On Message with Ben Gross

Adobe’s PDF format now an ISO standard: AppleInsider reports on the official acceptance of Adobe’s Portable Document Format as ISO Standard number 32000. This means that ISO is officially in control of the PDF standard.
RealSnailMail: is a research/performance art project to have snails outfitted so that they can store and deliver electronic messages (snail [...]

E-Discovery Leads to Arrest of Bear Stearns Hedge Funds Managers: The Wall Street & Technology Blog covers the depressingly evergreen story of senior management who send messages from their personal accounts about company actions that are illegal. This email about Bear Sterns acknowledged that a senior manager knew the fund was collapsing even though [...]

Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast: Matt Richtel at the New York Times writes about corporate recognition of the costs of interruption and distraction caused by email and other messaging technologies. Richtel now says that many of the companies that are also the largest messaging providers are working together to develop new tools [...]

Man accused of using LinkedIn to steal clients: The Register covers a lawsuit regarding a former employee of a recruitment firm who allegedly used his LinkedIn account to essentially export his contacts from the firm so he could use them to start a new competing firm. This is interesting for several reasons particularly with regard [...]

Coding Horror: Please Give Us Your Email Password: Jeff Atwood has a nice point outlining the unfortunately still too common practice of web services that request a user’s login and password from the major web services (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.) in order to extract address book information. Not only is this an obviously bad idea, [...]

Coding Horror: Designing For Evil: Jeff Atwood discusses some of the problems Craigslist has with spammers, some of the automated tools people can buy to spam Craiglist and some of the protections Craiglist has put in place to defended its community from spammers. Many of the problems and solutions apply to other community messaging systems.
Email [...]

Choosing the right email listserv: David Strom’s Web Informant provides a brief overview of free and inexpensive mailing list management tools suitable for individuals, groups, and small businesses. These services are often great improvements over attempting to manage a list directly from an email client. Strom is using Listserv in the generic sense as he [...]

New Sites Make It Easier To Spy on Your Friends: The Wall Street Journal has a piece on services and social network tools that can be used and abused to discover and extract information about individuals that would often be difficult to obtain otherwise.
The Dark Side of Social Networking: Questions for Brant Walker: The Voice [...]

mail-trends: Mihai Parparita’s tool to let you analyze and visualize your own Google-based email collection. The software is still in its early stages and requires a Python installation and a Google Apps or Gmail account. Mail-trends is open source under the BSD license. Hopefully, Mihai will update the package to support other IMAP servers in [...]

Cory Doctorow: How to stop your inbox exploding: In the Guardian Cory writes covers a set of simple tips for keeping messages to your inbox to a minimum. The five tips are: Sort your inbox by subject, color-code messages from known senders, kill people who make you crazy, half-resign from mailing lists, and keep a [...]