Chellam, Raju. Can you live without e-mail? The Business Times: Biz IT. July 29, 2004

Reports on recent industry survey in which 60% of respondents said they'd be willing to give up e-mail if virus and hacker threats continue unchecked.

META Group. META Group Assesses E-mail Hygiene Market Development. Tekrati Research News. July 28, 2004.

META Group free online briefing in which they predict consolidation and rapid vendor innovation in the E-mail hygiene marketplace over the years to come.

Fernandes, Julia. CXOtoday. July 30, 2004.

CXOtoday Interesting article from Indian perspective related to the recent Forrester survey on companies monitoring e-mail.

SJPD Sending Warnings, Alerts Through E-Mail. NBC11.com - News. July 29, 2004.

Interesting perspective on compliance and e-mail. :-) The San Jose Police Department (SJPD) has started to use a website to provide communities with a report card of crimes happening in their communities. In addition, the SJPD has started using e-mail to notify residents of important warnings and alerts that affect their neighbourhood.

Million, Paul [Archival Vendor: Metrofile]. E-mail management and the corporate bottom line. ITWeb. July 20, 2004.

Great article on Email management listing the components to look for in an effective e-mail management solution. Obviously slanted towards archival and written to support the vendor's featuresets, but still useful.

Connell, James. Now, e-mail without all that writing. International Herald Tribune. July 30, 2004.

Article about an offering from a company called mail2speak who are providing customers the ability to send voice messages that show up as e-mails in the recipients' Inboxes.

E-mail glut costs business. The London Free Press. July 31, 2004.

Report on a recent survey by Christina Cavanagh, professor at Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario, in which we learn that the average corporate information worker is spending approximately one hour more (over last year) to deal with an overloaded workload. Business users average receiving 54 e-mails a day, not including SPAM. This represents an increase of 13% over the past year. More recent statistics estimate that figure at 64 e-mails a day.

Bermant, Charles. House e-mail bill raises the bar on privacy. The Seattle Times: Business & Technology. July 31, 2004.

The E-Mail Privacy Act of 2004 was recently introduced as a response to a U.S. Court of Appeals decision that the wiretap law did not apply to e-mail. Essentially it attempts to make intercepting an e-mail message as illegal as phone taps.

Jacobs, Paula. E-mail archiving on the rise. SearchExchange.com. Jul 26, 2004.

Title says it all. E-mail archival is on the rise in both regulated and non-regulated industries. Discussion of Health Insurance Portability and Accountablity Act (HIPAA) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Microsoft Corporation. Lookout 1.2 Available for Free Public Download. July 23, 2004.

• NOTE: Microsoft changed the download link soon after I posted this.  New link is http://sandbox.msn.com.

Microsoft has released Lookout 1.2 for free public download. They only just announced the acquisition 7 days ago ... great job making this available so quickly! I've been using this solution for a bit and have to say that this is my #1 choice for best Outlook add-in from a productivity perspective. Phenomenal tool, largely for its very, very fast indexing speed and very fast search. I've run tests with complex queries against 250,000+ messages and documents stored across 10+ PSTs and multiple file locations and had results returned in sub-5 seconds. And my Index size is only around 375 MB, which is great when you compare with other solutions (in a similar test that I ran with competitor OutIndex a few months ago it gave me an index size of over 1.6 GB before "giving up" trying to index the same 10 PSTs).  Note the bit on the download site about being able to search:

• "Email messages
• Contacts, calendar, notes, tasks, etc.
• Data from exchange, POP, IMAP, PST files, Public Folders
• Files on your computer or other computers
• ... Very soul (okay, not true) "

Heh!  Outstanding tool.

Sengupta, David. Best Practice: Always Use Mailbox as Target for Exchange Journaling for Compliance Purposes. July 23, 2004.

Have been doing some reading lately about message jouraling and archiving for compliance purposes, specifically to do with Microsoft Exchange environments.  First of all, some definitions. 

• Journaling - refers to the ability to record all communications.
• Archiving - refers to the ability to remove content from native data storage (i.e. Exchange databases) and store it elsewhere (i.e. File system, SQL, Oracle, mySQL, Tape, HSM, nearline/offline storage, etc.) to reduce capacity.

If you're using the built in Exchange journaling functionality, it's always a best practice to specify a mailbox as a target journaling container.  In other words, don't use a Public Folder (PF) or Contact/Custom Recipient as the target for journaling.  This is because cetrtain types of messages don't survive transport to a Public Folder (by design) including NDRs, etc.  It's always a best practice to journal to a mailbox, and if you need to, to use a rule set on the journaling mailbox to forward/redirect journaled messages to another location (such as an archive).

As an aside, note that there is some blurring of nomenclature when in comes to journaling in Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003.  The settings to enable message journaling (at the store level only) allow you to "archive all messages sent or received by mailboxes on this store" to a specified recipient.  If you think about what's actually happening here, this is simply journaling and not archival.  But I digress ...

