Backhanded reality TV casting request of the day, culled from a Gawker inbox:

Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull has admitted to sending a mass email joking that Barack Obama is black because his mother slept around so much, she even had sex with a dog. Cebull swears he's not a racist, though.

Earlier today, Anonymous announced what sounded like an awesome caper: The group had compromised the email of a law firm that represented Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, the Marine squad leader who got a slap on the wrist for his role in the Haditha massacre. Trouble is, the hack had a lot of collateral victims,…

The New York Times says it didn't send a mass email erroneously telling loads of people their subscriptions were expired. But all indications are that the message originated from the paper or its approved vendor, likely as a mistake.

In what may be the first case of tragic e-mail spam, a family keeps receiving spam emails from their dead mother's email account. From wtsp.com:

Larry Page is a busy man. The Google CEO wants his company moving quickly and decisively. That, in turn, means eliminating the plodding exchanges fostered by Gmail.com. Who invented that thing, anyway?

The third quarter fundraising deadline for presidential candidates is today, today's the day! If you are subscribed to President Obama's campaign email or text message alert lists, you're well aware of this, because you are constantly getting emails and text messages with cutesy variations of, "So how bout those dumb…

A young woman who works in show business emailed 15 friends last week with a tale about meeting director Quentin Tarantino at a party. She made out with him, took sexy pictures in a photo booth, and watched him whip out his "short," "fat," "nub-like" penis. She then had foot fetish quasi-sex with him, she claims.

Nothing will stop rabid fans from tracking down their idol's email address—even the fact that it might be the wrong address. So it is that some guy named "Taylor" gets five emails a day meant for pop star Taylor Swift.

Have any interest in reading over 14,000 emails from Sarah Palin's personal account? What, don't you want to find out what wine spritzer she liked to pair with moose nuggets? This fully searchable "inbox" makes Palin's inbox yours. [Gizmodo]

Some Chinese hackers may have been reading top U.S. officials' email for a while. Google says they've thwarted a phishing campaign that targeted the Gmail accounts of politically sensitive targets.

This weekend, Princeton's class of 2006 celebrates its five-year reunion with a standard-issue bacchanal. This year's theme: "'06 Feet Under." Cute, right? Except when they announce the '06 reunion memorial service, which now looks like it is being introduced with a wacky pun.

Osama bin Laden was apparently a "prolific email writer." But how did he forward all of Islamist chain letters without getting tracked down by the U.S.? By sending his couriers to cybercafes with thumb drives.

Some Yale undergrads dug through the cell phone, email and Facebook accounts of a classmate as part of a project, then posted what they discovered on a website for all to enjoy. Shock discovery: Yalies are obscenely well-connected.

During a web conference with American Apparel store managers today (topic: "store summer-ization and shitty sales in the Midwest") Dov Charney opened the browser on his personal computer. One participant took a screengrab and sent it to us. Above, an annotated guide to Dov Charney's desktop, featuring the following:

Ah, spring, when a young man's fancy turns to love, and minor Republican officials start emailing racist JPEGs about the Obama family to one another. This week's casual racist: Orange County Republican Party central committee member Marilyn Davenport.

Tim Ferriss, the self-help guru behind the '4-hour Workweek', is a god to bros who dream of fashioning themselves into blisteringly efficient Web 2.0 business robots just like him. Ferriss' obsession with self-improvement means that the way he deals with people who aren't himself is to basically be as big of an asshole

Thank ever-loving Christ: The official AP stylebook has dropped the hyphen from "email." The AP will no longer write like your computer science teacher in 1997. Now maybe they can stop capitalizing Internet and the Web.

While what comes before the @-symbol may include the letters and characters you picked out, what comes after it still says a whole lot about you. A new study breaks down the types of people that use different types of free email services.

Today we gave you some advice for dealing with email disasters, inspiring many of you to share your own email-related horror stories. Here are three of them!