For reference, here's some Peek PR from 2008, right after their first product launched:

Peek, the first elegantly simple, email-only device, launched today. Created for people who don't need or want an expensive smartphone full of functions and software, the Peek device delivers unlimited email to and from existing accounts, anywhere in the U.S. Extraordinarily simple to set up and use, Peek has eliminated multi-year contracts, bewildering rate plans and hidden fees. The mobile device is super-thin, stylish and easy to use. There are no scary buttons; no confusing bells and whistles.

So they've basically gone from "hey, check out our new product! It's not quite as capable as a smartphone, but we're happy to make a reasoned case that the tradeoffs are worth it!" all the way to "Ha! Look! One of many overlapping BlackBerry features went down for a few hours, so fuck them! And fuck you! Buy a Peek or you'll eat dinner alone forever, like a loser."

You feeling ok, Peek?

What follows is a guide for getting Thunderbird 3 set up as a dedicated offline email client, as well as a more convenient and powerful online inbox aggregator—allowing you to manage everything from your regular email accounts to Google Voice, Google Wave, and other non-email inboxes with a little setting up. If you're using a standard Gmail account, setting it up with Thunderbird 3 is really easy—just type in your username and password when you first start up. If you're a Google Apps user or have another IMAP-available email client, follow Google's IMAP instructions to get started.

Set up content tabs for Google Wave, Voice, or any site

We showed you last week how easy it is to create a persistent Google Wave tab in Thunderbird 3, helping you keep tabs on the not-quite-there-but-really-interesting messaging and collaboration service. The short version? Head to the Tools menu, select Error Console, then enter this code (copy the whole thing) and hit Evaluate:

If you're a Google Voice user, you can pull off a similar persistent Voice inbox tab, per commenter steelpitt's advice:

And, as trstn points out, you can easily enter most any web site as the address in the contentPage section. Heck, you can even keep your web-based Gmail open, if you feel like having a fallback if Thunderbird frustrates you.

Learn its search and filter powers (and let it index overnight)

Thunderbird's new search powers are, in a word, awesome. One of the most powerful arguments for sticking to Gmail's web interface is its uber-powerful search operators. Thunderbird's search powers aren't quite as comprehensive, but they do help you quickly find a message using the same kind of filters and operators.

For my personal Gmail account, search results loaded about as fast they did on the web version. After a quick keyword search, you can filter by sender, prioritized by how many emails they've sent you, or by folder location, and add filters like "To Me," "From Me," starred items, and with attachments. Those are, of course, the basics of web-based Gmail, but when you're using Thunderbird offline, they can still search through every single message, not just the 3 months and change you've loaded into Google Gears.

A good bit of advice, though, from Seth Rosenblatt at CNET: give Thunderbird time to run through your messages. Leaving it running overnight is about what's needed for accounts that have been active for a few years, and overnight plus a day in the background should work for most any account.

Set up permanent and one-shot offline sessions

Gmail offers offline inbox access and composition, and even offline message attachments, but it's limited in size, and even Google warns you that you'll see some serious slowdown if you stash more than the standard 3 months of messages in your Google Gears database. Thunderbird, on the other hand, is a tried and true road warrior, and lets you keep as much material as you want on your hard drive.

To edit which messages, and how many of them, are kept local for searching and retrieval, head to the Edit menu and then Account Settings. Under the Synchronization & Storage menu for a particular email account, hit Advanced to set which folders get the synchronization treatment. Don't select all of them out of security, though—you'll see that you can do one-shot folder syncs, just below. When you've got a good set checked off, set the maximum message size in back in the main storage settings.

When you're getting ready to head out on a trip, hit the File->Offline menu and select Download/Sync. You'll get the menu you see above, asking you to either go ahead and use your default settings, or choose certain folders to bring offline for this offline jaunt. Do the sync, and you're ready to read, write, and do your general email thing without a net connection.

You'll still want to "compact" your mail folders every now and again—made easier with one of the buttons in the Toolbar Buttons add-on.

Install ThunderBrowse

At its core, ThunderBrowse is a tiny, fast browser that bakes itself into Thunderbird to allow reading web sites without switching over to your browser. More than that, though, ThunderBrowse's preferences let you fine-tune how JavaScript, images, and plug-ins like Flash are handled in HTML-formatted emails. Put simply, ThunderBrowse makes it more convenient to stick to text-only emails, clicking to open the HTML-formatted space hogs only if you choose.

