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

Web-based email systems can be convenient to consumers, but they can be convenient to spammers, too. And if they’re convenient to spammers, they can be very inconvenient for an organization’s email system.

One way to deter spammers from compromising mass numbers of webmail accounts has been a device called a CAPTCHA — Completely Automated Public Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. These common puzzles present visitors to websites with a word composed of letters distressed in a number of ways.

The idea is to make the puzzles difficult to solve for automated systems used by spammers, but easy enough for humans to crack. As use of the puzzles grew, though, spammers steadily improved their technology for cracking them. Continue reading Researcher Cracks Video CAPTCHAS

As the Internet slowly moves towards accepting the new addressing system known as IPv6, email administrators need to keep an eye on how that change may affect their organizations, especially when it comes to security.

IPv6, as you may know, was created because the Net was running out of IP addresses under the old IPv4 standard. Don’t ask what happened to IPv5. It’s a complicated story. Suffice it to say the term IPv5 wasn’t available when the Lords of the Internet concluded their realm was running out of numbers, and they’d better do something about it.

One problem that may arise as email servers are configured to handle mail originating from IPv6 addresses is what to do about inbound mail from those locations. That’s because email from IPv6 addresses could pose security threats to your system not posed by the older IPv4 addressing system.

Continue reading IPv6 Can Make Inbound Email Less Secure

Email has become a ripe target for critics. Gripers complain there’s too much of it. Keeping up with it saps worker productivity. Filtering and routing it burdens IT resources. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

The technology became so loathsome to one CEO, Thierry Breton of Atos, that he launched a program to eliminate all internal email communication. In place of internal email, Atos intends to substitute a new solution patterned after social networks like Facebook—a move some email bashers will praise, as they believe anything email can do, social networks can do better. Continue reading Email Needs to Be Social to Survive

On March 8, the FBI will be pulling the plug on the ad hoc DNS infrastructure it set up when it took down the DNSChanger network last November. When that happens, any computers infected with that Trojan will lose their Internet access.

And that includes plenty of computers around the world. According to an analysis conducted by Internet Identity (IID) earlier this month, 250 of all Fortune 500 companies and 27 of 55 major government entities have at least one computer or router infected with DNSChanger.

When the FBI and other law enforcement authorities took down the DNSChanger network, it was estimated that four million computers, including half a million in the United States, were infected by the Trojan around the world. Six Estonian men were arrested in what was called Operation Ghost Click. An Estonian court ruled on February 21 that four of those men could be extradited to the United States for trial. Continue reading March 8: A Day when the FBI Will Shut Down Your Internet Access?

Text messaging and social media communications may be popular, but anyone who thinks that email is dead is sorely mistaken.

According to a report from the Radicati Group, the number of email accounts worldwide is expected to grow from 3.1 billion in 2011 to roughly 4.1 billion by the end of 2015. Most of these newly created accounts will be in the corporate world stating:

“Over the next four years, however, we expect corporate email accounts to increase at a faster pace than consumer email accounts. This will be particularly due to the growth of affordable cloud-based email services. Many organizations are using cloud-based email services as a way to extend email services to kiosk workers who may not have had access to email in the past.”

Now, as any email administrator knows, every newly created email account can mean trouble – especially when it comes to email management. Continue reading Tips for Better Email Management

Email storm can be a great disaster. Simply put, email storms occur when Exchange can’t process the messages in its mail queues fast enough to keep up with incoming traffic. There are a number of common causes for this man-made disaster, among them:

• Spammers have found an open relay on your system and are bouncing hundreds of thousands of messages off your servers.
• A looping message has been created by a configuration mistake that keeps sending and replying to the same message repeatedly.
• A public folder with “replicate all folder content” enabled starts flooding your transport server with messages.
• A rogue application placed on your system by a well-meaning but clueless developer starts spewing mass amounts of mail.

As you might imagine, the source of the storm will determine how you should pluck out its eye. That usually starts with simply by eyeballing the mail that’s backing up in your queues. Continue reading Plucking the Eye out of Email Storms

Email signature blocks—that lump of stuff that’s automatically attached to all outbound email—can be a valuable communication tool if they’re constructed properly.

Although “properly” can be a subjective measure, there are some rules of thumb for creating signature blocks that can be useful for block makers.

For example, put a cap on the amount of phone numbers in the block. One phone number is best, but unless you belong to a one-number-contacts-all service like Google Voice, you’ll probably want at least two numbers: a business line and a mobile one. Continue reading Some DOs and DON’Ts when Creating Email Signature Blocks

Email is one of the most important communications tools for businesses. When it stops working, people start to get nervous.

While there are many things that a user can do to mess up their email, many of these problems can be resolved with a restart of the software or the computer.

However when the old standby of restarting doesn’t work, it is time for the email administrator to start looking into the issue a bit more deeply.

Here are some of the more common errors found in Outlook 2007 along with some of the ways you can make things right again: Continue reading 5 Common Outlook Errors and How to Fix Them

In an age where millions of emails are sent every day it is hard to find someone who hasn’t made a mistake when sending a message.

If you are using Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, you can quickly recall a message and delete unread copies, if you are lucky that is and no one has opened the email. If someone has already opened your errant message, then it’s too late.

Companies have become a bit more cognizant that some employees are just a bit too quick to pull the Send trigger on their mail. To compensate, many have put into place a time delay that gives someone the opportunity to think twice about a message that was sent out and stop it before it is delivered. Continue reading Common Mistakes When Sending Emails