email system

Spam turns 30

Mon, 05 May 2008 06:59:59 -0400

Spam, the bane of every office and personal email system, celebrated its 30th birthday on May 3 and as every CIO knows, age hasn't stopped the scourge from remaining ubiquitous. Microsoft founder Bill Gates predicted in 2004 that the spam problem would be solved in two years. But Sophos, an email security company, says that 95 percent of all email today is spam, while Symantec says that figure is more like 80 percent to 85 percent. Due to sophisticated solutions, email service providers and the hard work of IT managers, end users only see a fraction of what's out there. But the spammers are an industrious lot, constantly presenting new security risks to company systems and offering an unrelenting array of solicitations for unwary victims. Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten says "there is more spam than ever and no end is in sight."

For more on spam's significant birthday:
- See this InformationWeek article

Relieving overloaded email systems

Mon, 05 May 2008 06:59:58 -0400

Sharing large documents, media files or data files is critical in the workplace and many CIOs rely on email systems because they are easy to use and familiar to most people. But as many IT executives know, making the email system the de facto content management system for communications has its drawbacks including bandwidth and storage constraints and increasing storage costs. Pepperdine University CIO Timothy Chester tells of his trials and tribulations dealing with this issue. At first, he instituted file size limits for the attachments passing through the university's email system but were unable to accommodate users' needs and folks turned to free email services from Microsoft, Yahoo and Google as well as social networks like Facebook and MySpace. That, in turn, created security problems for the IT department.

The solution? Turning to a secure file transfer solution that would be easy to use and cost-effective while at the same time providing relief for the over-burdened email system. In his case, it was Accellion, a product he says allowed students, faculty and staff at the university to use the email technology they already know yet still collaborate on sending large files quickly and easily without an exposure to security risks.

To read more about the Pepperdine IT experience:
- See this CIO Magazine article

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Google's email hang-up

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 06:59:59 -0500

Got any aspirin? Google sure needed some last week. Google disabled an unknown number of Gmail accounts in an over-the-top effort to combat spammers. The problem began on Dec. 5 when email users began reporting on the Gmail Help forum that they couldn't access their accounts. Google acknowledged the problem on Thursday afternoon. The Gmail Guide wrote, "Our team is aware of the problem, and our engineers are continuing to investigate." Several hours later, the company said the problem had been fixed. The company said it happened while they were trying to purge spammers from their system. But there still is a problem. The email system apparently would not accept emails while the accounts were offline. And Gmail will not try to re-deliver those emails. Such is life when you play in the big leagues.

"Our goal has always been to keep Gmail free of people who abuse the service and to keep Gmail inboxes free of spam. We've been targeting a large network of spammers to keep them out of the Gmail system and accidentally disabled access to some other accounts," said Google spokeswoman Courtney Hohne.

For more on Google's traffic snarls:
- Check out this Computerworld Article

Taking the middle ground with email

Mon, 07 May 2007 20:01:38 -0400

Today, it's entirely possible to take a hybrid approach to email messaging that allows you to choose the best from both the open standards community and your legacy proprietary systems technology. But this hybrid open/proprietary approach will only work if it allows users to drop in an email server without making changes to desktops or infrastructure. For a smooth transition and managed migration, the new system must operate seamlessly at the server-to-server level, so that during a period of coexistence, users of the new system can work effectively with users who are still hosted on Exchange. An effective approach uses a product compatible at the network-protocol level with the existing infrastructure. Outlook on the desktop will think it is talking to Exchange when it is really talking to the new Linux email server, and end users don't know they are on a different server. An open standard, Exchange-compatible, drop-in solution supports a Linux-friendly messaging environment that enables full Outlook functionality. What's more, enterprises can scale their email systems and choose the most economical storage components, and the servers can communicate on a peer-to-peer basis with Exchange and the rest of the email ecosystem. This middle-ground approach leverages systems that enable protocol compatibility with the market-dominating system but also allow the organization to evolve an open email ecosystem.

Read more about the hybrid email system:
- read the article at Linux Insider

U.K. terrorist alerts going the email route

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 19:01:37 -0500

Britain's security agency is initiating an email system to alert residents of changes in security levels and terrorist expectations. The U.K. Security Service has already embraced using the Internet for its public notification service, which provides updates on current security threat levels via its website. The next step is providing an email alert system that residents can sign up for starting soon. At least one security pundit doesn't think online security alert systems are worth all the time and trouble it takes to implement them.

For more on the U.K. terrorist alert systems:
- read the article at Security.itworld

Editor's Corner

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 19:01:40 -0500

Today's leading news item isn't about strategy, new technology or an advancement in networking. It's about an IT leader who has been charged with hacking into his former company's email system, in order to tell ex-colleagues about impending layoffs. It isn't the crime aspect that warrants attention. It's the fact that the former tech honcho actually left his company three years ago and was still able to access internal systems and networks as recently as this past summer. That's what caught my attention, and what I think should catch yours. In every company that I've worked for, IT is typically called in the moment a layoff or firing takes place, and gets busy deleting the employee's passwords and user privileges immediately afterward. Now that could have taken place in this case, and maybe the accused figured out a way in given his knowledge of the system. It will be interesting to find out as the case heads into court. It also got me thinking about how companies handle network access and email once an employee leaves a company. Let me know what your processes and approaches are and I'll share them here next week. -Judy

The danger with email encryption

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 20:01:36 -0400

There has been a great deal of talk about how great email encryption can be for eliminating security vulnerabilities, assessing sender authentication and protecting confidential corporate data. But as some expert relate, if done wrong, encryption can crash the email system. The big mistake is doing a deployment without some investigating, planning and testing. Another big lesson learned is that while many IT leaders think encryption is a cheap approach, often it's not, as some companies have learned the hard way. Yet if done right it can deliver on all it promises, say tech leaders.

For more on making email encryption work well:
- read this News.com article