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.

Share/Save

“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…

Share/Save

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.

Share/Save

Here is the original, republished by Folio.

A Message from Andrew Cawood

In December, the Nielsen Executive Council (NEC) held an Act Now! event to review suggestions from across the business that would eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency. Beginning Thursday, January 29, we will implement one of the approved recommendations: removing the “Reply to All” functionality from Microsoft Outlook.

We have noticed that the “Reply to All” functionality results in unnecessary inbox clutter. Beginning Thursday we will eliminate this function, allowing you to reply only to the sender. Responders who want to copy all can do so by selecting the names or using a distribution list.

Eliminating the “Reply to All” function will:

• Require us to copy only those who need to be involved in an e-mail conversation
• Reduce non-essential messages in mailboxes, freeing up our time as well as server space

This is one of the many changes being implemented as a result of the NEC Act Now! initiative. If you have any suggestions on how we can continue to improve the way we work, please send your comments to Nielsen Communications [mailto: REDACTED].

Andrew Cawood
Chief Information Officer

As pointed out on numerous blogs, the move is most likely linked to an email faux pas by Mitchell Habib, Executive Vice President at Nielsen who accidentally sent a derogatory note to all Nielsen employees, a few months ago.

The unintended use of Reply-To-All keeps generating headlines of personal embarrassment and email system meltdowns.  I cannot imagine having to retype all email addresses every time I reply to an email as part of my typical team collaboration.

Removing the Reply-To-All functionality is as silly as Email-free-Friday’s.  Instead, companies should invest in user education of best practices and technology solutions to prevent these mishaps from happening.

Technorati Tags: nielsen, Andrew Cawood, reply-to-all, email overload

Share/Save

The State Departments responded by announcing “unspecified disciplinary actions” to employees who keep using reply-to-all, and they delivered this news via old-fashioned cable.

“Department staff hitting ‘reply to all’ on an e-mail with a large distribution list is causing an e-mail storm on the department’s OpenNet e-mail system,” says the unclassified cable that was sent Thursday by Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy.
He said the result was ‘effectively a denial of service as e-mail queues, especially between posts, back up while processing the extra volume of e-mails.

The cable orders employees to ‘take immediate action’ to ensure they and their colleagues are ‘aware of the negative impact’ of hitting ‘reply all’ and to delete e-mails addressed to large numbers of people that they might receive in error.

Anyone who disregards these instructions will be subject to disciplinary actions, Kennedy wrote in the cable, which begins:  Please ensure widest distribution of this message. Some also compounded the problem by trying to recall their initial replies, generating yet another round of messages.”

I am still amazed how little control many companies and government agencies assert over their critical communication infrastructure.  Distribution lists, reply-to-all, mail forwarding, restricted content, etc. should all be governed by administrative rules that protect the company from serious technical and legal consequences.

The technology certainly exists…

Technorati Tags: reply-to-all, email security, us state department

Share/Save

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.

While there has been much focus on the long-overdue client-side improvements, since the release of version 8, Notes/Domino 8.5 is now bringing significant enhancements to the server.  Domino Attached Object Storage (DAOS) is a welcome feature that helps enterprises cope with rapidly growing storage demands and the rising costs for email storage. DAOS stores only one attachment per server, regardless of how many recipients received a copy of the message.

The chart below shows the projected storage savings with DAOS deployed. The report was produced on actual email traffic data and is representative of the savings that one can expect to see in large environments.

Technorati Tags: macworld, lotusphere, Notes 8.5, ND8.5, DAOS

Share/Save

I met Jared Goralnick, an efficiency and productivity consultant, at the inaugural IORG conference last summer in NY, and he told me about a solution he had been working on, called AwayFind.

AwayFind launched yesterday and is a smart alternative to static out-of-office responders.  The web-based solution will work with any email platform.  You simply embed a link to your personalized AwayFind webpage into your email signature or out-of-office message.  Anybody who needs immediate attention can follow the link to fill out a contact form, which then is routed to you via SMS or private email.

The pro-version even allows you to configure categories, to automatically delegate requests to co-workers.

There is no single solution to fight email overload, but AwayFind might become another weapon in your arsenal.

Technorati Tags: awayfind, email responder, out-of-office message

Share/Save

This convenience comes at a price.  Not only do our our inboxes become increasingly cluttered, but the more often we share our primary address on the Internet the greater the chance of getting onto spammers distribution lists as well.

I learned that lesson the hard way at the end of Dot-Com.  As fast as many of those companies went out of business, their customer or subscriber email addresses seemed to end up in spammer’s hands, either because of carelessness or perhaps for profit.

I decided then to stop sharing my primary email address with just anybody. Instead, I set up a special catchall email domain that allowed me to assign a dedicated address to every vendor, newsletter subscription, internet forum etc.  Any email addressed to the catchall domain is by default accepted and forwarded to a single mailbox.  That way I can hand out new addresses on the fly, like: amazon@catch-all-email.com, ups@catch-all-email.com, etc.  If I start receiving spam on any of these addresses I simply put them on a blacklist and future emails won’t go through. As a nice side effect, I can also track who is sharing or leaking my address purposely or due to internal data security problems.

This system has worked really well for many years now.  Of course, not everybody has the time and know-how to set this up, but there are a number of ways and solutions around that.

Many people are simply using free email accounts on Google, Yahoo! or Hotmail for this purpose.  Google’s powerful inbox filters easily sort and organize this catchall inbox.

There are now also a number of new services that productize the concept I described above.  Here are a couple that are worth mentioning:

• OtherInbox has launched a private Beta for their consumer service. There are a few Beta invites that they have shared with me. So feel free to check it out.
• Reflexion is offering a similar solution targeted at enterprise customers and ISP’s.

While it’s never too late to bring some order to your inbox, the best time to set up this kind of inbox management is when you switch to a new email address.

Technorati Tags: email overload, inbox management, catchall inbox, catchall account, otherinbox, refexion

Share/Save

“E-mail is an extraordinarily useful tool, as virtually all of us recognize. However, it can create enormous liabilities for an organization and it can cost an organization more than it should.”

In the article, Osterman lists examples of corporate liability and unnecessary cost caused by un-managed corporate email. He suggests four steps to address the problem:

1. Establish detailed corporate use policies.
2. Deploy monitoring and reporting solutions to gain insight and assure compliance.
3. Implement real-time policy enforcement that automatically handles suspect messages.
4. Think beyond email. IM and collaborative applications are exposing the company to similar problems just like email.

Permessa is listed as one of the vendors that provides extensive solutions in this space. As an additional reference on this topic, check out our latest whitepaper titled: “6 Best Practices That Reduce Email Overload and Costs“.

Technorati Tags: Osterman, email policy, email policy management

Share/Save

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.

This is a significant finding especially in times where tight IT budgets are strained by rapidly growing message volumes and resulting skyrocketing bandwidth & storage costs.

What this really means is that there is a huge opportunity to dramatically reduce operating costs by going after the cause of this excessive email traffic. Don’t worry, I am not proposing to fire the 1% of offending employees.

There are ways to manage email more efficiently without adversely affecting users or business operation.

Permessa just published a whitepaper (I am a co-author), titled “6 Best Practices That Reduce Email Overload and Costs”. The paper highlights areas for managing excessive email traffic, such as unnecessary reply-to-all, attachment ping-pong and the overuse of mailing lists. Some of these have been previously discussed on this blog. For each topic area the whitepaper makes best practice recommendations on how to implement email policy changes that can prevent the negative effects and help save money.

Technorati Tags: email costs, information overload, best practices to reduce email overload, permessa

Share/Save