The French National Commission on Computing and Liberty is shocked to find that Google's street view vans have recorded snippets of wirless traffic, including email content, user ids and passwords. Apparently, the French are easily shocked.  What many people seem to forget is that wifi is radio and they're running a radio station, starring all of the computers in the network.  Like any radio station, anyone with the right type of radio can listen and record your shows.

There are two things that everyone using wifi should do.

• First, encrypt your wifi using WPA2.  It's not foolproof, but defeating WPA2 is difficult and time consuming.  Anyone who's after you, in particular, may want to invest the time, but the drive-by vans will skip you and read your neighbor's unencrypted signal. 
• Second, whenever possible, login to websites using SSL.  SSL provides secure encryption from your computer to the server at the other end of the connection.  If you visit websites using "https" instead of "http", you're using SSL encryption. 

Using SSL is for all data exchanges is critical when you're on a shared, public wifi network.  Anyone at Starbucks, or the library, or your favorite place to park yourself with your notebook or phone could be recording network traffic.  On such networks, you should have absolutely no expectation of privacy.  It's critical to encrypt your data before it goes out over the air.

Check with your email provider to find out if they support POPS or IMAPS and Secure SMTP.  The "S" at the end of POP and IMAP means that the connection between your computer and the mail server is encrypted via SSL, too.  All major mail clients support the protocol. If your mail provider doesn't, it's time to find a new mail provider.

If you use Gmail, click "Settings", then "Always use https".  Gmail will then enforce an SSL connection whenver you access it on the web.

Mozilla Thunderbird is my day in, day out favorite email client. When most people think about email, they think Outlook.  Outlook is a great program, but it's very expensive.  Unless you need to connect to an Exchange server, you can do better with the free Thunderbird.

In a previous post, I talked about add-ons that improve Google's web mail interface.  Here's a list of some tools that extend Thunderbird and make it both easier to use and more powerful.  Top 10 lists are popular. Here are my top 9 addons for Thunderbird.

1. Folder Account  selects a default "from" account for any given folder.  I have some accounts on external systems that are forwarded to my primary email address.  Message rules move these into particular folders. When I reply, this addon selects the address on the external system as the from address.
2. Lightning is a calendar that integrates with Thunderbird. In thas all the features you'd expect, including invitations, recurrence, etc.
3. Provider for Google Calendar syncs my Google calendars with Lightning.  Google Calendars provide the link to the calendar on my iPhone. Changing the calendar on the desktop, on the web or on the phone is automatically synched to the other two places within seconds.
4. .vcs Support add support for .vcs files to Lightning.  It handles .ics natively.
5. GContactSync synchronizes my Google and iPhone address book with Thunderbird.
6. EnigMail adds support for PGP/OpenGPG signing and encryption to Thunderbird.
7. Signature Switch adds a toolbar button easily swaps signatures. I use it for switching among formal and informal signature lines.
8. Manually Sort Folders lets Thunderbird override the folder ordering defined on an IMAP server. Sometimes, you just don't want things alpabetically.
9. Compact Headers reduces the screen geography used by message headers, providing more space for the message itself.

What do you use to make Thunderbird work better for you?

Google-hosted mail accounts are now fully accessible via Exchange Active Synch (EAS).  This means that Google-hosted email users (e.g., gmail.com and sterndata.com) now have push email enabled for the iPhone.  All that's required is setting up the account as a Microsoft Exchange account rather than Gmail.  Click read more to see how.

I've finally untethered my iPhone from iTunes, at least for keeping my calendar and contacts up to date.  I'm using Thunderbird to manage email, contacts, and calendar, and using Google as a back end to keep it all synchronized between the iPhone, my Linux desktop, my Windows Vista notebook, and Google Apps on the web.

We have a lot of communication tools -- email, social networking sites, blogs -- that exist in silos. There are some attempts to integrate all of it. For example, there are tools that put blog posts on Twitter and Facebook, Facebook posts get Twittered, and vice versa.  But we're still dealing with clunky mechanisms that preserve the silos.  Collaboration tools are their own silo.  Google Wave is a set of products and protocols that truly integrate email, social networks, blogs, tweets, and probably whatever is coming next and are built on the idea of real-time collaboration.

Some cool new features in Thunderbird 3.0, beta 3.  It seems fairly stable, too.

The good folks at Xobni have opened up their program to the public. As noted before, Xobni is a tool that explores your inbox and reveals the social network among your correspondents. It also helps you organize that network.