Ken Gartner filling in.

Rumors, urban myths, scams and other undesirable communiques have a remarkably long shelf life on the Internet. Periodically they get ‘rediscovered’ and disseminated as if they were hot news, worthy of everyone’s immediate interest. When this happens with an inflammatory email broadcast widely in a business environment, the results are, sadly, quite predictable. The message and its ensuing forwards and replies take on a viral spike initially, and periodically latecomers to the party add their 2 cents to reignite outrage, flame wars and general ill-will among the populace. Email takes rumor mongering and kvetching at the corporate water cooler to a new extreme.

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Things have been rather busy for me over the last couple of weeks, hence the lack of posts. Kenneth Gartner is helping out with this post about one of the latest corporate email faux pas. Thanks Ken!

Here is another headline story about email mislabeling that resulted in significant embarrassment and business impact, colorfully reported by the NYT as “A Nightmare on Email Street”. A lawyer for Eli Lilly mistakenly emailed an extremely sensitive, unflatteringly frank missive about the company’s negotiations with the federal government over a case of “marketing improprieties” for one of their popular pharmaceuticals. Instead of mailing it to another lawyer involved in the case, the TO field auto-completion helpfully found a similarly named person who happened to be a NYT reporter!

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Commtouch released yesterday its annual report on email threats and trends the company collected in 2007.

Not that we needed reminding, but spam now represents over 80% of all global email traffic, reaching a peak of over 95% in Q4 of last year.

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Numerous news wires and blogs reported a serious email problem at the Department of Homeland Security yesterday that resulted in a tidal wave of emails between about 7,500 department employees and external security professionals; said to have generated over 2 million email messages on Wednesday alone.

“The Department of Homeland Security self-inflicted what one observer called a mini distributed denial of service, with a reported mass of more than 2.2 million messages stuffing the inboxes of the nation’s security experts.”

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Here is another story from the field that seems appropriate to share as we are still in the midst of vacation season.

A couple a years ago, our consulting team received a call from an alarmed customer who noticed a sudden increase in mail traffic that appeared to be growing more rapidly every day and was starting to overload the mail servers at the Internet gateway.

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I have been following an interesting blog thread on ZDnet between two of their writers, David Berlind and George Ou. It all started when David took issue with the practice of sending passwords as clear text via email as some websites still do as part of their password reset routine. This brought up the topic of secure email. As David points out:

“The technology exists. It’s just not found in every e-mail client nor are businesses prepared to alter their processes to handle this approach.”

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