While the bulk of unsolicited email still focuses on male enhancements and other dubious wares a new breed of Spam is emerging.

The new angle is to peddle seemingly genuine and useful (I use this term loosely) products that magically reduce costs, solve problems or in some other way resonate with mainstream worries or fears.

The latest fad seems to be Green Energy.  I’m a firm advocate of reducing our insatiable appetite for energy and there are many ways we can contribute individually. In recent months I have been getting more Spam advertising miracle solutions that will reduce your personal energy dependence.  What caught my attention is the level of sophistication with which these schemes are orchestrated.

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Did you know that by 2012, the typical knowledge worker will receive hundreds of messages each day via e-mail, IM, text, and social networks?  And that knowledge workers today lose 25% of the work day due to Information Overload?

I have written about information overload and the research conducted by its namesake group on this blog a number of times. Now IORG is bringing renewed attention to this problem by declaring August 12 “Information Overload Awareness Day” and holding a half-day online event, presenting findings of their research and options to lessen the impact.

The keynote is being presented by Nathan Zeldes, the former “Information Overload Czar” at Intel and current President of the IORG.

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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.

Today is Earth Day and incidentally it feels as if spring is finally coming to New England. What a perfect morning.

Apropos green initiatives: Michael Osterman wrote a blog post last week with some surprising findings. He questioned respondents in his most recent survey whether “green” computing was a criterion in their decision-making process for new messaging server purchases.

The answer was “not much impact at all”:  53% of organizations said that green computing would play little or no role in their purchase decisions; only 2% told us that it would be a critical part of the decision-making process.

That is remarkable, since many companies are investing heavily in server consolidation and virtualization, which often significantly reduces their overall power consumption. According to Osterman, servers consume about 1.2% of the total power output in the US alone.

Perhaps it proves the point that market forces are still the best drivers for environmental progress. Just as SUVs became less popular with rising fuel costs, the push for greener data centers is largely driven by the need to improve a company’s bottom line through savings on power and cooling.

Twitter has been making headlines for weeks, fueled by a celebrity powered media frenzy. With Ashton Kutcher beating CNN to 1 million Twitter followers last Friday and now even Oprah Winfrey joining in – Twitter is surely bracing for the Oprah effect.

So is Twitter over-hyped or the future of electronic communication?

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Microsoft announced yesterday the availability of the public beta for Exchange Server 2010. The software, which is only released for 64-bit Windows is available for download here. The official product release is slated for the second half of 2009.

The key areas for improvements of this release seem to focus on productivity and cost savings, by providing:

• Capabilities to mix on-premise and hosted services, while maintain the same capabilities
• Storage performance improvements and resulting cost reduction
• New compliance capabilities through built-in archiving and expanded user roles management
• Improving user productivity and inbox management/experience

I found particularly interesting the introduction of so called MailTips that help prevent end-user faux-pas, such as reply-to-all or accidentally sending mail to unintended recipients outside the company.  I’m curious to see the actual implementation, since misguided user tips can quickly get annoying – remember clippy.

Voicemail preview is also very cool – I’ve been using Phonetag as an external voice mail transcription service for over a year now and would not want to miss it.

WindowsITPro published this more detailed article highlighting other notable improvements.