The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has obtained a draft version of the SEC's report on bond-rating firms and their role in the credit bubble, and some of the stuff is pretty scary.

In one e-mail, a staffer at Standard & Poor's, which is own by McGraw-Hill (NYSE: MHP) told another that "we rate every deal," and that "it could be structured by cows and we would rate it."

Another wrote that "rating agencies continue to create" an "even bigger monster -- the CDO market. Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters. ;O)"

Yes -- complete with the smiley face. If this seems reminiscent of disgraced analyst Henry Blodget's e-mails bashing stocks he was publicly pumping during the dot-com bubble, that's because it's exactly the same. The lesson here, once again, is this: e-mails ever really get deleted permanently and, if you're being shady or doing something unethical, make a phone call, talk with the person in a dark alley, or send them a letter that they can promptly discard. Don't send an e-mail!

Of course, S&P's investment-grade ratings on CDOs stuffed with dodgy loans turned out to be wildly optimistic, and the house of cards has done more than falter -- it's brought down Bear Stearns and wreaked havoc on the economy.

Lot's of ink has been spilled on these pages about Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) bid for Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) and what this might mean for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and for the entire search industry. See Gary Sattler's article on his views of how this may play out.

Tech guru, Tim O'Reilly takes a different tack on sizing up the news. On his blog, O'Reilly examines what this merger activity would mean for the whole e-mail industry, not search. "And for Microsoft, it could be a fatal mistake to take the battle to Google on its own ground. That's the very mistake that companies like Netscape made in competing with Microsoft," says O'Reilly.

Instead, posits O'Reilly, the combined Yahoo! and Microsoft should focus on their dominance in the e-mail industry. Yahoo Mail is still an industry leader online and Microsoft has huge assets in the corporate realm with Outlook and Exchange. Says O'Reilly, "Now think about all the possibilities that are starting to be explored in the area of e-mail data as a source of information about users, and a locus for building new services for those users."

This could get very interesting.

Zack Miller is the Managing Editor of IsraelNewsletter.com and a former equity analyst for a leading multinational hedge fund. Author owns a long-term stock position in Google.

The New York Times [registration required] reports that spouses are using electronic means to spy on their significant others. Here are three examples:

• Research in Motion Ltd.'s (NASDAQ: RIMM) BlackBerry uncovers a husband's affair with a medical resident. One woman noticed that her husband, a Manhattan surgeon, was distant and obsessed with his BlackBerry. She drew him a bubble bath on his birthday and then pounced on the BlackBerry while he was in the tub. His e-mail messages documented his affair with a medical resident, including plans for a liaison that night. A few weeks later, she found messages in his AOL e-mail from a mortgage company proving he'd purchased a $3 million Manhattan condominium for his trysts with the medical resident.
• Time Warner, Inc. (NYSE: TWX)'s AOL e-mail reveals wife's Australian lover. A Philadelphia man believed his wife was engaging in secret online correspondence. He found e-mail messages to a lover in Australia that she had sent from a private AOL account on the family computer. The man's lawyer used the AOL e-mails as evidence to help win a legal dispute between the man and his wife and an advantageous settlement.

If your email inbox is overflowing, you don't have to spend the next three hours responding, you can tell everyone you know that you're filing for email bankruptcy. According to today's Washington Post, that means either you'll just ask people to resend their emails if they expect a response (weak form) or you'll sign off from email altogether (strong form).

I first got exposed to email at MIT back in 1980 when it was used on a few university and military computers. I could not see declaring email bankruptcy, although I don't get that much email. However, I do have other email problems: too much spam and an unreliable Yahoo! email account.

But some people have so much email that they declare weak form email bankruptcy. For example, In April, venture capitalist Fred Wilson announced he was giving up on responding to all the email piled up in his inbox. "I am so far behind on email that I am declaring bankruptcy," he wrote. "If you've sent me an email (and you aren't my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again. I am starting over."