Your e-mail account is a goldmine. Technology companies push hard to keep your data secure, but there are plenty of scumbags out there who always seem to find a new way to gain an edge over the guys in white hats. Phishers, in particular, are eager to find new ways to profit from your identity and information, and they're getting some new tricks.

Phishing scam activity was quiet at the beginning of this year, according to a report in USA Today, but these attacks surged 200% from May through September, says the X-Force team at IBM (NYSE: IBM). Webmail, social media and gaming accounts are their primary targets. E-mail access, in particular, is highly sought after, since they can be use to push out spam ... while bypassing filters.

These "virgin" e-mail accounts command top dollar: a digital criminal can pick up as much as $2 for a clean account from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows Live, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Gmail, Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) YahooMail or AOL (NYSE: TWX). This is more than twice the amount typically paid for a stolen credit card account, according to Fred Rica, principal in the security practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Many webmail users actually do half the criminals' job for them, with 33% using just one password online and 48% using only a handful.

Time Warner's AOL division, having seen a recent re-resurgence to catch up to the web leaders in several areas, has just announced that it has integrated complete search capabilities into its AOL Mail service. [Clarification: at this time, search capabilities are only available to AOL's webmail users, and is not integrated in the AOL mail client.] It will work very similarly to Google's Gmail service -- you can not only search by subject and sender, but through email text as well. In other words, the days of constantly shuffling messages into deeply embedded folders (and forgetting where you put them) has changed, as you can search through all your email just like a web search.

In addition to searching capabilities within AOL Mail, AOL has also linked its AOL Pictures service into its email offering. This will allow customers to save pictures attached to email messages directly to their AOL Pictures account in addition to attaching images into emails directly from your AOL Pictures account. Again, this is similar to what Google's Hello service and Picasa photo application already does.

Can these moves by AOL seek to reclaim some of the company's former customer glory? Time will tell, as I'm not sure. There are many millions of AOL users that will surely use these new AOL Mail users, but I doubt that it's enough to attract new customers -- something that AOL desperately needs with the decline of its bread-n-butter dial-up ISP service.