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

When starting out, many small businesses set up their email using one of the free accounts available to them. Services like Gmail by Google, Hotmail from Microsoft or Yahoo!’s mail service, provide a working email address with almost no maintenance for a business just getting its feet wet.

However this may not be the best way to make a first impression with your potential customers.

Listed below are seven reasons why you need to ditch the yourcompany@freeemail.com and go with an address that better reflects the image you want your company to have. Continue reading 7 Reasons to Ditch That Free Email Address

Users of practically every supported version of Windows, whether desktop or server, 32 bit or 64 bit, and even the low attack surface Windows Server Core should immediately review Microsoft Security Bulletin MS11-100 and begin testing and deployment of this patch as soon as possible. The patch, covered in KB2638420 addresses four vulnerabilities in the Microsoft .NET Framework, including 1.1 SP1, 2.0 SP2, 3.5 SP1, 3.5.1, and 4. Three of the four were privately reported, while the last one has been publicly disclosed. Continue reading Microsoft Releases Critical, Out Of Band Update

Users interested in deploying a hybrid configuration have been looking forward to Exchange 2010 SP2 for months so they could take advantage of the new hybrid configuration wizard included with SP2. That wizard takes dozens of manual steps and automates them in a simple to follow wizard, which we discussed in this article a few weeks ago.

While the hybrid configuration wizard is a great improvement in setting up an Exchange system with some mailboxes on premise, and others with a cloud service provider, it seems a small glitch made it through to the release of SP2. It seems that many customers are running into issues using PKI certificates that were previously issued and which worked without a problem in Exchange 2010 RTM and/or SP1.

Continue reading Certificate Problems with Hybrid Configuration in SP2

You’ve probably seen this before. A user opens a help desk ticket because every time they try to send an email to someone, it bounces. That someone could be a co-worker using the same email system, or it could be a customer on an external email system – it doesn’t matter. When the user replies to an email sent from the other person, the reply is delivered flawlessly. But when the user tries to create a new email, it bounces.

You try to send an email to the remote person and it is delivered correctly. You use message tracking to try to run down the problem with the email, and you might not even find it (if you are searching on the recipient address that is…which is a hint).  It’s not until you have the users actually showing you what they are doing that you realize they have a bad address in their nickname cache.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Outlook Auto-complete

A team of researchers from IBM and Microsoft recently published an article detailing their studies about email sorting and searching called “Am I wasting my time organizing email? A study of email refinding”. The researchers studied the email sorting and searching activities of 345 users and came up with a surprising conclusion – users who sort email might be wasting their time.

The researcher team was made up of Steve Whittaker, Tara Matthews, Julian Cerruti, and Hernan Badenes of IBM, and John Tang of Microsoft used a web-based email client called Bluemail to study the actions of the study participants. They coined three phrases to define the actions of email users. Preparatory activities are those actions users take to sort and file messages, including the creation of folders, moving emails into those folders, tagging messages, and setting up rules to support the other actions. Opportunistic methods for finding messages use search and conversation threading to locate messages. Refinding actions are those that users take to look for a message that they have already seen in their inbox, whether that was tagged, sorted, or just allowed to drop down the list.

Continue reading Study Says Sorting Emails Is a Waste of Time

There was a time when using PST files were thought to be the solution to file storage problems. Getting emails out of the user’s mailbox and onto a shared repository not only freed up email inboxes from increasing file sizes, but also gave admins a central location in which all emails could be backed up and archived.

Add to these benefits the fact that PST files could be separated so emails related to a project, client, subject, etc could be stored and archived separately, and many would think that this solution was all that an IT department would need to manage their archiving and storage needs.

Of course PST files aren’t a panacea; they have many problems associated with them. Continue reading Two Big Problems With PST Files

I’m not saying that email is taking a bad rap these days, but there are many people out there who believe that email’s days as the reigning king of workplace communication are numbered.

With more companies opening up the doors to social media communication, text messaging and instant messaging, email is no longer the only method used to send electronic messages out to co-workers and customers. Continue reading Making Email Pleasant Again

In Understanding Email Encryption Part 1 I covered not only why encrypting email is important, but also the two different types of email encryption: asymmetrical and symmetrical.

There was another section that briefly mentioned some of the barriers that impede buy-in from management when it comes to an encryption solution. But these were only touched upon.

Unfortunately when it comes to making a pitch for encryption, those who understand the need for it are an easy sell. Those who either don’t understand it or see the need for it often cite one or more of these stigmas that are attached to email encryption as reason to avoid it. Continue reading Understanding Email Encryption (Part 2)