We all get busy—or even sometimes lazy—and forget to return a call or answer an email. This often leads to problems and can even ruin a good opportunity. Here's how to repair the damage next time you drop the ball. More »

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The News Corp. phone-hacking scandal continues to spiral out of control, sweeping up more and more of the companies employees and executives. In the UK, 8 people were arrested, including five News Corp journalists, in the broadening scandal, which may embroil deputy COO James Murdoch—Rupert’s son and heir-apparent. A paper copy of a deleted email found in a crate ties James Murdoch directly to the events under investigation, which involved the routine and illegal hacking of phone voicemails on behalf of a News Corp publication.

This email evidence would never have been found if it wasn’t printed out because News Corp, like many corporations, regularly deletes archived emails. It is standard practice, but the technical reasons given for deleting emails are usually not the real reason they are eliminated. The only real reason to destroy old emails is to avoid liability and future lawsuits.

Reading the account in the New York Times about this newly discovered email from former News of the World editor Colin Myler to James Murdoch, which dates back to 2008, you get a sense it wasn’t meant to be found.

Mr. Myler’s electronic copy had been lost “in a hardware failure” on March 18, 2010,” while Mr. Murdoch’s electronic copy had been deleted on Jan. 15, 2011 during an “e-mail stabilization and modernization program.”

Big corporations routinely delete old e-mails. Between April 2010 and July 2011, News International discussed e-mail deletion with HCL Technologies, which manages its e-mail system, on nine occasions, according to a letter HCL wrote to Parliament last summer.

Most of the reasons were mundane. But in January 2011, HCL said, News International asked whether HCL was capable of helping “truncate” — meaning delete — “a particular database” in the e-mail system. The question came shortly after disclosures in a civil suit brought by the actress Sienna Miller raised fears that material about widespread phone hacking at The News of the World might become public.

Companies know that incriminating evidence always exists in emails because emails document the conversations and decision-making that goes on in all organizations. But they need a justification other than “We don’t want to get caught.” So that’s how you get corporate doublespeak like “e-mail stabilization and modernization” programs, with its vague suggestion that there is a technical reason to delete old emails, as if a company’s entire email system might crash under the weight of old emails stored on a server.

Let’s just be clear here. By putting in place policies to routinely delete old email archives, companies are protecting themselves from future incrimination. And News Corp isn’t the only company that does this, by any means. It’s a preventative measure. But it only works if they destroy any incriminating emails before they are caught. Once an investigation starts and the prospect of subpoenas arise, destroying emails is no longer a legal option. In this case, that may come back to bite News Corp.

How to get started with Apple Mail

Despite the popularity of social networks, no computer is complete without a great email app to help you keep in touch with friends and loved ones.

It's no surprise, then, that all Macs come with Apple's Mail program built into OS X. It makes it easy to set up your email account and browse and sort your messages, as well as write emails to others.

You'll need to have an email account. And for many email types, including Yahoo!, AOL, Gmail and Windows Live/Hotmail, Mail can set up your account using just your email address and password.

You can set up other kinds of accounts, but you may need to know the details of your incoming and outgoing servers, which your provider should be able to supply you with.

Once your account is set up, you'll see the Mail interface, with a list of emails on the left, and a preview box on the right. There's a Show button just above the messages list that enables you to see your list of account inboxes, which is handy if you have more than one set up, have created multiple mailboxes, or if you want to browse messages you've deleted from your inbox.

From the toolbar along the top of the Mail window, you can check for new messages, compose a new email, create a new note, delete emails, mark emails as junk mail, forward and reply to messages, and flag emails for your attention later.

There's also a search bar here, which enables you to find text anywhere in any of your emails, so you can easily search for its subject, or the person who sent it, for example.

In this walkthrough, we'll talk you through the basics of using the Mail app, including getting set up, reading your emails and writing messages, but once you're more confident with Mail, you can do a lot more.

For example, you can set up Rules such as having incoming messages sorted into different inboxes depending on the sender, you can change the default font and size that messages are displayed in, and create multiple email signatures.

Of course, if all you want to do is send and receive the occasional hello from family members, you can stick with just the steps on the opposite page and enjoy the full email experience.

How to get to grips with features in Apple Mail

1. Set up your account

When you first open Mail, or when you add a new account, it will ask for your name, email address and password. For many types of email, this is all you'll need to enter, but if Mail is unable to find the information it needs automatically, it'll ask you for more details.