"Yeah, that's nice, but I like my Chrome/Safari/Opera," you say? ThunderBrowse is still worth the very quick download.

To start with, ThunderBrowse lets you customize how your external browser is launched. You can open most links in ThunderBrowse, but save middle-clicked links for your high-powered browser. Customize how email links are launched in that browser? You sure can. ThunderBrowse is also fairly snappy and light, so even if you're using an ultra-speedy browser, it might be just as fast to launch a site you're glancing at inside Thunderbird, rather than wait for an external browser to pick up the URL and load it. Your mileage may vary, but I've found ThunderBrowse tremendously helpful in running through emails with speed.

That's a lot of emails—but not as much data as you might first think. Berkeley estimated in 2003 the average email size to be around 18,500 bytes. That's about 379 gigabytes of lost email, give or take a few Powerpoints attachments with slides missing in the "Find a reason to invade Iraq" section.

Mother Jones had details of the recovery process:

Restoration of missing emails promises to be the trickiest part of the settlement agreement. The White House first ran into archiving problems in 2003, but didn't begin to address the problem until October 2005. Only in the final days of the Bush administration did the White House begin working with contractors-including software giant Microsoft-to find missing messages.

Don't expect to see these for a while. The National Archives have to sift through the emails before they'll be released to the public. But expect a thousand Freedom of Information Act requests to let fly towards Washington in the meantime. [Telegram/AP]

As soon as the email archives' contents were made publicly available, arguments broke out. Was there proof of data manipulation that could flip the entire climate debate topsy-turvy? Were scientists at the university working to keep works by climate skeptics out of journals? Answers to either question are unclear. According to New Scientist, there was no evidence of actual data manipulation, but some of the email exchanges could be construed as attempts to suppress some research.

No matter how those questions wind up being resolved, in the end the trouble doesn't seem to be in the contents of the emails or in the data, but in the fact that the Climate Research Unit restricted access to the climate data to those it deemed "bona fide researchers." Maybe some of the accusations the unit faced could've been avoided had the data been more freely shared in the first place. [New Scientist]

Photo by coda

The project's name reflects how much faster Nigeria is able to deal with the problem now. Previously, officials would use cyber raids and petitions (seriously? Like a "Sign here if you want to see this guy busted for identity theft" petition?) to deal with the problem. Now they're implementing a drop-kick shut down procedure that, according to officials, could take up to 5,000 fraudulent emails offline per month.

The Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has been working closely with Microsoft to develop a solution that should be fully operational by 2010. [Ars Technica, image of Nigerian scammer via Fox News]

"Got the Wrong Bob?" is a new Google Labs feature that you can turn on in Gmail. It works by analyzing groups of people that you usually email together. For example, if you accidentally include your boss Hank in with your normal key party invite group when you meant to invite country singer Hank Williams Jr., well, Gmail will ask if you meant this Hank instead of that Hank. This will in turn save you a boatload of awkwardness (or a magical night where you learn more about your boss than you ever thought possible, but that's neither here nor there).

So go ahead, check it out and see if it works. It certainly can't hurt, right? [Official Gmail Blog via Esquire]

You might someday send resumes or other important documents over Facebook and Twitter, but Email is never going to be "dead". In fact, with push email on your phone, it's basically as instant as any of the other networks.

Google Wave might also be pretty interesting when the people pimping it out call it what email would look like if it were invented today. It's too early to tell. But for it to be truly ubiquitous—and it has to be in order to replace email—it can't be hosted by just one company.

Think of it this way: if people are still using Fax machines—fucking FAX MACHINES—on a daily basis, there's no way that Email will be excised from our collective productivity streams. Not when it's this much more usable by the average person than faxes.

Lastly, how did they come up with the number of social network subscriptions being higher than email, when all social networks require you to sign up with an email account? [WSJ]

He told Commonwealth Club of California forum attendees that he recently responded to an email that appeared to come from his bank, stopping only when he was asked for his password. Using his experience as an example, he went on to speak about the ever increasing threat of cybercrime. One smart-ass citizen responded to his warnings thusly:

"I'm not worried about a teenage hacker reading my e-mail. I'm worried about you reading it."

