SeamlessWeb, the high-class Kozmo.com of the new millennium (this means they deliver you meals from local restaurants, while you are at work, if you are too lazy to call a restaurant) (oh hah one of the founders of Kozmo.com went back to Lehmann Brothers when that site shuttered), might be in a spot of trouble! You see, the financial sector is melting down and thousands of Wall Street people are going to get laid off. Those Wall Street people and their Wall Street firms make up a large part of SeamlessWeb's client base! (Not out fault you guys list like two restaurants in Brooklyn, losers.) But don't worry, SeamlessWeb employees! The CEO sent out an email this morning promising that even though all their corporate clients are facing upheaval and chaos, SeamlessWeb will continue to deliver sushi: "Regardless of whether people are at work or away from work, they need to eat. And, SeamlessWeb provides a highly efficient and cost-effective way for them to order food from local restaurants for both takeout and delivery." Poor dopes. (Of course, SeamlessWeb is owned by food service giant Aramark—so they may ride out this hiccup yet.) Click to read the sad email.

Oh dear, it seems that the corporate leadership of a media agency has royally fucked up. Carat decided it had to lay off some workers. So the honchos carefully prepared secret internal talking points and strategy memos laying out exactly how they would break the news to the staff and clients, and deal with the media fallout. Then they accidentally emailed all that shit to their entire agency. Ha. Ha. Ha. The highlights are just so delicious: Lesson 1: Layoffs provide innovation, somehow. Message to clients:

Pussy-smashing brew-guzzler and occasional blogger Tucker Max is hard at work on the Shreveport, Louisiana set of his comedic masterpiece film debut I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. The ideal situation would obviously be for Tucker to produce, direct, star in, and cater the movie himself, but due to demands on his valuable time he's forced to take on lesser mortals as his assistants. One of whom, surprisingly, has now quit in disgust and forwarded along his story to us! After the jump, the sad tale of woe, abuse, and poop. But Tucker has a warning for you haters: "I didn't get where I am today by being a moron.": The young man was a Tucker fan, and quit a real job to go be a paid assistant on the set of Tucker's film, where we pick up his experiences:

A tipster sends us evidence of a new form of marketing spam: someone has sent her $0.02 via Paypal, with the subject line "my 2 cents on [company]." Yes, using Paypal as a delivery system is insidious. But if every spam email came with two cents, we would have 389375692099302 cents.

Blogger mentor Tucker Max runs a blog network called Rudius Media that is badass, bro. Earlier today we mentioned that one former Rudius blogger once worked for six months only to receive a check for less than a hundred bucks ($82, to be exact). Now that blogger, Brandon Woods, has helpfully forwarded us the email chain that ensued after he emailed Tucker-very politely, we might add-to ask how the hell he came to be paid such a paltry sum for half a year's work. Tucker Max's reply to him (which he also forwarded to six other people) is below. And, well, yea:

The latest study from the grinds at Pew Internet Research touts the rise in daily search users to 49 percent. That means of all Internet users, only half use search daily. The killer app? It's Twitter! No, it's still email, used by 60 percent daily.

NonSociety, Julia Allison's new media project of indeterminate meaning, needs your help! The protocelebrity and Wired cover girl is filming a TV pilot show for Bravo with her friends, and she's sent out an invitation seeking "35 fashionable, vivacious people who will agree to go on camera." It's interesting that while Julia's show has been heavily hyped for some time, she's rather self-deprecating about its prospects. The exclusive affair happens tonight, so the invite is last-minute. While you might expect, say, half of your friends to come to a party you throw, we're conservatively estimating that Julia is counting on around a 5% response rate, meaning she sent this email out to 700 people in search of 35 takers. We could be wrong! After the jump, read the entire invite-then RSVP and help her out. It's the least you can do. Spies, please send us some details.

The time has come for us to put together a current list of default email styles for media companies: First.Last@CompanyName.com, or whatever it may be. Send us your (media) company's style with the subject line "Email Style," and we'll have this public service project ready for you in the near future.

Email: it's no longer cool! Was it ever? Apparently it was, so I hope you didn't miss your opportunity to use your inbox as a "gauge of Digital Age machismo." Because now email, like The Blob, has turned into a monster that threatens to swallow us all in its pulsating, gelatinous walls. The problem has spread from nerds to regular people, and America is now paying attention. The LA Times even quotes one nerd proclaiming "EMAIL shall henceforth be known as EFAIL." Dang! "All your time are belong to email," I imagine internet scientists saying. And they're more right than you know!: Experts have discovered that Americans no longer go to work to perform actual work; they simply go to work to send and receive email about what would happen if they theoretically were to do some work. When they're not doing this, they're mentally recovering:

A reader is upset with Gawker for wholeheartedly embracing The New Yorker's terribly offensive cartoon about how Barack Obama is a terrorist. She writes:

