Everybody has heard of the 80/20 rule, also called the Pareto principle, which states that in many cases, business and otherwise, 80% of the effects come only from 20% of causes. Email is no exception - however, the ratio is far more extreme.

Our analysis of large messaging environments over many years has revealed that in most companies 80% of the corporate messaging resources are being consumed by only about 1% of all employees.

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Larry Seltzer wrote an interesting article in eWeek a few weeks back. He is examining the fact that enterprise messaging demands increasingly more resources, not only due to the rapid growth of message volumes, but also because more and more sub-processes must be executed before actual message delivery.

“Think, for example, of all the things that must happen to a message either inbound or outbound. There is the basic transport protocol, the SMTP commands. The message itself may be encrypted, so there is encryption and decryption. The message may be signed. The message needs to be scanned for malware, for phishing, for malicious HTML. The sender of the message may be authenticated through DKIM or Sender ID, and their reputation evaluated. Regulatory compliance rules must be enforced. Company policies about the message must be enforced. Think also that multiple messages might be processed at once—sort of like superscalar processing for messages.”

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IBM released last week a new data migration tool intended to ease the movement of large amounts of data from existing content platforms such as SharePoint, Exchange Public Folders, Domino Document Libraries and other repositories (see coverage here, here and here). The tool also provides synchronization capabilities to enable platform coexistence during extended migration periods.

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There have been reports over the last few weeks that CAPTCHA the popular tool used by many websites to thwart spammers is being attacked. CAPTCHA is the hard to read squiggly text that users are asked to decipher in an effort to tell real human users apart from automated bots. Free email services such as Gmail, Yahoo or Live Mail all use some form of CAPTCHA to prevent spammers from utilizing automated scripts to create large numbers of user accounts to be then used for spam-mail.

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Bob Spurzem on the Ferris blog sees the same exponential pattern that Gordon Moore predicted for electronic circuits to apply to the growth of email.

“Consider email quantity. Where once we sent and received only a handful of emails daily, today we routinely send and receive hundreds of emails. You might argue that the volumes are increasing exponentially.

Finally, consider mailbox size. A 10MB mailbox was once the norm and was replaced with 100-200MB mailboxes in recent years. Today users expect multigigabyte mailboxes, made famous by Google’s Gmail.”

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Most of us know about phishing by now. Those annoying emails coming from a bank you don’t even do business with, telling you in poor grammar and spelling to update your account settings by visiting a website with a strange looking URL. The more clever ones, such as the genuine-looking messages posing as eBay or PayPal customer support, have lured many people into exposing their account credentials and still pose a significant threat to the uninformed.

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