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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Outside North America, cellphone users make heavy use of texting. It’s like a very simple form of email. Spam’s quite rare, because senders are usually charged a few cents for each text. A typical user receives two or three a year. By way of illustration, here’s one I received a month ago: From: Winner Date: […]... read more »