ReadWriteWeb

When Google Apps left beta back in July, Google announced that it would be adding a set of enterprise-specific features to make Premier Edition more attractive to businesses. Today Google has made good on that promise by supporting email retention and delegation for Apps customers.

Gmail is an awesome Web mail program, but it was missing some functionality essential for adoption in larger enterprises. One of those aspects was the ability for businesses to set company-wide retention policies in order to comply with regulatory requirements. Another one, the icing on the cake really, was email delegation that allows users to let others manage email for them.

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?

Earlier this month, Google attempted to make a shot across Microsoft's bow with an Apps Sync for Outlook. Unfortunately for them, it completely fizzled when Microsoft made clear that the plugin disabled key Outlook functionality.

Google admitted as much at the time. But today, they've announced that the issues have been fixed. Windows Desktop Search now works, and users can control how the archiving operates. For those who continued to use the completely dysfunctional version, Google will save you from yourself by automatically updating to the current release.

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.

Google today announced a new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform; Google Wave. While some of the details are still a bit sketchy, Google Wave looks to be an integrated communications platform that brings together email, chat, photo-sharing, and collaborative editing features. Google describes a 'wave' as "equal parts conversation and document" and the Wave team basically sees it as a replacement for email and other collaboration tools.

Oh, how I'd like to be Merlin Mann... master of the email demons, wizard of the inbox. (Also, brilliant and funny as hell.) He has a methodology for taming the beasts that lurk inside Gmail, Outlook, Entourage, Thunderbird and Eudora, and his gleaming, empty inbox serves as a beacon of hope to all that it might be possible for you, too.

Of course, knowing something's possible is a double-edged sword... at least, for those of us procrastinators who have yet to find the time to become inbox black-belts. (Yes, yes... the investment of time now will more than pay for itself in future productivity. Thanks for the tip. Now please look up the word "procrastinator.")

Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System blog found an interesting reference to a "magic inbox" in Gmail's code this morning. In addition, there are also references to an "icebox-inbox" and the ability to sort mail by priority. Google has been relatively tepid with regards to adding features that exploit a user's social graph, but these references seem to point towards a system where Google could organize a user's mail based on the strength of this user's connection with the sender and not just based on the time a message arrived.

A couple of weeks ago, we reported that the highly popular blog host WordPress.com now allows its users to reply to comments by email, but starting today, WordPress.com is taking its email strategy even further, and now allows users to post text and images by email as well. Those WordPress.com users who subscribe to the VideoPress upgrade will now also be able to upload videos to their blogs by email, and those who subscribe to the WordPress Space Upgrade can also post MP3 attachments. The service now gives every user a 'secret' email address to sent their posts to. These addresses can be activated from the WordPress.com dashboard.

WordPress, on their official blog, made a short announcement that Wordpress.com blog owners could now enable reply by email support for comments made to their blog. With a couple of simple configuration changes, blog owners can get the convenience of being able to directly reply to new comments via their preferred email address instead of through the Wordpress admin interface.

If you often send emails to multiple recipients, a new feature in Gmail Labs will now help you to ensure that you don't inadvertently forget a recipient you typically include in your group emails. After you activate it, this new feature, "Suggest more Recipients," kicks in after you add at least two recipients to your message. If you, for example, usually send out a message to your mom, dad, sister and brother together, Gmail will suggest that you add both your sister and brother to the list of recipients after you type in your mother's and father's address.

Full Disclosure: this is an opinionated rant. Why do I have to go to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to send messages? Why do people insist on using these non-standard messaging systems? If people said, "Don't call me on the telephone -- I prefer the delephone," you would think they were crazy. For a while, this was a minor inconvenience, but now it is starting to get out of control.

In the earliest days of the Internet, getting an .edu email address and signing in to Pine for the first time was a rite of passage for many college freshmen. Now, however, virtually every new college student got an email address before even graduating from primary school. Because of this, a number of schools are now considering phasing out email hosting for their students altogether. According to a recent report (PDF), 20% of American colleges already outsource their email systems to commercial providers, and more plan to do so in the future.

From CircleUp, a group messaging service for membership websites, comes a new service called SmartPay which lets small groups and teams collect money via email. This can easily replace the old method of payment collection used by most groups today: passing around an envelope and stuffing it full of cash and checks. The new SmartPay service uses Amazon Payments on the backend, providing members with a familiar experience that will hopefully ease their security concerns about paying online.

Xobni, the Outlook email plugin that makes your inbox a more social experience, is finally leaving their beta phase after 10 months of testing. The company is also announcing they've taken in an additional investment of $3.2 million to bring their series B round to over $10 million.

Nielsen Online, an analytics firm that tracks time spent online at various websites, has issued a report finding that throughout 2008 social networking sites and blogs saw more time spent by users than personal email. While not shocking, the finding does mark an important point in the history of the web.

Youth watchers have long argued that for young people, email is how you communicate with elders in formal situations, while social networks and SMS are the preferred method of communication among peers. Nielsen found, however, that Facebook in particular saw greater growth among older people than it did among the young.

Twimailer is a new service that provides a simple, yet extremely useful function: It enhances the standard Twitter email notification with lots of good information on the new follower including recent tweets, follower and following stats, and more. Thanks go to Amber Case (@caseorganic) for the heads-up.

Today at DEMO09, a company called cc:Betty launched their new smart email service which creates "mailspaces" for your email conversations. These online sites serve as a home for your email discussions, functioning somewhat like a SharePoint site or a Google Group, but far more robust and much easier to create. The collaborative workspaces are populated with the email conversations themselves as well as images, videos, audio files, and more all retrieved from within the email thread. Most importantly, they can be created on-the-fly. All you need to do is "cc: Betty."