2010 and it is the first major update to the platform in about five years.

The Associated Press reports that Yahoo Mail has 277 million users, down 1% from the same time last year. Hotmail is the global leader with 327 million users while Gmail has grown 24% (43 million users) over the last year to 220 million. Yahoo's announcement coincides with last week's iOS update to Yahoo Messenger as the company looks to reassert itself as an innovator and communications leader.