2. Read a message

With your account set up, and email flooding in, select one in the left-hand inbox list to display it in the window to the right. Or, you can double-click on an email to open it in a new window. From here, you can click the arrow buttons at the top to reply or forward emails.

3. File attachments

If an email sent to you has an attachment, you'll see a paperclip next to the sender's name. A file icon will be displayed beneath the email text. You can click a file's name to open it, open it with Quick Look for a brief check, and save it by right-clicking.

4. Photo attachments

Attachments, such as photos and PDF files, are handled slightly differently. They are displayed in full under the email's text. Again, they can be opened or saved, and if there are several photos, you can view them in a slideshow with Quick Look.

5. Search through emails

In the top-right of the Mail window is the search box. Mail will search all emails for anything you type in here. Results appear in the inbox pane, and below the search box. You can use this list to search for emails from certain people, or by subject line, for example.

6. Compose a message

Click the paper-and-pencil icon to create a new message. In the To field, you can enter the email address of your recipient.

If they're stored in your Address Book, you don't need to type out their email address in full – start typing their name, and Mail will offer their email address. Add a subject line and type a message in the blank space below that.

To attach a file, click the paperclip icon at the top of the windows and browse to the file you want. Clicking the icon that looks like a mountain will open a photo browser, so you can insert a photo from your iPhoto library.

To the right of this icon is a button to open the stationery pane, which enables you to send colourful emails.

We've long been fans of online file conversion service Zamzar, but today they released a new feature that lets you convert files over email, so you can convert files no matter where you are. More »

Some people always see the good in people and some people always see the bad … Gawker just published a post with what at first seems to be some pretty damning evidence against Path founder Dave Morin, publishing an email where he assured writer Ryan Tate that Path wasn’t storing user data.

While today’s headlines would lead one to believe that the statement was a lie, Morin (who is a friend) tells me that the exchange is misleading out of context. He was actually talking about Path 1.0 in the email, which lacked the “Add Friends” feature and therefore did not store any data.

The “Add Friends” data storage was added in Path’s second iteration, so he was technically telling the truth at the time. Again, Path 1.0 did not store data — it was a completely different product back then.

I’m waiting for an official statement from Morin, in the meantime, here is the [old] Gawker email.

[Gawker: Is it correct that Path uses iPhone address book data? Thanks for any guidance!]

Hey Ryan,

Thanks for the good question.

Path is created to share personal moments with your close friends and family. From the end user’s point of view, access to your iPhone contacts makes sharing with your closest friends and family convenient.

Like many apps (i.e. Skype and Kik ) — Path allows you to access your friends’ and family’s contact information from your own iPhone contacts in order to find them on the network.

One of our core principles here is that you must have contact information for someone in order to find them on Path. Usually, you have contact information for your close friends.

Path does not retain or store any of your information in any way.

That help?

Dave

[Emphasis added.]

Update: And here is the official statement from Morin …

Our email exchange from November 15, 2010 was absolutely accurate.  That was the day Path launched and we were not storing any address book information at that time, as I clearly stated in my email.  We introduced FriendRank in March 2011 and that is when we began retaining contact information with the intent to maximize the Path experience, specifically by:

1) showing users a list of friends on Path

2) suggesting friends users might want to connect to

3) telling users when any of their contacts joined Path

Image via Joi Ito/Flickr

Sick of mailto: links in your browser opening Outlook or Mail.app whenever you click them? You can tackle this problem with extensions or through other means, but Googler and HTML5 guru Paul Irish offers a simple, no-add-ons-required approach. Here's how it works: More »

PowerInbox, the email platform that lets you run apps for Facebook, Twitter, Groupon and Google+ inside your inbox, is today announcing the launching of its API. With this addition, companies that want to make their own emails interactive can now do so. To kick off the launch, PowerInbox signed up ten partners who used the API to build email apps across multiple verticals including video, shopping, games and more.

As a refresher, PowerInbox is service that runs on top of email (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail or Outlook), augmenting the messages sent to you by various services, like Facebook or Twitter, for example. With PowerInbox installed via a browser extension (or Outlook add-in), those emails become interactive. In other words, you don’t have to click through on a link in an email to take a specific action, you can do it right from within the email itself.

From your Twitter emails, you can follow, message and @reply users. From Facebook emails you can like and reply to posts. You can also add people to Google+ circles or see how long you have left to grab the newest Groupon.

With today’s API launch (beta), companies can add their own interactive elements to the emails they send out, including e-commerce functions, videos, photos, real-time updates within the email’s body, and more.