Ballsy—I'll give him that. But it appears that we have little to worry about as far as Muller is concerned. He's too busy reading every email in his inbox that's from Zimbabwe or in all caps. [SFGate]

"123456" was the most popular password, appearing 64 times. Yes, that's but one digit away from this famous Spaceballs clip:

Other trends? The next top 20 most popular passwords were Spanish names, just under half the population used all lower case letters, and only six percent of the population used an alphanumeric combination.

Also, about 20% of the passwords were only six characters long...though the longest password was the awesome "lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo". [The Inquirer]

The New York Times says Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have confirmed the addresses are real, and that they're helping affected users recover their accounts.

Even though you generally have to be pretty damn gullible to fall for one of these fake sites (or open strange-looking email attachments), now might be a good time to change your Web mail password...something you should be doing every now and then anyway. [BBC via New York Times]

The locks allow remote status checks and changes, so anywhere you've got a secure internet connection, you can lock and unlock the door at will. It's also got a ton of extra features, like turning on customized lighting when you enter the door or notifying you via email of anyone going in and out of your house. This is all done by Kwikset's marginally paranoid Connect4 system, and it's likely to cost a pretty penny. But I'd definitely pay a premium to be able to know for sure whether I locked the door. [Kwikset via Engadget]

Click on the picture for a closer look.

The higher up in the hierarchy a distractions is, the more of a priority it's supposed to be. I'm not entirely sure I agree about a work email trumping a new pal's Facebook update, but it's a reasonable enough chart. What's your order of priorities? [Information is Beautiful]

According to her employer, ProCare Health, Vicki Walker was terminated from her position as a financial controller because she "caused disharmony in the workplace by using block capitals, bold typeface and red text in her emails."

What Vicki told the New Zealand Herald though, is that it wasn't a series of emails, but rather one single email which was used in the evidence against her:

The email, which advises her team how to fill out staff claim forms, specifies a time and date highlighted in bold red, and a sentence written in capitals and highlighted in bold blue. It reads: "To ensure your staff claim is processed and paid, please do follow the below checklist."

To me it sounds like Vicki is either a crazy control freak of a cat lady who insists on spelling things out as if she works with a bunch of children or maybe she learned from experience that her coworkers are in fact childlike and require colorful instructions to guide them. Either way, her email style hurt someone's feelings and they ran crying to the boss.

Has anyone had any similar experience with typography resulting in a termination or scolding at work? Or do you spend all day idly wishing that you could in fact terminate that coworker who insists on sending emails littered with bold capital letters? [New Zealand Herald]

You can watch the whole insincere deletion process play out above, but here's a handy guide so you can follow along at home. Turn off your device radio and Wi-Fi connection for maximum OH GOD:

1.) Find a message with a memorable subject line, and delete it.
2.) Go to your trash, and remove the message from there.
3.) Check whatever IMAP folders may be listed on your device—this works with POP too—and make sure your message is really not
there.
4.) Flick over to the main Spotlight search screen, and search for the subject line on that message that shouldn't exist
5.) Be shocked and confused when you find that not only can you see the subject line in a simple search—you can still view the entire message. Your email-based illicit affairs are ruined.

I've tested this, and it works. I even restarted my iPod for good measure, and the message was still in the index, and still accessible by search, despite not appearing anywhere in the main Mail interface. As far as I can tell, there is no way to completely delete emails from iPhone OS 3.0, which isn't just strange, it's a disastrous security flaw.

Still, a few things don't really add up here. The video submitter says he can find emails from months ago, but surely this would result in creeping storage consumption, and has to stop sometime. I mean, doesn't it? And even if these messages are just hiding out in some secret folder or something, and can be deleted by some obscure method, this isn't how a mail client should behave, at all.

Try this yourselves and see if you can find any clues as to what's going on here: I'm as alarmed as I am stumped.

UPDATE: An internal tipster has provided us with proof that Apple is fully aware of this issue and will probably be including a fix in iPhone OS 3.1. Additionally, there are a number of ways to delete the messages from the index—for some, waiting works; for me, even restarting didn't—but the fact remains that deleted emails are left, for some time, fully accessible.

Richard from 148Apps has this workaround, which seems to work fine:

From my messing around with email, the message actually disappears after viewing it a few times. At first I thought the email disappeared after deleting it a few times but I simply viewed the messages about 3 or 4 times and it disappeared.

