The Glorious Days before Email - for Some Still Here

Actress Rosalind Russell as secretary Kendal Browning and actor Brian Aherne as advertising executive Stephen Dexter in the 1940 comedy Hired Wife. 

On Wall Street, a high-ranking few still avoid email

Excerpt:

In an age when most bankers use keyboards to communicate with each other, a small group of the Wall Street elite refuses to say anything substantive in an email, text or chat, and some will not communicate digitally at all.

This group, which includes top bankers like JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon and powerful investors like Carl Icahn and Berkshire Hathaway Inc's Warren Buffett, were eschewing electronic communications long before the probe of U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's emails and the recent hacks of her campaign manager's account made headlines.

Some on Wall Street are nostalgic for a time when in-person conversations or phone calls were the norm, but others believe the words they type and send can come back to haunt them.

Prosecutors have built insider trading, mortgage fraud and rate-rigging cases on embarrassing emails over the past several years, and they are often the most memorable part. ...

Ariel Investments chief John W. Rogers also shuns email, which he has described to associates as a "distraction." His staff filters important messages, prints them out and puts them on his chair for review, according to spokeswoman Merrillyn Kosier. He prefers to speak with employees in person or over the phone.

"I do think there is certain cautiousness today around email," said Virginia Healy-Tangney, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management who focuses on managerial communication. "Since the financial crisis, executives really have to be prepared for anything they say to potentially end up on the front page of the New York Times."

Comment: If only! Image source

Keep Your E-Mails Secret

Trying to Keep Your E-Mails Secret When the C.I.A. Chief Couldn’t

 How to's ... a partial list:

• Anonymous Web browsing
• Choose the “off the record” feature on Google Talk
• Encrypt your messages
• Use a service like 10 Minute Mail allow users to open an e-mail address and send a message, and the address self-destructs 10 minutes later

It is hard to pull off one of these steps, let alone all of them all the time. It takes just one mistake — forgetting to use Tor, leaving your encryption keys where someone can find them, connecting to an airport Wi-Fi just once — to ruin you. “Robust tools for privacy and anonymity exist, but they are not integrated in a way that makes them easy to use,” Mr. Blaze warned. “We’ve all made the mistake of accidentally hitting ‘Reply All.’ Well, if you’re trying to hide your e-mails or account or I.P. address, there are a thousand other mistakes you can make.” In the end, Mr. Kaminsky noted, if the F.B.I. is after your e-mails, it will find a way to read them. In that case, any attempt to stand in its way may just lull you into a false sense of security.

Comment: I don't do any of these. My email is boring! Image source (PC Mag article on email)

How the authorities to get to your email

It's not that hard for authorities to get to your email

Excerpts:

Unless an email sender goes to great pains to cover his or her tracks — using anonymous remailers, for example — it’s fairly trivial for a law enforcement official to obtain a court order and track down the computer used to commit a crime with the help of an Internet service provider. But how could federal investigators link an anonymous email to a suspect without even going to court?

Some Web mail services, including Yahoo and Microsoft's Outlook.com, send user IP addresses across the Web with every email, according to privacy researcher Chris Soghoian, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. IP addresses can be used to track the physical location of a computer user connected to the Internet, sometimes without the help of an Internet service provider.

Broadwell had used a Yahoo account publicly in the past. If she used a new Yahoo account for any of the threatening emails — federal officials told NBC’s Michael Isikoff that she used several accounts to send the emails — agents would have had an easy time gathering a list of IP addresses from the threatening emails Kelley provided to them. But even if Broadwell used another service that doesn't "leak" IP addresses, an FBI agent can obtain such information by subpoenaing those providers.

Some reports suggest Broadwell and Petraeus did take steps to evade cyber-investigators. They apparently used a trick, known to terrorists and teenagers alike, to conceal their email traffic. The Associated Press reported Broadwell and Petraeus composed some emails and instead of transmitting them, left them in a draft folder for each other to read. That avoids creating an email transmission trail, which is easier to trace. It's a technique that al-Qaida terrorists began using several years ago and teenagers in many countries have since adopted.

Comment: my email is so bland, it would bore the FBI to death

Does email have a future?

Open Thread: The End of Email?

Excerpt:
...

... only 11% of teens email daily, a statistic she sees as a sign of the coming transition to SMS and social networks. But in 2005, another study found that less than 5% of American teens aged 12-17 preferred email over instant messaging for digital communication. Now, five years later, many of those teens are entering the business world--but we haven't seen AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and G-Chat overtake good old-fashioned email.

At least not yet.

A study by the Nielsen Co. of email consumption in Australia, Brazil, several European countries, and the U.S., found that usage rose 21% between August 2008 to August 2009, reaching 276.9 million people. During that same period, users of social-network sites leaped 31% to 301.5 million people. Because of this sharp growth, Internet communities like Facebook are eating away at the amount of time users spend communicating through traditional messenging services: Between 2003 and 2009, time spent on email sites dropped 41%; social networks, on the other hand, now represent 22% of total user Internet time--up 24% since last year.

