Archive for the ‘Email’ Category

Outlook hamstrunged ULS progress

Friday, August 24th, 2012

I’m not one for highly controversial titles. But today Outlook wasted a couple of hours of my life. Instead of posting big explanations I think I’ll rather let the pictures do the talking:
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The superflous subject line

Monday, November 15th, 2010

So it’s that time of the day again where I try to figure out which emails I missed in the last two hours is important, and which I can ignore till 17:00. And this is what my INBOX looks like:

Re:
Re: [Fwd]
Re: Attention Steven
Re:
Fwd: Re:
Re: MyOwnCompanyName

Needless to say. I feel violated. No, the above is really not a massive over-exaggeration. The truth is I just skipped a few (three or four) entries with sane Subject lines. And it’s been a good day seeing that there was only about 10 missed emails in the two hours.

We should be glad Darth Vader isn’t a spammer

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Right, so we’re busy doing some top secret email stuff in the office relating to client support and generally being more efficient when it comes to queries and stuff. And part of this testing involves the transmission of emails that needs to comply with RFC specifications, and generally having the correct headers and content in it, blah blah blah. All good fun. And then this gem landed in my inbox (tracing the Received headers reveals it was Stephen – perfectly spoofed in every other way from Darth.Vader.This.is.legit@gmail.com, quite a mean feat seeing that I haven’t yet received spam from professional fraudsters that managed this):
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Email Archiving

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

So recently this topic came up again in the office. And with clients. And I came to realize exactly how sticky this problem really is. The requirements companies generally has is something down the lines of:

We want all email to be archived, and we don’t want anybody to have access to it. Not even the mail admins, and yet, they want the archives to be available on demand.

The irony is that your email admins can probably do significantly more damage than you think. For example, it’s dead easy to BCC all incoming email from your CEO to him/herself.

So from the outset there are legal issues surrounding email archiving, when are you allowed to archive (monitor) and when not. Who’s allowed to have access to these archives and who not? To what extent does your policies cover your proverbial legal ass, and to which extent does your archive solution need to be immune from it’s administrators (without hampering their ability to perform their work). These types of questions are strictly speaking not even technical – and trust me, when it comes to legalize I’m the last person that should be asked about these things.

I prefer the technical side of this challenge. And when it comes to email archiving there’s a few.

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