UPDATE 2: Also, current 3.1 betas don't seem to suffer from this bug, so yeah, a fix is essentially imminent. [CultOfMac]

Civilization Revolution: Real-time strategy doesn't really suit the iPhone—it can be a little frantic, and controls aren't perfect. So how about an iPhone adaptation of one of the greatest turn-based strategy games of all time? $10 is right at the acceptable ceiling for non-professional iPhone apps, but this is real, true-to-form Sid Meier stuff, right here.

Duke Nukem 3D: Oh, by the way, everyone who likes strategy games is a nerd, right guys? Because real men play DUKE NUKEM', with the boobs, and the cursing! This is a fairly direct port of the classic game, but with crappier—though not terrible, for the iPhone—controls, and sadly, no iPod Touch 1G compatibility. Three dollars for a reasonably long, surprisingly playable game.

eBay: eBay has updated their app to support two pretty awesome things: Push notifications, to tell you when you've been bidsniped, because that's pretty much all that shopping on eBay is about nowadays, and PayPal payment support, so you don't have to log onto a PC every time you want to seal a deal. Still free, OBO. (via)

reMail 2: iPhone mail search is fine. reMail iPhone mail search is actually good, if it works for you. Two things: there's no Exchange support (sorry suits!), and there's only support for one account at a time. But within that one IMAP or POP account, reMail archives all your message text as far back as you want, letting you search full text—not just subjects—without a network connection. The five dollar price is a little shameful, though.

Pastie: Lets you make a list of preset text snippets that you can quickly send as emails or texts, rather than having to type out a unique message. It's a timesaver if you're the kind of person who responds to everything instantly and succinctly, or if you just like having a large clipboard on your phone, but beware: it doesn't work on iPod Touches, at all. (via)

My Gay Agenda: Are you gay? Do you have a well-formed sense of irony? Would you like to spend three dollars to make everyone is totally aware of these two facts? Great! Though in all seriousness, this faux-pernicious calendar/to-do list is pretty funny, and a portion of the proceeds go to charity.

This Week's App News on Giz:

• Qik Video Sharing Application Now Available for iPhone 3GS

• iPhone App Developer Uses Fake Tablet Video to Promote their Crappy Game

• The 10 Most Expensive iPhone Apps

• Apple's Phil Schiller Continues Quelling Faithful's App Store Unrest With Polite Letters

• Sex Offender Locator Back in the App Store For Some Reason

• CourseSmart Dumps 7,000+ Textbooks Into the iPhone App Store

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a swell weekend everybody.

That's right. When little Timmy gets Susie to "sext" him nudie pics in class, not only are both parties degrading the moral fabric of our civilized society, they're also contributing to the growing number of transient relationships Nichols feels is slowly killing us all.

"I think there's a worry that an excessive use, or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we're losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that's necessary for living together and building a community," he said in a Sunday interview that was probably not conducted over email or IM.

While I agree that anything can be abused if done in excess, the suicide note seems a bit alarmist and anti-technology, even for the Catholic church. Then again, I've (luckily) never had the misfortune to know someone who was driven to suicide because I un-friended them on Facebook.

That said, we've seen some freaky cases where crazy shit's happened on these networks... maybe the ol' Archbishop has a point. What do you think? [Reuters]

In the past 20 years, more than 200,000 post boxes have been removed due to lack of use (less than 25 pieces sent per day), leaving only around 175,000 nationwide. That's just the most obvious sign that the Postal Service isn't doing too hot, but financially they're really suffering, with a projected $6 billion shortfall this year. That's bad news for the USPS, which has been considering actions like ending Saturday delivery to make up. But that may not be enough.

Unfortunately, it's our fault that the USPS is dying. Us early technological adopters have hastened the death of all kinds of physical media: We pay bills online, we communicate online, we send invitations online. Hell, the only thing I use USPS for is Netflix, and even they're pushing streaming video to replace mail-service DVDs.

As anybody who's experienced the horrors of Canadapost knows, USPS is a fantastic service: It's cheap, fast, reliable, safe and they still deliver on Saturdays. But the only way to save it is to send more mail, and I just don't see that happening. Sorry, USPS, on behalf of all nerds who killed you. [Washington Post]