Ten companies have teamed up with PowerInbox, and are announcing their own interactive emails. These include:

• Followup.cc: Enables one-click snoozing of emails for later review.
• Fundraise: Allows donations inside emails.
• NextWidgets: Browse store items inside emails.
• OmniStrat: Enables response to SocialStrat panel activity within emails.
• Senexx: Facilitates construction of enterprise knowledge inside emails.
• Smak: Enables communication alerts within emails.
• Symbyoz: Connect with your network inside emails.
• TimeTrade: Schedule meetings within emails.
• TumbleCube: Enables project management inside emails.
• Vsnap: Allows Vsnap videos to be viewed within emails.

PowerInbox is also debuting support for Outlook today (2003, 2007, 2010), as well as browser extensions for Safari and Internet Explorer. Previously, it only supported Chrome, Firefox and Rockmelt.

While it may not be as exiting as a Facebook IPO, email is still the most used application for many people. “We spend more than 1.5 trillion minutes in email a year,” says PowerInbox CEO Matt Thazhmon. “This is an incredible amount of time and we wanted to make sure it was time well spent.”

Despite email’s ubiquity, it hasn’t turned into a platform. “Email hasn’t really changed in the last 20 years,” Thazhmon says. “I have no doubt that in the future we will all be able to shop, play games, watch movies etc, right in our email.”

Early metrics from the service’s first users show that making emails more interactive can have an effect. Roughly 30% of users have followed someone on Twitter, tweeted, DM’d or liked something on Facebook via the platform.

Going forward, the company will focus on API improvements, adding more partners, and, in the near-term, on maintenance, tutorials, and launching hackathons and contests.

PowerInbox raised an additional $800,000 in funding in October, bringing its total funding to $1.9 million, with both VC and angel backers.

The toolkit, API and documentation will be live this morning at Powerinbox.com/learnmore.

When we first wrote about PowerInbox a few months ago, I was impressed by how the company was attempting to make email do more than just send messages back and forth. By custom-coding its own applications, PowerInbox was allowing people to annotate messages, track packages and more, akin to how Movable Ink works. But the team met a bit of a challenge when it was trying to sell the product to potential users. It was faced with the same question, time and again:

“That’s great, but how do I make my own emails interactive?”

So the team had a decision to make. Should it keep crafting its own, or should it make an API whereby other people could make their own emails interactive? The choice was made to focus on the API, and the results are pretty incredible.

PowerInbox is now launching to the public with a system that lets you integrate applications directly into your email. The best part? It’s so simple that you can get an application embedded into your email in less than 5 minutes. The platform works in Outlook 32-bit, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, across all major browsers.

Some shining examples of what you can do with the new version of PowerInbox come from companies like NextWidgets, which powers a shop for Kelly Wearstler. The company allows you to embed a widget of your online store directly into an email. Customers can browse, recommend and even add items to the cart, only having to leave the email to actually complete the checkout process.

PowerInbox is launching with a load of partners, covering everything from fundraising to project management and even enterprise knowledge sharing. Given how quickly companies can insert apps, we should see more adoption rather quickly.

• Followup.cc: Enables one-click snoozing of emails for later review.
• Fundraise: Allows donations inside emails.
• NextWidgets: Browse store items inside emails.
• OmniStrat: Enables response to SocialStrat panel activity within emails.
• Senexx: Facilitates construction of enterprise knowledge inside emails.
• Smak: Enables communication alerts within emails.
• Symbyoz: Connect with your network inside emails.
• TimeTrade: Schedule meetings within emails.
• TumbleCube: Enables project management inside emails.
• Vsnap: Allows Vsnap videos to be viewed within emails.

When you look at average click rates of email, which hover around 3-4%, PowerInbox makes a huge impact. The company tells me that it’s seeing 30% of emails that include a Facebook Like button or Twitter widget gather true engagement via Likes, Shares, Retweets and Favorites. For a company like Groupon, which often sees its emails open after a deal is expired, it can dynamically feed in a current, soon-to-expire deal to the message, giving it a second chance to close a sale.

If you’re looking for a way to do more with your email, the PowerInbox API is a massive step in the right direction. Drop by the site, check out the new PowerInbox and give us your thoughts in the comments.

➤ PowerInbox

Nowadays, immediacy is the norm. Cellphones offer the possibility of constant contact and app and media stores offer instant downloads of purchases. When we're required to wait for something, such as a reply to an email, we often feel slighted as if a lack of immediate response means we're not important. Sometimes it doesn't, and he's why. More »