National Public Radio broadcast a fascinating report yesterday about the father of a United States Marine killed in Iraq who is petitioning Yahoo to allow him access to his son’s email account. His desire is to preserve the messages he…... read more »
Today, we received an email from a well-known charity. The message talked about the charity’s work relieving suffering caused by last week’s tragic events in the Indian Ocean. At least, we think the message was from a charity. The huge…... read more »
Today’s AOL press release about spam volumes makes surprising reading. To begin with, it talks about how AOL’s spam filters are better than they were last year. One would hope so, but we say well done to AOL, nevertheless. But after that, AOL said some very odd things. It’s a complicated area and we can’t... read more »
The Register: Click Here for Story... read more »
New technologies are becoming available that catch viruses very quickly: before you’ve received the anti-virus (AV) signature from conventional AV suppliers. They’re worth considering adding as a second layer of defense, after conventional AV. We’re aware of at least four vendors with such technology: MessageLabs, MailFrontier, IronPort, and Avinti. We wrote about Avinti’s unusual detection... read more »
In the past we’ve seen some amusing tit-for-tat between Microsoft and IBM/Lotus around their respective messaging/collaboration user conferences. For example, there was the big yellow Notes bus at one or more MECs (now sadly defunct). On a few occasions, Lotusphere[1] attendees have arrived at Disney World[2] with significant Exchange announcements from Microsoft ringing in their... read more »
In this report, we look at three of these approaches, with a particular focus on Avinti’s anti-virus virtual machine technology. ... read more »
Today Microsoft announced their new plans and timing for Exchange Edge Server. Exchange Edge Server has now morphed into a new role for Exchange Server that administrators can deploy, similar to other Exchange roles (front-end server, back end-server, routing server,…... read more »
Ed Brill’s comment to Richi’s post yesterday prompted me to post my own view on the scorn over the lack of an Exchange roadmap. I don’t believe for a second that there is no Exchange roadmap in Redmond, it’s simply…... read more »
An observation: although Hotmail and MSN now examine SPF records as part of their spam scoring for incoming email, Exchange still does not. Surely Microsoft will roll out a SPF/SenderID update to IMF soon?... read more »
At this time of year, we exchange Christmas greetings. Many of the expressions we receive are sincere. And many obviously aren’t, as when you receive boilerplate text that is irrelevant and you barely know the person concerned anyway. In an…... read more »
In InformationWeek, Bob Evans polled for ideas to stop spam. We’re not very impressed with the answers he got. (Reading between the lines, it doesn’t sound like he is, either.) The best contribution turned out to be Tempfailing. In case you’ve not come across this before, the idea is that if a receiving MTA "tempfails"... read more »
Sherpa Software announced version 1.1 Archive Attender for Exchange, its automated email archiving tool. Key enhancements: ability for administrators to automatically access and search the archive by size and age of messages, improved administrator search and recovery capabilities, and user search of archived data, among others. read more »
In the US, making a law can be just the beginning. There’s typically a Federal agency empowered to interpret the law, and put flesh on its bones. This process is known as rulemaking. A year ago, "W." signed the CAN-SPAM Act into law. the FTC then started its rulemaking process. Yesterday, it announced the conclusions.... read more »
The slumbering giant buys Giant. Interesting, but the thing about spyware removers is that you have to trust the people who write it to identify spyware correctly. We’re betting that Microsoft’s new product isn’t going to delete advertising brokers’ tracking…... read more »
This webinar identifies the market trends most likely to emerge in 2005 as well as longer-term trends in messaging and collaboration technologies we expect to see in 2006 through 2010.... read more »
We’ve noticed a significant uptick in spam volumes over the last week or two. Our spamtraps are overflowing and the ISPs that serve them have been glowing red hot. FrontBridge Technologies seems to agree with us: observing recent spam levels up 650% on the same period last year, as much as 93% of inbound mail.... read more »
Symantec and VERITAS Software announced that the companies have entered into a definitive agreement to merge in an all-stock transaction. Based on Symantec’s stock price of $27.38 at market close on December 15, 2004, the transaction is valued at approximately $13.5 billion. The transaction is expected to close in 2Q2005. read more »
Previously, we talked about people who don’t get spam because their email address isn’t known by spammers. The bad news is, this is changing….... read more »
Symantec announced Symantec Premium AntiSpam, its add-on subscription service for Symantec Mail Security and Symantec AntiVirus Enterprise Edition customers. Integrates Brightmail technology for multi-layered spam prevention. Available December, 2004. read more »
Recently, Microsoft has been offering a nice little plug-in for Outlook, called Lookout. As we’ve blogged previously – it provides a decent and usable search engine across an Outlook PST and a wide variety of other documents on your desktop….... read more »
Several news sources are reporting today a service called Microsoft Office Outlook Live (MOOL for short) will shortly be available in beta. Microsoft briefly posted a slick flash demo to their own site as well, which has since been taken…... read more »
Last week, I talked about who’s buying anti-spam tools. So what about those who aren’t? We estimate that only 75% of US corporate mailboxes are protected by anti-spam. Why so few? One reason (at the risk of making the rest of us insanely jealous) is that some people simply don’t get spam.... read more »
Ferris Research talking about online dating? Well, it’s communication. It’s collaboration. It incorporates email and often IM. Why not? Just a quick thought — it seems to me that the economic incentive for a dating website to provide a good service is broken. Most businesses thrive on repeat business, or a regular cashflow from a... read more »
Oracle today announced that it has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire PeopleSoft, for $26.50 per share (approximately $10.3 billion). The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies and should close by early January, 2005. read more »
Oracle released results for 2Q2005, ended November 30. Revenue increased 10% to $2.76 billion with net income of $815 million. read more »
Postini announced Postini Auto-Encryption, new feature of its leading secure email boundary service, Perimeter Manager Enterprise Edition 5.2. Sends and Receives encrypted email via implementation of Transport Layer Security (TLS). read more »
The Law of Unintended Consequences is hard at work… Assuming spam fighters continue to be successful, email spam will decline in the medium term. When that happens, inadvertent spamming will clearly stand out. Anti-spam "vigilantes" will be ready to pounce on any such unsolicited mail. So, organizations should make doubly sure that their employees don’t... read more »
“In the past, Exchange administrators had to manage each server individually with limited information and different tools for solving each problem,” said Dave Champine, director, Exchange Solutions, Quest Software. Quest’s Spotlight’s graphical view of the Exchange organization allows administrators to view detailed information and act on events across the entire Exchange network. Features include: Real-Time... read more »
An increasing proportion of US anti-spam tool sales are "brownfield." That is to say, they’re replacement sales — replacing products that are no longer doing their job adequately. Spam is an arms race between spammers and anti-spam tool writers, which means… Some anti-spam vendors don’t have the expertise to keep up — these vendors will... read more »
Symantec announced an agreement to acquire Platform Logic, a vendor of intrusion prevention software. Symantec declined to share details about the deal until it closes. read more »
In January, 2005, IBM Lotus will launch its web conferencing service, IBM Lotus Web Conferencing Service. The main functions are Whiteboard, integrated phone audio, Screen Sharing, Chat, Send Web Page, and Polling. This is essentially a hosted version of Lotus’…... read more »
Today, the cost of using a web conferencing service such as Microsoft PlaceWare and Webex adds up to around 50 or 60 cents per person per minute, for both the audio and web sessions. Less if you buy in bulk….... read more »
Organizations have slowed the pace at which they upgrade their email systems. The cost to deploy new releases to large numbers of clients and servers (for organizations that have not consolidated their infrastructures) can be quite high. This poses a…... read more »