Focus On: Email

After all the criticism Microsoft has endured over Outlook through the years, the Redmond team can take some solace as the complaints pile up about the upgrade to Thunderbird's calendar extension, Lightning 0.1. In general, user requests fall into two categories: Make it more like Outlook with Exchange, and Everything Else.

After a long year of trying, Windows Live Mail BETA developers claim it just crossed the one million subscriber mark, on the way, they gush, to a fast ten million accounts. Bruised and battered beta testers who have suffered through giant ads, crashing browsers, sluggish performance, and lost contact lists are no doubt wondering how long it will take for the peppy Windows Live crew to build a Google-worthy email solution.

The boneheaded idea probably sounded great in committee: If you charge unwanted senders a ransom to bypass your spam filters, you turn them from an enforcement headache to a paying customer. Unfortunately for AOL and Yahoo, the concept hasn't had the same resonance with the public. As a result, opponents are signing up thousands of troops, while AOL's recruiting direct email customers, and Yahoo's heading for the hills. The outcome will be great fodder for a Harvard Business School case study.

Yahoo intermittently refused email from CraigsList. Hotmail nailed the world's largest classified advertising website to its blocklist. In response, CraigsList shut off subscription mail to them... kind of. Months later, CraigsList techs were still complaining of spasmodic delivery problems to the very services they claimed... and still claim... to have shut down. Email Battles takes a stab at sorting the whole mess out.

Meng Weng Wong invented the SPF method for email authentication. He worked hard for its adoption, but apparently not hard enough. In the just concluded SPF Council election, Wong came in dead last. Of course there are only 35 voters left to cast ballots for this once-thriving community. Email Battles has complete election results.