Fun-loving millionaire Jason Calacanis (right) is not joking: He's quit blogging. In a quickie phone call, Calacanis told Valleywag that he felt blogging was taking too much time away from both his work and his family, because of the blogosphere's always-on, why-haven't-you-replied-it's-been-5-minutes nature. Instead, Calacanis is posting his thoughts and observations to an old-school mailing list. He says the list has gathered 500 subscribers since its launch last week. Don't worry, you haven't seen the last of blogging's fair-haired boy. I just subscribed tips@vallewyag.com to the list, and I give it a week at max before someone sets up an automatic system that reposts every one of Calacanis's emails — to a blog. (Photo courtesy of Jason Calacanis)

A California appeals court ruled yesterday that your job has no right to obtain your work emails or text messages if they are stored by a third party provider. That means that the roughly 30% of Microsoft Outlook users whose emails are handled by a vendor, for example, would be protected from having their employers snoop on them. If your job stores employee emails internally, they can still read them. Regardless, this is good news for leakers in this age of corporate snooping on your Facebook pages. Who do you have to thank for this newfound privacy? A cop who sent sexy text messages from his work phone!:

The Associated Press wants us bloggers to purchase a license from them for permission to quote 5 words from their stories. Ok guys, good luck with that. Recently they threatened some D-list bloggers in order to put the fear of god into everyone, but it backfired, naturally. So they're trying the good cop approach-they will not sue bloggers, they promise, and they will meet with some blogger advocacy group to hammer out an agreement. These new guidelines will be drawn up in consultation with something called the Media Bloggers Association, a.k.a. The Justice Blogiety of America, a.k.a. the Congress of Blogustrial Organizations. It's a powerless group of funny-looking nerds with no ties to mainstream "blogging" as we know it. Amusingly, after Night Editor Ryan Tate made fun of them last night, they sent him a wounded email asking why he didn't call them for comment first. OMG guys, you represent bloggers? Don't you know we never pick up phones? That email is attached, and more fun with the M.B.A. is below.

I've always suspected vast swaths of Cisco, the boringly profitable networking giant, were stuck in the '90s. An exchange forwarded from an internal mailing list confirms it. First of all: forwarded from an internal mailing list. Haven't these people heard of wikis? Second of all: They're complaining about files being deleted from an internal FTP server. Hello, isn't storage supposed to be in the cloud? The email chain ends with equally dated complaints about misuse of the "reply all" button.

File this under "Confirmation of scary news that you already suspected was true": a new survey says that corporations have become so paranoid about leaks (justifiably) that many are now engaged in "systematic snooping" in employees' electronic communications. More than 40% of large companies read employee emails, but that's not all; they're also looking at your instant messages and Facebook pages. Delete! Delete!

Taking questions after a speech before the New America Foundation, Google cofounder Larry Page told the crowd the reason Microsoft and Yahoo shouldn't merge is that it would give Microsoft too much control over email and instant messaging. "90 percent of the communications all in one company, I think that's a really big risk." We totally agree! So when will Google open its search results pages to third-party advertisements?

Angelo Mozilo is the CEO of disastrous mortgage lender Countrywide, and one of the most overpaid, reviled, and villainous business executives in America today. He's drawn huge salaries even as his company led to the way for the subprime mortgage collapse. So you might expect the guy to be surrounded at all times by a team of highly-paid image consultants, ensuring that every word out of his mouth in some way helped to resurrect his shattered reputation. Wrong, bitches! With a classic "Hitting reply instead of forward" move, Mozilo inadvertently let a desperate homeowner (and the world) know what he thought of his plea for help: "Disgusting.":

Hey, Sanjay Sanghoee, the hedge funder who's raising money from hedge funds to make a movie about a heroic hedge funder, has apparently been trying this nonsense since college. A former business school peer of Sanjay's just emailed us to inform us that back at Columbia, Mr. Sanghoee "was the founder, president and sole member of the Film Financing Club." He's been sending these fund-seeking mass emails for years. Former b-school associates received this one just a few weeks ago, as the banking crisis threatened the money Sanghoee had raised to date. If his screenplays are half as captivating as his pitch emails, it'll be a hell of a picture.

It seems like only yesterday that I got my first unsolicited piece of shit email from some piece of shit selling some piece of shit. But spam is actually 30 freakin' years-old today! "The first recognisable e-mail marketing message was sent on 3 May, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC-a now-defunct computer-maker. The message was sent via Arpanet-the internet's forerunner-and won its sender much criticism from recipients. Thirty years on, spam has grown into an underground industry that sends out billions of messages every day."

At last, an explanation of the Bush Administration's misbehavior that will resonate in Silicon Valley: It's all Microsoft's fault. Ars Technica details how switching from an IBM Lotus email system installed under Clinton to a Microsoft Exchange server made it impossible to store White House emails systematically. The archiving system was operated manually, and Bush appointees nixed efforts to upgrade it. CIO Theresa Payton says that the White House is now working on a new system, but knowing the ways of both Washington and enterprise software, what are the chances it will be done before we have a new president?