Messaging

Applying Email Marketing Features to Personal Email

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 12:00:00 +0100

A standardized element of modern email marketing services provides statistical results of the campaign - what % of messages were opened, what % were forwarded. These large campaign services struggled with being able to scale their service to the point where they could enable or justify this functionality for the casual or individual emailer who might value knowing that the one addressee of the message had in fact just opened the email in question. No doubt, competition for the high volume email...

GiveBackMail - a New Class of Email Service

Mon, 02 May 2011 15:00:25 +0100

Email is probably the oldest Internet communications service, and today is considered among the most mature of the wide range of services used in business and in personal life to share ideas and digital artifacts such as photos, PDFs, documents and presentations with coworkers, customers, partners, friends and family. The 'free' web-based email service, supported by display advertisements is a staple of many users' online communications experience and starting today, a new entrant promises to ch...

DexRex Brings IM & SMS to Highly Regulated Industries

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 20:25:48 +0100

I had a briefing with the founder and CEO of Massachusetts startup DexRex, Derek Lyman earlier this month and discussed the company's upcoming announcement of ChatSync Mobile Enterprise for BlackBerry. Founded in 2006 by Derek and Richard Tortora, two University of Massachusetts Computer Science students, the company has steadily grown to engage with 70+ enterprise customers. The ChatSync product and service involves a software agent that plugs into your PC or mobile device and securely forwards...

Email Cache Is Evidence

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 19:07:37 +0100

Paul Shin Devine, the former Apple manager who is facing charges of wire fraud used his company computer to provide information about pricing, product specifications and sales forecasts for products not yet released and allegedly profited some $1 million in kickbacks. Apparently the use of so-called freemail Hotmail and Gmail accounts didn't hide from prosecutors the cached messages confirming his fraud. Even the use of the Microsoft Entourage email client for Mac provided the necessary details a...

BoxSentry's New Offers Reduce False Positive Email

Mon, 31 May 2010 20:19:11 +0100

[[False positive]] is the little-known side effect of content-based filtering. For email security professionals, it's a cost of implementing spam filtering: that some legitimate email are caught in the spam filter. For most email users, it's that surprise in one's spam folder: a legitimate email in a swirl of spam, it's the pony in the proverbial pile of s--- and it's happening more often than you'd think. This Google Trends report shows how users are search less frequently over time for anti ...

RPost's New eSignOff Combines Written & Digital Signatures

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:44:29 +0100

In a update briefing last week with Zafar Khan, CEO of RPost, the electronic signature and registered email company that I first blogged about in 2008 while at Lotusphere, the company described its introduction of a new product for electronic signatures. I've been an enthusiast for digital signatures as popularized by the Public Key Infrastructure solutions from RSA or Entrust, blending strong cryptographic technologies with hash mechanisms for complete privacy, authentication, authorization...

Tips on Using Twitter for Business

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:53:32 +0100

I have written about how various folks are attempting to use Twitter for business in our January 2009 report, Twitter in Business and in general, it's not particularly successful. I've experimented with Twitter myself in early 2008/9, but found it to be too onerous to stick with it. Ergo, my followers are only about 5 dozen friends, family and people who searched me out (scary thought). But, now I have figured out how to use Twitter in a way that integrates the service with my firm's web publish...

Sendio Release 5.0 Scores High Points

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:23:08 +0100

I've been a fan of Sendio email security technology for many years. The appliance is a rock-solid email processing server that scans all outbound messages for addressees to add to the accept list and scans against nasty viruses we may inadvertently try to bombard the world with. The appliance performs simple processing on inbound emails as well, which can include, if administrator so chooses, scanning for viruses, attachment policy compliance (no .exe please), sender comparison to an ac...

Swiss Postal Service Integrates Snail and E-mail

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:42:14 +0100

Who'd have thought that the Swiss would innovate in an otherwise declining market and perhaps accelerate the decline by integrating the physical delivery world with the virtual online world? Mail has been in a decline as more and more people and companies around the world use email and web for communications and billing details and promotional initiatives. Positioned as a service for those who are frequently away from home but never far from the Internet, the Swiss Post Box service scans sealed ...

my my myobama

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:52:56 +0100

The kick-off speaker at this year's Enterprise 2.0 in Boston (June 23-25, 2009) did a fabulous job setting the bar high for others. Of course, Jascha Franklin-Hodge is in the social media development business. His company (BlueStateDesign) offers design and strategy consulting and used the nation's biggest success in web 2.0 to great effect in his presentation. (If Obama-team paid for their services, extra great for F-H, but if not, it was still worth a great deal since it gave F-H's company suc...

