A Microsoft blogger says that, since 2006, Hotmail users have experienced a dramatic decrease in spam. Unfortunately, that still doesn't stop us from judging people with an email address ending in "@hotmail.com." more ›

TechFlash sat in on Microsoft's Mac unit conference call this morning, thinking the surprise announcement might be about Office on the iPhone (honestly, like our phone doesn't crash enough already), but it turns out they're just getting around to burying Entourage, and will offer an Office for Mac suite that contains Outlook. Finally Mac users in an Exchange environment won't feel like a red-headed stepchild. In the meantime, current Office 2008 users can download a more Exchange-friendly Entourage 2008 Web Services Edition here. more ›

• Feeling lonely? The Daily Weekly says Larry Phillips will email you if you email him. (Wonder if he'll send pics, too.)
• Publicola says Gregoire does not support a state income tax, so stop asking. Goldy at HorsesAss is not so sure he's entirely against the idea.
• Fourteen percent university tuition hike, anyone? The Capitol Record reports on why that might not be feasible.

This morning Microsoft announced that they will be cutting 5,000 jobs across the board over the next eighteen months thanks to a serious profit shortfall compared to their estimates for this last financial quarter. Some 1,400 of the lay-offs are to happen today. The round of layoffs will be the largest in company history. more ›

Just a couple weeks after sitting on the Sonics trial, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman passed down a precedent setting judgement in the case of Robert Soloway, the so-called Seattle "Spam King." Yesterday, the Judge sentenced Soloway to 47 months in prison for sending over 90 million spam messages in just three months off two servers. His nearly four year sentence is only half of what the prosecution requested. more ›

Because your inbox isn't already a landmine of things you may or may not want to see and know, the state of Washington has decided to offer email notifications to residents when sex offenders move into the neighborhood. While the website and notification system is still in the planning stages, it could be up and running within three months. It would include "real-time updates for newly registered offenders," as well as the email notification program. more ›

Turns out Amazon.com's customer service department isn't staffed by computers -- just sarcasm-savvy people who use computers. Consumerist broke the story: Amazon Sends "Best Customer Service E-mail I've Ever Received". We'll summarize: One of Amazon.com's Black Friday deals was the chance to win a $1000 laptop for $299. Many people entered; most of them were unsuccessful. Some theorized that Amazon employees had snatched up all the good deals, since no one they knew had won... more ›

So Danny Westneat is musing on the future of email, on the occasion of the announcement that spam volume has doubled this year, to 120 billion emails per day. Remember the Spam King, he asks? Remember the drop in spam we were promised? Well, it's been more of spike. more ›

It’s been hard for us to admit this, greenie that we are, but a vote for Prop. 1 is in order, at least from this Seattlest's perspective. more ›

After paying for a financial feasibility study, the Muckleshoot tribe announced today that they'd be willing to donate land for an NBA arena down there in Auburn. more ›

And in news related to what will fill the iPhones purchased at the U Village Apple Store this week: UW has announced that not only will they not protect students from file-sharing lawsuits, they will hunt them down and club them to death to protect the violated rights-holders. Ok, a shoot-on-sight order isn't in effect yet--for the time being the University of Washington will only serve legal papers to students who use the school's network to download music. more ›

The headline: "White House E-Mail Inquiry Will Widen." The story: how the Bush administration has quite possibly made a major infraction, broken big giant rules, or in the 's words, "committed 'extensive' [legal] violations." more ›

On Saturday, Frank Hughes of the Tacoma News-Tribune reported that local real estate developer Dave Sabey had offered to buy the Sonics from Clay Bennett and make them the centerpiece of a development he's planning south of Boeing Field. more ›

And while you're at it, trash the place!! more ›

SEATTLE ARTS & LECTURES: Art Spiegelman's 1992 Holocaust tale Maus (based on a true story) won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a comic book. Its success paved the way for the graphic novels thriving today and led to Spiegelman's ten years on the staff of the New Yorker. In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) gathers his recent broadsheets of disenchantment with the war on terror. more ›

We don't really have to look any farther afield than the Stranger to get more than our fill of Seattle Weekly bashing in any given week, but right now there's an article in a Phoenix daily about the New Times Media vs. Village Voice Media culture war that jettisoned Weekly longtimers out the Weekly's door (and into something yet to be seen). The gist of the article is that across the country the left-leaning, axe-grinding, political alt-weekly veterans have been replaced with ass-kicking, name-taking whipper-snapper upstarts who don't much care for politics or other traditional alt-weekly stomping grounds. more ›