To summarize, always use a target mailbox if you're enabling message journaling in Exchange 5.5, Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003.  I'll probably flip this into a Microsoft Community Solutions KB Article when I get a chance.

META Group. Microsoft IM Partnership Illustrates Move Toward Convergence of Collaboration and Communication Services, Says META Group. July 20, 2004.

META Group perspective on Microsoft wanting to "own" client experience around real time collaborations, end-to-end. Interesting perspective on Microsoft attempting to "triangulate consumer, entertainment, and corporate markets around rich media."

Nowell, Paul. Banc of America Securities OKs SEC Penalty. phillyBurbs.com. March 10, 2004.

Banc of America Securities LLC could not produce an e-mail thread relating to issues being investigated by the SEC. The cost? A record $10 million fine. Having a product such as Recovery Manager for Exchange would've greatly facilitated their efforts finding that e-mail thread.

Sturgeon, Will. 'Cyber-loafing' signposts motivation problems - ZDNet UK News. July 16, 2004.

"Cyber-loafing" ... sitting around at work surfing the Internet ... has massive impacts on office productivity. Is there a lesson to be learned here?

Graham, Pam. Email-wiping may go to police. The New Zealand Herald. July 17, 2004.

Company in New Zealand (Tranz Rail) accused of "email-wiping" for alleged anti-competitive reasons (against Fast Cat Ferries) ...

Growing Risks of Workplace E-Mail and IM. eMarketer. July 15, 2004.

Results of the '2004 Workplace E-mail and Instant Messaging Survey,' conducted by the American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy Institute. Overall suggests most companies are ill-equiped to deal with regulatory inquiries, don't manage their e-mail, and are facing significant risk from IM and e-mail abuse.

Claburn, Thomas. Policies Lag E-Mail's Popularity. InformationWeek. July 12, 2004.

Many companies haven't come to terms with e-mail in the workplace. If this applies to your company, read on ...

Barnes, Andrew. [Vendor Article] The risks of e-mail mismanagement. Continuity Central.

Good article by KVS Global Marketing Director Andrew Barnes. Covers current trends in policy compliance, etc.

Joyce, Erin. Resistance is Futile. Your e-Mail Is Being Watched. Internetnews.com. July 13, 2004.

Forrester Consulting survey reports in excess of more than 43 percent of companies with over 20,000 employees employ staff to monitor and read outbound e-mail. Is someone reading your e-mail as we speak?

Microsoft Corporation Press Release. MSN Announces Investment in Search Technology. Redmond, WA. July 16, 2004.

Interesting move by MSN. Purchase of Lookout brings Index and Search capabilities to Microsoft to be able to search across multiple .PSTs, multiple MAPI datasources, etc. Similar to others on the market like OutIndex, etc. but reportedly faster. I evaluated OutIndex two months ago and could never get satisfactory results unfortunately (huge index, slow performance, never completed indexing 120,000 msgs across 10 .PSTs on one of my computers). Will see where this goes.

Iosub, John C. What the Sarbanes-Oxley Act means for IT managers. TechRepublic. March 19, 2003.

Older article that I haven't blogged yet. Section on Microsoft Exchange and Sarbanes-Oxley has some interesting points on backup tape rotations being a "malpractice time bomb" in that many tape rotations involve overwriting tapes ... meaning your company is knowingly destroying evidence (no this wasn't written by a tape vendor ;-) ).

Travaglia, Simon. BOFH: Addressing the Computer Usage Policy. The Register. July 6, 2004.

Great read if you're in any way involved in establishing or enforcing your corporation's appropriate e-mail usage policy ... or just want a good laugh!

Ulfelder, Steve. Building a Compliance Framework. Computerworld. July 5, 2004.

Great article on building a compliance framework with discussion of IT, leadership, execution, etc. Includes mention of the following technologies: business process management, enterprise resource planning, search and retrieval, storage, security, content management, records management and email archival, data and application integration and business process automation. Great table at the bottom of the article comparing Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, SEC 17A-4, 21 CFR Part 11, Basel II, USA Patriot Act, California SB 1386.

UN takes aim at spam epidemic. CNN Technology. Jul 6, 2004

UN says international effort is needed to counter SPAM. Quotes Robert Horton, acting chief of the Australian communications authority.

Evans, Robert. Spam Could Drive Millions From Internet. Reuters. July 6, 2004.

SPAM may drive millions from Internet. [gonna need to move to a print-based media for blog distribution if that happens (sic!) ...]

Gross, Grant. Court Case: E-mail isn't private. IDG News Service, Washington Bureau. July 5, 2004.

Recent U.S. Court of Appeals decision dismissed a criminal wiretap charge against Bradford C. Councilman, who was vice president of Interloc Inc. Essentially gives ISPs the right to read our e-mail.

Hansell, Saul. You've Got Mail (and Court Says Others Can Read It). The New York TImes: Technology. July 6, 2004.

According to the recent federal appeals court ruling, if an ISP "stores" your e-mail even for just a millisecond, then that ISP has the rights to read your e-mail message without a court order.