I have just launched a brand new tool called LockBox. LockBox is a free, lightweight, purpose-built, ad-free AJAX app that lets you store little bits of sensitive info like passwords, serial numbers, account logins, and the like.

LockBox is a tool I wrote for myself about a year ago. It quickly developed into something I use on a daily basis. With dozens of clients to keep straight, along with a seemingly endless stream of unique crypt keys and and serials to keep track of, LockBox has proven to be incredibly useful.

The beauty of it is its ease of use, flexibility, and ubiquity. The app is a one-trick pony, and is very lightweight. Yet, you can store just about any kind of info in the system you like. And because it’s browser based, you can access the info from any location.

The data is protected by strong and proven encryption techniques on the back end, and is kept private all the way to your screen through SSL.

And did I mention it was free?

Head on over and sign up and see how this tool can be useful for you.

Starting in June, AOL will charge a fee to guarantee that emails sent to users in their system will wind up in the recipient’s Inbox. This is accomplished through a participation in a third-party program called Goodmail that certifies you as a “good” sender and allows you to bypass AOL’s spam-prevention filters. Yahoo! is expected to follow down the same path soon.

If I am reading the tea leaves correctly, e-mails from companies not participating in the Goodmail program will be shunted to the Junk folder. It is unclear if a user can ‘whitelist’ a sender to receive legitimate, solicited e-mail such as purchase receipts or a newsletter.

While I understand the need to address the problem of spam, my take on this is that this is a form of corporate extortion that will wreak havoc on the system. And AOL users will bear the brunt of the inexorable friction between legitimate companies and spammers.

On the business side, few companies outside the Fortune 500 will participate. Expect to see a flurry of emails from small and mid-sized companies to AOL subscribers reiterating the need to whitelist them.

In addition, AOL customers will see an increased number of legitimate e-mails ending up in the junk mail box. There will be a shake-out and public outcry as AOL users start missing legitimate and critical communications. The system will become unusable and AOL will move onto the Next Big Thing.

All around, all concerned will get mad, and at the end of the day, spammers will just find another way around the problem. And AOL, Yahoo! and Goodmail will make millions in the process. They always do.

Go Deep:
http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3581301

http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3559441

http://www.goodmailsystems.com/

AOL E-Mail Best Practices for Corporate Senders:
http://postmaster.aol.com/guidelines/bestprac.html

This just in: Vista will slip to ’07.

First, my theory is that there’s no way they are slipping only a couple of weeks. This far out, you don’t have even close to that level of granularity in the predictability of your launch date.

Instead, their announcement to that fact is a move, in my opinion, to take the pressure off Christmas with this move so that vendors won’t scream bloody murder this Summer when MSFT announces the real release date of Summer ’07.

So what does this mean for Apple? Opportunity. Perhaps the most prime opportunity in their history.

Here’s the play: Launch the next version of OSX with tons of gee-wiz features just before Vista launches, and do it on a platform-independent basis. Include in the OS the ability to launch Windows apps natively on the Intel Core chip, and it’s a no-brainer for people. Upgrade to Vista which has a 2-year-old feature set (by the time it ships), or Switch to OSX which can run the same apps natively and do so on your existing hardware: it’s not even a fair fight.

Apple has just been handed a gift. Vista slipping right into Apple’s 18-month revision cycle represents a unique point in Apple’s history where they can finally break out of their niche market.

Think about it.