Send your fat attachments through Gmail

If your email provider or corporate IT department blocks large attachments (and in my experience, most do) you'll appreciate this: Chris Otts points out that Google has just doubled the maximize attachment size Gmail will accept to 20 megabytes. "Now you can start sharing more of those home videos, large presentations and files you just can't seem to get smaller," Google says. I think it's safe to say it's no coincidence that Google just bought YouTube and has announced it will be unveiling its own Powerpoint-like software soon. You can, by the way, find some other options for transferring large files at the Reporters' Cookbook.

How to Read Email Headers

Explained by Pobox:

Headers contain a wealth of information about your email. They tell you which machines handled your message, and how long they took to send it to you. They can tell you who sent the message, and who it was destined for. However, headers can be misleading. It is fairly simple to write fake headers, which obscure information about the sender, recipient, and the machines that handled the mail.

Spammers frequently use fake headers to confuse the people they spam. And because so few people know how to read headers, it often works. A working knowledge of email headers can help you track spam to its source, which makes it easier to stop spammers in their tracks.

Where's the e-mail?

Government e-mail is often a public record and is sometimes useful for watchdogging public agencies. I just came across this useful article from Law Technology News last year summarizing all the places e-mail can hide.

"Where's the e-mail?" It's a simple question, but one answered too simply -- and erroneously -- by, "It's on the e-mail server" or "The last 60 days of mail is on the server and the rest is purged." Certainly, some e-mail will reside on the server, but most e-mail is elsewhere, and it's never all gone, notwithstanding retention policies. The true location and extent of e-mail depends on systems configuration, user habits, back-up procedures and other hardware, software and behavioral factors. This is true for mom-and-pop shops, for large enterprises and for everything in-between.