Inside these posts: E-mail

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Walgreens, Chase, TiVo warn of email breach

A data breach at one of the world’s largest providers of marketing-email services may have enabled unauthorized people to access the names and email addresses for customers of major financial-services, retailing and other companies.

While no financial information was compromised, the major concern is that the emails and names could be used for “phishing,” that is, phony emails asking unsuspecting consumers to divulge information such as account numbers, log-ins or Social Security numbers. Get the full story »

Student who hacked into Palin e-mail enters prison

David Kernell, 23, the former University of Tennessee student convicted of hacking into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account, has begun his term in a dormitory-like, unfenced federal prison, a Bureau of Prisons spokesman said on Thursday. Get the full story »

Microsoft says lost Hotmail e-mails now restored

Microsoft Corp. said it has resolved a glitch that caused some Hotmail users to temporarily lose all of their e-mails. Get the full story »

USDA moves e-mail to Chicago-area cloud

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is moving to a cloud-based system for e-mail, with its data being stored in Microsoft’s data center in suburban Chicago.

Cloud computing moves applications to the Internet, cutting costs and facilitating easier access to information. The USDA said it awarded a contract in May to Dell for Microsoft Online Services, aiming to move all of its e-mail, instant messaging and collaboration applications to the cloud.

Microsoft’s data center in Northlake opened in September 2009 and is home to thousands of servers that provide processing power and storage for the company’s cloud services. Get the full story »

New Facebook messaging takes on Google, Yahoo

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks about the 350 million active users daily of Facebook messaging in San Francisco, Nov. 15, 2010. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

In a bid to become the junction box for people’s digital communications, Facebook announced Monday it plans to launch a new communication platform intended to unify e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging and the social network’s existing message system through a single “social in-box.”

While each of the social network’s more than 500 million users will have the chance to get an @facebook.com e-mail address as the new service gradually rolls out to members in coming months, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the goal was not to create the world’s largest e-mail network, but to merge external e-mail, text messaging, instant messages and Facebook’s existing internal messaging service into a new kind of seamless communication system. Get the full story »

Google blocks data from Facebook amid rivalry

Google will begin blocking Facebook and other Web services from accessing its users’ information, highlighting an intensifying rivalry between the two Internet giants.

Google will no longer let other services automatically import its users’ email contact data for their own purposes, unless the information flows both ways. It accused Facebook in particular of siphoning up Google contact data, without allowing for the automatic import and export of Facebook users’ information.

Facebook, with more than 500 million users, relies on email services such as Google’s Gmail to help new users find friends already on the network. When a person joins, they are asked to import their Gmail contact list into the social network service. Facebook then tells the user which email contacts are also on the social network. Get the full story »

Yahoo revamps e-mail, shows new products

Yahoo Inc., aiming to reverse the slide in time that people spend on its Web sites, previewed updates to several advertising and consumer products on Thursday, including a revamp of its e-mail service and additional features in its search engine.

At an event at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters, Chief Product Officer Blake Irving laid out a three-year vision for Yahoo as an “innovative technology company with the largest digital media content and communications business in the world.” Get the full story »

Gmail to add mind-reading priority mailbox

Google is adding a new feature in Gmail that will automatically spotlight important e-mails and separate out the ones you can wait to read later.

The tool, called “priority inbox,“ works like a spam filter, except instead of filtering e-mails that you definitely don’t want to see, it moves the ones you really want to the top. Google said the feature will help users sort through inboxes that fill up with hundreds of automated e-mails that don’t need immediate attention. Get the full story »

India says RIM to give it access to secure data

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion will give India access to secure data from Sept. 1, a government source said Monday as the country pushes RIM, Google and Skype to set up servers in India due to its security concerns.

On Monday, the interior ministry said RIM had offered India a few proposals to gain access its secure data and that the feasibility of the solutions would be assessed within 60 days. It did not give details of the solutions. Get the full story »

Google adds free PC-to-phone calling to e-mail

Google is adding a new e-mail feature that may persuade more people to cut the cords on their landline phones. The service unveiled Wednesday enables U.S. users of Google Inc.’s free Gmail service to make calls from their personal computers to telephones virtually anywhere in the world.

SEC adds rulemaking actions to e-mail alerts

The Securities and Exchange Commission has introduced e-mail alerts that will allow the public to be notified when new feedback is posted on its Web site about rulemaking for the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.

It has had e-mail alerts for a year on other matters and has since sent 11 million updates to nearly 14,000 subscribers. Get the full story »