ReadWriteWeb

Investors get lots of emails. Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group wrote just this morning on how he wishes email were slower so he wouldn't suffer from what he calls "Email Compulsive Disorder." That being said, there are ways to write better messages when communicating with investors (or anyone who receives a lot of email daily) that will make the process simpler, quicker and will better your chances of hearing back from them.

Today, email is nearly as ubiquitous as the computer itself. It offers a simple process that "just works" for most users and it has become a defacto communication process for enterprises and individuals alike.

YouSendIt found its place in the evolution of email by providing existing email users a solution to a common problem - sending large files. Along the way, the company has leveraged its position in cloud based solution to offer additional benefits to its users.

A couple of years ago, the new launch from Webwalks, a universal inbox, news aggregator, password manager and kitchen sink-type application would have caught my eye. I'd rush out to try it, merging my multiple accounts under its one roof then wait to see how well my life improved, how much time I saved. But today, I'm more ambivalent about these sorts of applications. The concept of a universal inbox for tracking everything under the sun now leaves me cold.

That's not to say that merging of social networks with the inbox in and of itself is a bad idea - Google Buzz, Xobni, and Outlook's new social connector all offer innovative ways to augment the inbox experience. But there's a key difference between these apps and those promising a "universal inbox" - they come to you, in the inbox you already know and love.

Over the last few days, there has been a lot of buzz about how much private information your public Google profile contains if you don't choose the right settings. The URL of your profile alone can already give away your Gmail address. To hide this address from public view, you can switch your profile URL away from showing your name to using an address that features a 21-digit number instead of your username. However, as it turns out, this isn't a foolproof method either. By using a very simple trick, anybody can quickly figure out your Gmail address from these numbers.

Gtriage is a new service that aims to help Gmail users suffering from "information overload" due to an overcrowded inbox - a problem affecting the majority of email users today. The way the service works is that it scans all your email messages and to determine which ones are the most important to you. It then tags those messages "Important" with bright red labels so they don't get missed.

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

"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."