Port of Seattle documents released Tuesday reveal a police chief fearful of a litigious union and overwhelmed by an e-mail scandal engulfing a third of his officers. more ›

There's a potentially interesting article in the Seattle Times about a potentially interesting class at Seattle University that includes in its coursework a potentially interesting experiment. It's an experiment in "media deprivation" for a class called "Restorative Solitude." Ninety six hours, no media. Awesome. It reminds us of Chris Pirillo's Google Fast. In the teeny bopper world in which the article is set "media" are things like cell phone, email, internet, iPod, TV, at least those are the options in their "what could you live without" poll (we voted internet). Hat tip to the Times for realizing the futility of listing "newspaper" in there, at least, but that's a pretty narrow view of what constitutes media to the teenagers or young twentyish types towards to whom this article seems to be directed. more ›

A Canadian mining minster in British Columbia recently flamed someone who wrote in about a policy decision via email. He pretty much tore the guy up and attacked him on the grounds of the guy's questionable Canadian pedigree ("It is my understanding that you are an American, I don't give a shit what your opinion is on Canada or Canadian residents"). Big story. The guy seems to have resigned over it. Shit's in the P-I. more ›

Barack Obama has hope, but Mike Daisey has the audacity to sit down just one hour prior to his one-man show, Stories from an Atlantic Night Café, and write an outline that will be his only guide when he steps on stage. Seattlest chatted with Daisey via e-mail as he made the cross-country trek from his home in Brooklyn to Seattle prior to his performance at CHAC on Sunday night. more ›

Founder of the social networking news site Newsvine and Seattle resident Mike Davidson got an email from Moda Condominiums last week. Not too big a deal, especially considering he'd given their website his email address for the specific purpose of sending him updates on availability. However, the CC field contained the email addresses of all 1086 recipients. more ›

There's subterfuge on the menu at the mysterious restaurant called Gypsy. With no permanent address, a revolving list of chefs creating original menus for each clandestine dinner, and an application process that weeds out potential diners who'd betray the cause, Gypsy has us buzzing. Marketing is entirely by word-of-mouth. About 1,000 people have made the cut so far, and dinners for 18 usually sell out less than ten hours after the invitation e-mail is sent. The man behind it all says Gypsy is a success because diners find it liberating to leave their comfort zone: they eat with strangers, don't get to order their food, and don't even know where they're going until a few days before the dinner. more ›

There’s subterfuge on the menu at the mysterious restaurant called Gypsy. With no permanent address, a revolving list of chefs creating original menus for each clandestine dinner, and an application process that weeds our potential diners who’d betray the cause, more ›

The e-mail arranging the interview said "call if you have any trouble finding the office," but we really didn't understand what she meant until we found ourselves under the Viaduct, staring into a shady-looking importer's warehouse with their address. Was this really the office of a highbrow and hip foreign policy quarterly aimed at intellectually minded college students? more ›

SxySingleSeattleTimes: the monorail crash is, like, so dum. can we just stop talking about it already?? more ›

Q: When does the smoking ban start? more ›

When we talked about increased tanker traffic in the Puget Sound recently we pinned it squarely on that Stevens asshole up in Alaska, and we weren't wrong in that. We completely failed to acknowledge that the English oil company BP was pulling the strings for Senator Stevens, though. We're supposed to believe that BP doesn't stand for British Petroleum anymore - Now it's Beyond Petroleum. Whatever they're called they've greenwashed their website in shiney new colors (all done with Earth-friendly dyes no doubt) and we hear a lot about them and alternative energy technologies, but according to an article in The Independent today they're having a spot of trouble with walking the walk. more ›

There's nothing that excites Seattlest quite like the firing of a local DJ and the subsequent online airing of the laundry that inevitably occurs. While we apologize for getting this to you at this late date, we enthusiastically invite you to take a peek behind the faceplate and inside the reeking mess that is corporate radio. more ›

Salon.com is reporting today that The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, local philanthropy extrodinaire, has pledged ten million smackaroos to the Discovery Institute since 2000. Wait, you say, the same Discovery Institute tank of thinkers that promotes Intelligent Design? Yes, we tell you, that same Discovery Institute. Say it ain't so, Bill. more ›

Seattlest recieved an e-mail recently, pointing us to an article in the Village Voice about sensuality and food. In the article, one person mentioned about how they believe that cupcakes are a "sexy food." more ›