Roger Matus asks this question on his “DeathbyEmail” blog.

Like it our not, our email inboxes have become the virtual filing cabinets of our lives. Most of our personal and business communication eventually travels through email, and lots of critical data ends up being stored in our mail boxes. Surprisingly, not many of us ever contemplate what would happen if that information were instantly and irretrievably lost.

BusinessWeek just published an article: “Web-Based E-Mail: Businesses Beware.” The subtitle: “Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and lots of others offer these free or low-cost services, but if there’s a snafu or e-mails with essential information are lost, you’re likely to be out of luck.”

The old adage “you get what you pay for” holds true for email as well. Many of the popular free or low-cost email services have had their fair share of data snafus. One ISP even lost the emails of 14,000 customers.

So if you enjoy the convenience and the “price” of any of these free email accounts, plan for contingencies and please make a backup. This could be as simple as syncing a local copy with a free desktop email client such as Thunderbird via POP.

The Wired blog ‘Epicenter’ reports on a study commissioned by the IT staffing company Robert Half, which found that 54% of US companies have banned the use of social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn sites at work. Apparently, the primary concern is loss of worker productivity, but fears over unknown legal and brand exposure may also play a role in this.

“Using social networking sites may divert employees’ attention away from more pressing priorities, so it’s understandable that some companies limit access,” said Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, in a statement.

Another study conducted by Nucleus Research also indicated that employees who use social networking sites at work do so up to 2 hours a day. 87% of employees admitted they weren’t using the sites for business, but for personal purposes instead.

Does your company have a social networking use policy in place? Perhaps a good time to check before HR comes knocking.

Update: I just found this short presentation on slideshare…

If you have been following this blog, you may be interested to know that we just launched a newsletter called “onMessaging” that is focused on all things messaging. We’re planning to publish a new issue about once per quarter.

Similar to this blog, the newsletter is covering various topics about corporate messaging infrastructures while also providing specific insights and advice on how to handle some of the challenges in managing today’s mission-critical email, IM and collaboration systems.

For subscribers, we will also include in every newsletter a different, free product or service offering to help cope with tough economic times.

You can sign-up for the newsletter here.

As reported on TechCrunch last week.  The management team at Nielsen Media decided to control the abuse of Reply-To-All by simply removing this functionality entirely from the Microsoft Outlook email client.  In a memo sent by Nielsen CIO, Andrew Cawood, he explains that the measure will “eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency”.

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Only a few months following the reply-to-all tidal wave bringing down the email infrastructure at the Department of Homeland Security, the US State Department experienced a massive self-inflicted assault on their mail servers last week as well.

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A few days old, but noteworthy: In an interesting twist, IBM announced the availability of the latest version of Notes/Domino at Macworld, only two weeks ahead of Lotusphere – IBM’s own product showcase held annually in Orlando.

I think, this signals two things:

1. IBM acknowledges the growing popularity of the Mac, and its increasing usage worldwide. Macworld in particular is a great venue to connect with real end-users, many of which may not even know that Notes still exists. The success of MS-Exchange has been largely driven by the ubiquitous nature of Outlook, and IBM must rebuild end-user awareness and street-cred to regain market share.
2. Lotus is hoping to leverage years of heavy investment in Eclipse, which gives Notes instant cross-platform capabilities and feature parity on non-Wintel systems, including the Mac and of course Linux.

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