Hugh at gapingvoid points out a new book by tech writer Ben Hammersley called Hacking Gmail. It’s about neat things to do with Google’s e-mail service, like using it as a backup drive. Peter shares words of wisdom in the comments: since many of the hacks are against Google’s terms of service, if you already have a Gmail account, it might be wise to start a new account and use that for the hacks. That way if they terminate your account, you don’t lose your e-mail.

I admit that I appreciate Google and Gmail’s humor and sometimes even find myself laughing at it. Have you seen Gmail’s pun:

"This holiday season,
we hope yule log-in to Gmail."

*j groans, then laughs

Many of us are receiving a German lesson because of the flood of German spam e-mails. The Yahoo! account using their built-in spam filter received about 100. The other one with no spam filter received nothing. One of my work accounts received more than 650 of them over the weekend and continues to see about 300 a day. They arrive at about the same rate I delete them, so I try not to keep up. Luckily, that e-mail software has a mass delete option.

After discovering he’s having a difficult time keeping up with his e-mail, Steven Cohen of Library Stuff publishes his contact information and suggests people use alternative methods of contacting him, like telephone, instant messaging, and Skype.

I’ll be curious to know how well encouraging others to use alternate methods works for him. I feel like if I put more of my contact information out there, more people will probably contact me, which leads to more time spent communicating directly with readers and less time available generally. (I have a horrible schedule right now.) I wonder how well it would work to get people who would usually use e-mail to use a different form of communication. I much prefer the telephone, IM, and Skype for certain conversations.

Here’s some humor related to an e-mail attachment didn’t come through–not that receiving threatening e-mails is funny because it isn’t. It is a rather serious matter that should be handled via the proper authorities.

I doubt I’ll ever be able to get rid of those 50 invites I have.

I felt okay about the 100+ e-mail messages I receive daily until I read Stever Robbins’ estimate that it takes 3 minutes to deal with each message, which amounts to 5 hours of e-mail management a day. Wow. No wonder I can’t get anything done!

Robbins shares a number of valuable tips, like how to summarize messages, improve subject lines (one of my pet peeves is bad subject lines), and when to blind carbon copy someone.

from Garrett, who found it on beSpacific

Rebecca’s having a contest for the best Valentine’s Day sonnet about blogging and the holiday. The prize: a Gmail invite.

Addendum: Rebecca has a few follow-up posts, including a sonnet from David Weinberger. More are on Weblogs at Harvard Law blog. It’s so nice to see new content on that site. It’s especially appropriate since it’s still using a red theme.

beSpacific reports the Texas attorney general is suing a major spammer.