email news stories on Newser

New End-of-Life Planning: Social Media Wills

Matt Cantor — Mon, 07 May 2012 10:01:10 CDT

Social networking has already changed our lives; now, officials want us to consider its implications after our death. On its blog, the US government is calling on Americans to create "social media wills," which detail our wishes for the future of the huge range of online accounts we all have...

Judge: Yeah, I Sent Racist Obama Email

Polly Davis Doig — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:28:27 CST

It always seems like a good idea at the time: Open stupid email forward at work, guffaw under your breath, forward it on to a couple of buddies. Except when you're a federal judge. On your official email. And the content of the email takes a not-so-subtle racist jab at...

Errant Click Crashes German Parliament's Email

John Johnson — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:27:51 CST

Another entry in the "reply to all" fail category: A staffer in the German Parliament brought the government's email system to a standstill for about a half-hour after accidentally including all 4,032 co-workers in an email loop, reports Reuters . After the employee named Babette sent her email—"Please bring...

NY Times Mistakenly Sends Email to 9M People

John Johnson — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:29:53 CST

Nearly 9 million people got a puzzling email from the New York Times today, but fears of a massive hack are apparently unfounded. Turns out, it was good old-fashioned human error. The newspaper meant to send the email only to a few hundred people who had recently canceled home delivery,...

Tech Firm Outlaws Email

John Johnson — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:40:49 CST

Soon, employees of the biggest IT company in Europe won't be able to do the most common of tech tasks: send or receive email. Atos CEO Thierry Breton thinks email is a tremendous waste of time, and he's in the process of having it eliminated in the workplace, reports Ars...

GOP Email Shows Obama Shot in Head

Neal Colgrass — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:30:05 CDT

Conservatives in Virginia checked their email today and found an image of President Obama with a bullet through his head—courtesy of Loudon County's Republican committee. The image portrayed Obama as a zombie, with a bleeding hole in his forehead and part of his skull missing, the Washington Post reports....

The New Status Symbol: AOL Email Address

Evann Gastaldo — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 18:02:05 CDT

AOL.com email addresses are so nineties , right? But apparently they're also a sort of weird status symbol amongst a certain set. Ben Smith first made the argument last week on Politico , noting that despite the "stigma" long associated with the AOL.com domain, there's also "a certain prestige" attached...

Tech Writer's Experiment: 'I’m Quitting Email'

John Johnson — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 12:19:36 CDT

MG Siegler of TechCrunch sees email as the "absolute devil," a time-sucking demon that haunts him morning to night. Solution: "For the rest of this month, I’m not going to respond to any emails," he writes. "None." Those who email him will get an auto response telling them to figure...

Spammers Actually Deliver What You Order

Rob Quinn — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 17:04:05 CDT

Researchers probing the world of spam were surprised to discover that the email-box-clogging lowlifes of the Internet aren't quite as scummy as one would expect. The investigators, whose study involved making numerous purchases from spammers, found that the goods ordered—including pills and fake Rolexes—were usually delivered, reports Consumerist.