Thousands of people around the world received a mysterious email from Continental Airlines last week when the airline sent a pre-flight bulletin in error.

The personalised email suggested that as a passenger due to fly with the airline they will need to obtain electronic travel authorisation (the ESTA scheme) from the United States Department of Homeland Security.

The email went on to explain how the system works and looked forward to welcoming the recipient onboard.

Unfortunately anybody included in the Continental database from any of the 35 countries on the US’s Visa Waiver scheme, including the UK,  Australia, France and Spain, received the bulletin.

This included those without any scheduled tickets with the airline and those who have only used the airline as part of a codeshare agreement with partner carriers.

The mistake was corrected five hours later when recipients of the original email were sent an apology ensuring them “contact information has not been affected and that you were not intended to receive that e-mail”.

Continental has since admitted the mistake and said extra checks are now in place to prevent the same error occurring again.

An officials says:

“The message was to go to customers scheduled on upcoming flights yet it was inadvertently sent to all customers in our database that reside in visa waiver countries and who had previously given us their contact info. We realize this was confusing to customers, especially those who didn’t have upcoming travel scheduled, and have apologized.”

Deals publisher Travelzoo is understandably showing off some data this week that illustrates its position at the top of a chart of travel firms who receive traffic from user emails.

The company’s UK division heads a list of notable travel firms including EasyJet, Ryanair and Travelodge that perform strongly with downstream traffic from email bulletins.

The margin in January 2010 between the top three sites is tiny – 0.01% separating Travelzoo, EasyJet and Google Maps – but the publishing of the popular Top 20 weekly newsletter is keen to put its efforts into context against some of its larger rivals in the online travel sector.

The Experian Hitwise figures put Travelzoo’s share at three times as high as that of Expedia and twice as much as British Airways.

However, Travelzoo has conceded that positions at the higher reaches of the chart could change if the figures were more inclusive of the wider email marketing sector.

The current data only supports downstream traffic to travel websites from free email providers such as Hotmail and GMail, understandably missing out on capturing traffic from any client-based service such as Microsoft Outlook and Entourage.

Travelzoo says it believes the traffic share from wider sources would be similar but admits EasyJet’s customer base of business travellers would probably use corporate or client-based email services for ticketing and therefore traffic is not included in the Hitwise data.

The highest trafficked sites by share of downstream visits from email (UK, January 2001):

1. Travelzoo UK
2. EasyJet
3. Google Maps UK
4. Ryanair
5. Travelodge
6. Google Maps
7. National Rail Enquiries
8. British Airways
9. Thomson
10. Lastminute.com

For its part, Travelzoo says:

“We understand the data doesn’t include all Outlook or client hosted email boxes, but we would assume that share would be similar among those applications – we can’t think of any reason why it would be different. We don’t break down how the percentage of traffic received from client site vs. web based email boxes.”

OK, so I am really comfortable with email. I have been an Outlook user since I beta’d the first office suites when I was at Microsoft with the Office 1997 version.

So here we are more than ten years later and I still prefer it over all the other tools I have tried and abandoned.

Now its Office 2010 beta. It’s pretty useful and has some nice new features.

I thought that Office 2007 was a major upgrade and so far to me while there are nice new features 2010 is not as ground breaking.

I have tried to use the free tools like Google Docs and Open Office. I even went cold turkey for a week – well that lasted two days before I returned to the fold.

I do like Office for the Mac 2008. It has nice features. I may yet cross over to the dark side in the next year and go to the Mac. My old G3 Mac no longer functions for anything but the minimalist of tasks.

So, it would seem I am not alone. I recently saw an interesting study courtesy of eMarketer.

The survey shows that the primary source of content sharing is email. I believe this to be so for people like me.

However it is no longer the unique source of my information sharing services. This year – my Christmas greeting will be via Facebook, Twitter and my blog [here it is].

My private email users will get the email I usually do and if your one of the (un)lucky people a Christmas Greeting is probably due to you in the next 24 hours.

I have a quite a few friends who have moved their primary social interaction tool to Facebook. [So far I have yet to find someone who communicates exclusively via Twitter and I really hope I don’t!].

I have also noticed a trend among professional people who have abandoned their use of Facebook for personal stuff.

The ability to control personal vs professional remains a challenge for the Big Kahuna of social media. And its not getting any better. So despite the new privacy rules I have now essentially withdrawn my personal info from FB as well.

I never liked the phone and still don’t. So my usage – as measured in total minutes over the past decade has fallen dramatically. However my digital volume of email as measured in the respective growth of my PST files has accelerated.

Email has clearly evolved. I still get way too much and I am struggling to keep up. I need to revisit my filters again.

I have unsubscribed to a wide variety of newsletters in the past year. I seldom have time to read RSS feeds – again there is just too much data out there. I have found that the tools are getting better. Two of my favorite Outlook Add-ins are:

• YouSendIt – this is a great tool for sending sub 100MB files.
• Xobni – a great info manager.

I highly recommend both, however the latter is still unstable in Office2007 and will likely be so in 2010 although so far it does suffer from some annoying mis-features such as the occupation of valuable real estate on the screen and some inframe nav issues.

So for now I will continue to use email as my primary communication tool. Am I a Luddite, I don’t think so – but you might disagree.

Mobile apps appear to be de rigeur for any travel guide company looking to peddle its content to users when on a trip, but TravellersPoint has gone back to basics with a simple but effective email system.

The Norway and Australia-based community company has developed a system where anyone can email the site with a country or city name in the subject field and almost instantaneously receive reams of travel content in an email or PDF.

The founders claim it is one of a kind in the travel space as most other online content publishers require the guide to be organised on the website or a fee is charged to the customer.

The email and PDFs include information relating to transport, hotels, sights, tours, restaurants, weather, events and internet connection.

Around 3,100 articles can be obtained using the system, which launched today.

The London guide, for example, arrived within ten minutes of sending the email and with a 26-page PDF of information and destination content.

Co-founder Sam Daams says the content is aggregated from the site’s own wiki-based platform which is created by the TP membership.

“No need to download an app, search online or have an iPhone – it works on all phones with email,” he adds.

The next stage is to explore whether instantaneous edits can be integrated, so a user can send in a tip about piece of information about a destination and it immediately appear in the next downloaded guide.

Daams says the main idea is to make contributing and sharing information a lot easier than it is today, simply because users are forced to connect at an app or browser level.

The service is planned to be available to anyone and remain free, Daams says, stressing that it feels “wrong” to charge for what is effectively Creative Commons licensed wiki content from its own site.

“It’s always been our model to give away all the services, content and information for free, creating a vibrant, active community in return.”