Link Banana

You know that symbol in email addresses that you don’t know the name of? The one that you always replace with “at”? Well, I’ve been saving two links about it:

• Bits tells a brief story of it’s move onto keyboards and into email:
  

  The symbol ended up on typewriter keyboards after it evolved over the centuries into commercial accounting shorthand for the phrase “at the price of” in records of transactions written by English merchants.

  That’s why the symbol was sitting on a computer keyboard in 1971 when an engineer named Ray Tomlinson decided to use it in the first e-mail address to send the first e-mail.

• In the LRB, Daniel Soar tells a characteristically longer story, including this tidbit:
  

  This legerdemain is clearly nonsense but it’s no less crazy than the various cutesy attempts by languages across the world to naturalise the sign by making it an animal emblem: in Korean it’s apparently a snail, in Danish an elephant’s trunk, in Turkish a ram, in Hungarian a maggot, in many Slavonic languages a monkey, apart from in Russian, where – inexplicably – it’s a dog.

I would like to nominate this experimental feature of Gmail as the most useful common-sense (and overdue) email improvement ever:

if you mention an attachment in your email and hit send without actually attaching a file, you’ll get a pop-up message asking if you meant to send without the file.

(via Lifehacker)

It’s best not to try to say to someone that your email address is:

• MikeUnderscore2004@yahoo.com
• MikeAtYahooDotCom@hotmail.com
• Mike_WardAllOneWord@yahoo.com
• AAAAAThatsSixAs@yahoo.com
• One1TheFirstJustTheNumberTheSecondSpelledOut@hotmail.com

(via kung fu grippe)

I won’t attest to the veracity of the information in this chart, but I do think it’s interesting none the less.

In the last three months of 2007, 70% of e-mails offered sexual enhancers, 16 percentage points more than during the first three months of that year. Financial offers accounted for 5%, down from 23%, possibly reflecting the gloomier economic climate. Around 10% tempted holiday-season shoppers with counterfeit goods.