Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, may we have your attention. All is right in the world this morning, and you may all commence firing off breakup emails, work communication, chain letters, and whatever else you might use your Gmail account(s) for. Google's popular email service is back up and running after suffering a severe outage that potentially affected up to 35 million Gmail users yesterday.

Yahoo is denying accusations that it knowingly and willingly censored email messages related to "Occupy Wall Street" protests, a leaderless non-violent resistance movement upset over the disparity of wealth and power in the U.S. Protestors accused Yahoo of foul play when their emails containing a link to the organization's website were flagged as suspicious and blocked from being sent.

Yahoo introduced the latest version of its mail service late last year in beta form and has decided it's now ready for prime time. Over the coming weeks, all 284 million users worldwide will start seeing the upgraded platform, as will Yahoo's global partners, including Nokia. Key features of the revamped mail service include improved performance, enhanced spam protection, and a customizable inbox with an emphasis on social networking.

Following the launch of the new AOL.com is an ambitious new email system currently code named "Project Phoenix." This represents AOL's attempt at reinventing AOL Mail which, among other things, will bring a unified inbox into its new bag of tricks.

"Email remains one of the most vital communication tools despite all of the new sites and apps available to consumers today," said Brad Garlinghouse, President of AOL's Consumer Applications Group. "There is still so much innovation to be done in the space and Project Phoenix is just the tip of the iceberg. We see a huge opportunity to disrupt email in a big way. AOL is the company that brought everyone online, and now we're making it simpler and more enjoyable to be there."

AOL claims its email business drives 45 percent of the company's page views, so as you can imagine they're taking Project Phoenix very seriously. Completely redesigned and built from the ground-up, the new mail system includes a bunch of feature additions, including a Quick Bar (send emails, IMs, or text messages and update Facebook and Twitter), email aggregation (send and receive messages from nearly any provider, including Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail), a Smart View system that displays things like photo attachments and maps as thumbnail pics in the right-hand sidebar, and more.

Project Phoenix is currently by invite only, which you can sign up for here. Video preview below.