Electronic Mail

Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates' 2004 proclamation that the spam problem would be solved within two years has proved a bitter joke, with unsolicited messages doubling yearly to make up about 90% of mail transmitted on the Internet. But this week, the tide turned. The number of unwanted, offensive and misleading e-mails sent across the globe plummeted by about two-thirds, to a mere 60 billion or so a day by Thursday, according to spam filtering companies.

When new members were welcomed to an e-mail group called the Easy Rider Gag List, they were warned that they would soon be receiving a steady diet of tasteless humor. The warning came from the Easy Rider himself: Alex Kozinski, one of the highest ranking and most intellectually respected federal judges. On the gag list, Kozinski periodically distributed jokes to a group of friends and associates, including his law clerks, colleagues on the federal bench, prominent attorneys and journalists.

A volunteer coach for youth basketball teams in San Bernardino County was arrested Friday on suspicion of sending sexually explicit messages online to an Anaheim police officer posing as a 14-year-old girl, authorities said Gregory Albert Carroll, 45, was arrested at his Ontario residence and booked into Anaheim's detention facility on suspicion of distributing lewd materials to a minor, attempting lewd acts with a minor and luring a minor for sex acts. Bail was set at $100,000.

Intel Corp.'s loss of e-mail records in an antitrust case filed by rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. must be investigated by the court, a federal judge ruled Wednesday. Intel told U.S. District Judge Joseph J. Farnan Jr. in a letter Monday that "some document-retention lapses" had occurred because of "inadvertent mistakes" in its litigation-related e-mail preservation procedures. "It appears on the surface to be a human lapse," the judge said at a hearing in Wilmington, Del.

Last September, Internet spam messages touting the stock of Covina-based Healtheuniverse Inc. started landing in e-mail in-boxes across the country. The "hot biopharmaceutical stock," the messages promised, was "getting ready to explode!!!" It did -- for two days. Amid a surge in trading volume, the share price nearly doubled, to 22 cents, before declining steadily over the following week and eventually falling below its pre-spam price.

Intel Corp. Chairman Craig R. Barrett and Chief Executive Paul S. Otellini may have lost e-mail relevant to antitrust claims brought by rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc., a lawyer for AMD told a court official. The Intel officers apparently were unaware that procedures weren't in place to preserve the correspondence, the lawyer told Vincent J. Poppiti, a special master appointed to investigate the missing e-mail.

Just weeks after President Bush was inaugurated for a second term in January 2005, his White House and the Justice Department had pretty much settled on a plan to "push out" some of the nation's 93 U.S. attorneys. But which ones? D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, came up with a checklist. He rated each of the prosecutors with criteria that appeared to value political allegiance as much as job performance. He recommended retaining "strong U.S. attorneys who have .

Like many young people, Matt Sly and Jay Patrikios spent a fair amount of time thinking about the future. Then one day they were thinking about the past, playing Trivial Pursuit with a group of friends, and they thought: Wouldn't it be cool if your Past Self could communicate with your Future Self--via e-mail? How lame, their friends said, laughing. But Sly and Patrikios knew the idea was ingenious. And they soon set about making it real.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider reviving part of a new federal law that makes it a crime to send computer messages that offer child pornography, even when no pornography exists. Last year, a federal appeals court in Atlanta struck down the provision on free-speech grounds and said it reached too far.

Yahoo Inc. said Tuesday that it planned to offer unlimited e-mail storage to its roughly quarter of a billion users, starting in May. The world's biggest e-mail service is scrapping its free e-mail storage limit of 1 gigabyte, or about a billion bytes of data, responding to explosive growth in attachment sizes as people share ever more photos, music and videos. Microsoft Corp. has a free e-mail storage limit of 2 gigabytes, while Google Inc. caps its Gmail service at 2.8 gigabytes.