There are many ways to categorize how people manage email and recently Joshua Lyman aired a scheme based on how they use folders.

Lyman identified four classes of email managers:

• No Filers. They just let their inbox fill up and ignore folders entirely.
• Frequent Filers. They create elaborate folder structures and are diligent about filing messages as they arrive in their inbox.
• Spring Cleaners. They mix frequent filing with no filing. They allow messages to pile up in their inboxes, but periodically clean up their inboxes and file the messages in folders.
• Folderless Cleaners. They maintain lean inboxes by retaining all but essential messages in their inboxes and sending all others to a dump folder. Continue reading Be a better email manager through self-analysis

We’ve been gradually ramping up our coverage of the Exchange Management Shell and the capabilities of PowerShell here at The Email Admin, and it’s great to see that Microsoft hasn’t slacked off when it comes to the EMS and PS either. There’s a new tool out, currently in beta, which shows all the signs of being a command-line junkee’s new crave.

The Microsoft Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell is a new graphical tool that can help you navigate all the twists and turns of using Windows PowerShell. The tool is designed to make finding, understanding, and reusing existing scripts as quick and easy as possible. Whether those scripts are of your own creation, created by your coworkers, or contributed by others to online repositories, Script Explorer is built to help you find, and use, just what you need as quickly and as easily as possible. Continue reading Scripting with Microsoft Script Explorer

You may not have heard of inbox anxiety, but you may have felt it.

It’s the need to respond to all your email as quickly as possible and feeling overwhelmed when you can’t do it.

In many cases, the disorder can be irrational, as a recent study performed by OnePoll and sponsored by Microsoft suggests. That research predicted that the average inbox will receive some 14,600 emails, most of it (80 percent) headed for the junk folder.

Nevertheless, that fact isn’t calming office workers. As the study points out, one in 10 of them still suffers from inbox anxiety. Continue reading Tips for avoiding 'inbox anxiety'

As an email administrator you will find that much of your time is spent dealing with the same problems over and over again from your user base.

Fortunately, many user related issues are relatively simple to fix. However, addressing them on a constant basis takes time from more pressing issues you may have on your plate.

To help reduce the amount of time consumed with these issues you may want to consider publishing a FAQ page or something similar to your internal website. Simply directing users to this page may help them better understand the problems they are having and help keep you free to work on more pressing projects and keep your sanity intact.

While this list may not address some of the issues specific to any one company or industry, it does contain some of the more common problems users run into so they should definitely be included in any list you create. Continue reading Solving Common Email Problems for Your Users

For many organizations, email is their lifeblood. Because of that, most of what’s important to them lands on their email server at some point in its life span.

That’s a fact of life not lost to attorneys hell-bent on discovering electronic evidence to support a client’s claims.

When electronic discovery was in its infancy, it might have been acceptable to adopt a reactive posture toward it. That’s not the case any more.

Courts are taking a dim view of companies that appear slipshod in the treatment of their data. “We can’t find it” or “It was accidently shredded” aren’t acceptable responses to discovery requests aimed at your email archives.

Continue reading An ounce of retention can avoid a pound of pain in ediscovery

A study from the Ponemon Institute, a research firm located in Traverse City, Mich., revealed recently that nearly four-fifths (78 percent) of organizations have experienced a data breach that could be attributed to a malicious or negligent employee or insider.

An even more telling finding of the study [PDF] was that more than three-quarters (76 percent) of the 709 IT and IT security professionals participating in the survey acknowledged that their data was not protected (29 percent), partially protected (43 percent) or were unsure it was protected (four percent). Continue reading Data Protection Plans can curb data breaches

Becoming comfortable, and even skilled, at using the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) is going to take time, repetition, and it certainly helps if you can pick up some quick tips and tricks to make it seem less arcane, and more friendly. Here’s a list of ten quick tricks to help you get a little more comfortable with the EMS and also a little more efficient early on. Continue reading 10 Tricks in the Exchange Management Shell

Anyone who has spent any time browsing through the many urban legends detailed on Snopes.com knows that there are some pretty ridiculous rumors out there that get people pretty worked up.

Funny as they may be, people do hear these old wives’ tales and gossip and have such faith in their accuracy that they alter the way they live as a result.

The world of email has its own rumor and myths as well. Many of them also dictate how people act when it comes to electronic communication. Continue reading Five Email Myths Debunked

Complaints about email performance come with the territory of being an administrator.

Most of the time those problems can be traced to sources outside your email hardware. An improperly maintained PC starts exhibiting sluggish behavior, for example, or the network architecture starts creaking from data overload.

There are occasions, though, when a peek at your email hardware is in order is needed. You check your Exchange Server’s CPU and disk performance, as well as memory usage. Then there are event logs to review and tools to run like Best Practices Analyzer and Performance Troubleshooter.

One tool in Exchange 2010 that won’t be obvious to you, though, is the ECP Performance Console. That’s because it’s shut off by default. Since you may be interested in some of the things it can tell you about your mail system—time to authorize a user, number of cmdlets you have running and how long to process requests, to name a few—you may want to turn it on. Continue reading What the ECP Performance Console is and why you'd want to use it

Last time we talked about troubleshooting ActiveSync issues from the perspective of the client, particularly with regard to account issues and certificate issues. But sometimes, an ActiveSync issue may be one that you cannot get to from the client side, either because the client is remote, or the device is not as open, or it could be a more wide-spread issue that is just going to be more manageable if you focus on the server side of things. To do that, there are some great tools out there to narrow in quickly on the nature of the issue, even if you don’t have an ActiveSync device on hand with which to test. Continue reading Troubleshooting ActiveSync from the CAS Server