"My mom worries to unrational degree about my well being when I'm travelling. And she never reads her emails. So I decided to automate this process of informing my mom that I'm alive when I'm abroad. This small php script checks the ip address of the visitor calling it and if that ip address is not in Finland it'll generate a small email to my mom, mostly telling her where I am and that I'm alive. It does this emailing only once in 24 hours. This script is called from a small python script that runs in the background and tries to call this script every hour or so. So if I'm using my laptop (which I usually am) and I have internet connection this should automatically make me a better son." Hah!

"MockSMTP is a native Mac application that embeds its own SMTP server. It also features an e-mail client browser, enabling instant viewing of both raw content and HTML rendering, so you can see how your mail looks when delivered." What an excellent idea.

Fantastic. If you're like me, and use One Gmail Account To Rule Them All, but use Mail as your email client, you can only use the main email address to send from. This allows you to pick a from address, making your mailing lists work again, and allowing you to pick the From address on send.

"With no planning, we all started acting as if we were people in a real office. Almost immediately we began to adopt characters and send officious announcements. Soon we were referring to characters in the office who didn’t exist in real life. Meeting rooms were booked, couriers arrived, servers went down, timesheets were requested, and embarrassing emails were accidentally sent to everyone in the company." Phil is right; it's a wonderful, bonkers piece of improv-email theatre.

A story, between two people, told through email. Not looking like email; actually, originally, told over email. Now, it can only be read in order - but once, it would have been delivered. Can't imagine how striking it might have been.

"I don’t think I’ve read an article in the last year that speaks about email as much other than an irritant." This one, however, makes some very interesting claims.

Looks useful - a plugin to generate email updates about things within your domain model.

Mailtrap helps you test ActionMailer: "Yesterday I mocked up the simplest, dumbest, Ruby SMTP server you can imagine. It speaks just enough SMTP to allow ActionMailer to make a connection and send it a message."

"Sup is a console-based email client for people with a lot of email. It supports tagging, very fast full-text search, automatic contact- list management, custom code insertion via a hook system, and more." It's a bit like Mutt-meets-Gmail.

Really comprehensive Wordpress plugin for handling not just contact forms, but data-tracking forms of any kind. Customisable, reasonably nice output, and a good database admin that lets you spit out CSV. Recommended.

Beautiful: "Anymails is a visualization of my received emails... An unread email is hairy and swims fast; a read email has less hair and does not swim so fast anymore; a responded email is hairless and barely moves."

Colours svn/cvs diffs when you get them in your Thunderbird inbox. In a word: nice.

"Just as the mini-player in iTunes does for music; MiniMail puts information about your inbox at your fingertips. You can easily see messages as they arrive, and quickly action them." Want!

Oh god. This is such a terrible, terrible idea.

Might come in handy should I ever get one of them widescreen notebooks.

MsgFiler is a plug-in for Apple Mail which quickly files emails into existing mailbox folders.

I really need to start using Mail.app better.

Julian Bleecker on potential (slower) alternatives to email.

In short: it sucks