SpamBots

Fri, 08 May 2009 13:57:07 +0100

Recently, a number of spam messages (like maybe 5) got past my challenge-response anti-spam defenses and deposited a number of nastigrams in my inbox. I did a source view of the message and extracted the source IP address. Then I typed in the IP address to Google and one of the options presented was the trustedsource.org website, which offered me a three part report on the subject IP address. I suppose this measures the number of compliants against the address. Part 1 is a view of the inst...

Lotus Goes In The Cloud

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:56:34 +0100

Lotusphere 2009, which happened just last week gave IBM the opportunity to make a big deal about the cloud. Starting with the 2008 announcement of Bluehouse , the company's initial multi-tenant hosted service implementation, IBM announced the acquisition of the email assets of a white label hosting service provider powerhouse - Outblaze - to emphasize IBM's big move into cloud computing. When the deal closes in 1Q09, IBM will integrate the operation into Bluehouse, the Lotus multi-te...

CAN-SPAM Fine of $873 Million

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:02:22 +0100

The Canadian Adam Guerbuez and his company Atlantis Blue Capital were found liable for statutory damages and aggravated damages totalling $873 million to Facebook for sending some 4 million spam email. Often times, the spammer forges other people's identities. This is usually the best evidence that they are an illegitimate emailer. Although it is unlikely that Facebook will every see the judgment, it does suggest that there is finally a cost being assigned to these nasty and ...

SPAM targets CNN Top-10 List emails

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:00:00 +0100

On August 8th, a massive SPAM email was discovered, millions of people all over the world had clicked and obtained viruses from "CNN Top-10 Lists". As reported by ComputerWorld.com, 11 million people were clicking every hour on Thursday the 7th, by the 8th, it was down to 8 million per hour. An important development came some time during the following week, where the virus had morphed to a "CNN Custom Alert". Also the article by ComputerWorld.com ...

Box Sentry is a Better Choice in Multi-Lingual Environments

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:00:00 +0100

Manish Goel, the CEO of BoxSentry, gave me a delightful reason to ride my motorcycle into Boston on a sunny July afternoon. Sure it's hot this time of year, but at 65 miles per hour, even the most humid day can still be comfortable - until you stop at a light, then it hits you. Man it's hot. We had coffee at the Four Seasons on the Boston Common and chatted about anti-spam issues and technologies. The discussion came around to our groundbreaking work on the user experience with email (Spam ...

AVST Continues Growth in Messaging

Wed, 14 May 2008 07:00:00 +0100

Despite the expectation that the emergence and adoption of unified communications will kill the need for voicemail and unified messaging products, AVST continues to experience mid 20% year over year growth, proving the expectation premature or just plain wrong. With the continued aging of large standalone enterprise-wide voicemail systems from the 1980s and 1990s, in particular Octel systems (now a part of Avaya), many customers are reaching out to AVST to deliver the next generation solution, o...

30th Anniversary of Spam?

Sun, 04 May 2008 23:58:36 +0100

A lot of bloggers and web properties are making hay of the 30th anniversary of Gary Thurek's unpopular email sent to all the users on the ARPAnet. However unpleasant Gary's message was, it doesn't meet the standard test for spam. The standard test for spam relates to four critieria: Anonymous - no. Gary did not hide that he sent the email in question Bulk - yes. Gary did send the message to many users. Irrelevant - no. Gary did send the email to peopl...

Brace For It: Spambot Cracks CAPTCHA

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:43:49 +0100

Not good. Arstechnica.com writes about how spambots have cracked Windows Live Hotmail and Gmail's CAPTCHA disciplines. These services use CAPTCHA to prevent automated systems from signing up to their web email services. From there, the accounts can be manipulated into sending spam. Some ISPs have cut Gmail and Hotmail domains off, placing them on their block lists. Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart ([[CAPTCHA]]) is used to slow down automated we...

Registered Email

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:00:00 +0100

My first exposure to [[public key infrastructure]] was while working in Richardson TX at Nortel. About 1996, the Entrust organization reported into my boss' boss. As sister organizations it was appropriate to check out how we could use their technology and discuss how they could use our technologies. As part of that discussion, I began to study PKI technology - Nortel had secured years before a license to the RSA patents, and were attempting to commercialize the algorithm within an environme...

Virginia Supreme Court Allows Common Sense to Prevail

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 07:54:02 +0100

[[Jeremy Jaynes]] made $750,000 a month in 2003. Now, he'll be making license plates until 2017. A notorious and convicted spammer, Jaynes lost his argument before the Virginia Supreme Court. He used aliases and 10 broadband connections. Apparently it was the aliases that showed he was more into trickery than promoting ideas. It is estimated that he sent 10 million messages/day. Here's A Thinking Man's take on the topic as a user of SpamArrest , a [[challenge-response spam filter...