Comment: I have two views of email. At work .... I hate it. My inbox is full full full. I save send items to cover myself. I save deleted items for the same reason. For people closest to me ... I treasure the phone or face to face. Graphic captured from the article

Better options than email

I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip

Excerpt:

The first step was to decide which social software tools were available for me to use much more extensively. The second was to encourage people to stop using e-mail themselves and to start using some of these same social software tools as well, to share their knowledge and collaborate with one another.

Most social networking tools I use are pretty standard. Instant messaging is my preferred method of collaboration and knowledge sharing while at work because it allows real-time interaction. If an instant-message exchange lasts more than three minutes, I usually move the discussion to the telephone.

Other software used at I.B.M. helps me collaborate in various areas: blogs, social bookmarking and tagging, participation in online communities to which I belong, and an alert system for to-do items.

I.B.M. uses a Facebook-like site called Beehive and a personalized internal directory called Profiles. These help build trust levels with peers in order to get a job done much faster, and they easily locate experts in a particular subject. I share and update big files with a file sharing system that cuts down on the back-and-forth of sending big presentations and video files.

Say someone asks to view a presentation you have done recently, and you decide to share it via an open “file sharing” space. Then, before you know it, strangers thank you for sharing that presentation, which they will be reusing themselves within their own projects. That kind of immediate impact would be unlikely through e-mail.

I use a couple of R.S.S./Atom feed readers, which have become not just another in-box, but my primary method of receiving notifications of content relevant to my work. They give me control of what I receive and when, something I couldn’t say when I was relying much more heavily on e-mail.

Comment: We've been using Sharepoint to share calendars, files, etc. My publications have an RSS feed. Some good ideas in this article.

Coping with the digital deluge

Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast

Excerpt:

A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, according to one measure by RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits. The company, which draws its data from 40,000 people who have tracking software on their computers, found that on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day.

Comment: The "digital deluge" is the story of my "work" life.

“e-mail bankruptcy”

Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami

Excerpt:

.... start-up companies were mentioned favorably, like ClearContext (sorts Outlook inbox messages by imputed importance), Xobni (offers a full communications history within Outlook for every sender, as well as very fast searching), Boxbe (restricts incoming e-mail if the sender is not known), and RapidReader (displays e-mail messages, a single word at a time, for accelerated reading speeds that can reach up to 950 words a minute).

But none of these services really eliminates the problem of e-mail overload because none helps us prepare replies. And a recurring theme in many comments was that Mr. Arrington was blind to the simplest solution: a secretary.

This was the solution Thomas Edison used in pre-electronic times to handle a mismatch between 100,000-plus unsolicited letters and a single human addressee. Not all correspondents would receive a reply — a number were filed in what Edison called his “nut file.” But most did get a written letter from Edison’s office, prepared by men who were full-time secretaries. They became skilled in creating the impression that Edison had taken a personal interest in whatever topic had prompted the correspondent to write.


Comment: Re “e-mail bankruptcy”: We call it "email jail" at work.

Automailer - 2nd Try

Today was my 2nd use of Automailer. For my earlier usage see Automailer - 1st Try.

I'm working with a project manager who had a need to send an email to 850 desktop users. He did not know how to easily do this so I volunteered to do the mailing for him (knowing that I have the Automailer in my toolbox). I had to get my manager's approval to help him. I send it as it if was sent from the project manager with him as the contact person.

Sifting through the 850 rows (Microsoft Access), I eliminated rows where the email was NULL and also several duplicates. Then I exported to a [TAB] delimited *.txt file. I did a sample email to just the project manager and myself earlier this week. So today all I had to do was use the larger set of emails (744 with the NULLs and duplicates eliminated). Automailer sent the 744 emails out in less than 2 minutes.

It was one of the highlights of my day! (That and the resolution to the SQL Server Management Studio issue!).

What I am looking forward to ... trying this out with 3,000 addresses. Hopefully soon I will have a project need to try this!

Outsourcing Email

When E-Mail Is Outsourced

Excerpt:

In the world of e-mail, outsourcing means two things: Google or Microsoft. Both have been marketing Web-based messaging services to small businesses, nonprofits and other groups, and they’ve focused more intensely on the higher education market over the past year. Besides services that are completely free and interfaces that are familiar to students, they offer a wide array of features, tools that let people collaborate in real time — and of course, the cool factor.

The availability of viable options outside of the university IT department has forced administrators to consider the consequences of abandoning their in-house e-mail systems. Does it make financial sense to keep spending resources on aging proprietary software when it’s available on the Web? Do colleges’ services still offer advantages over those reflexively preferred by students? And in offloading a primary function of the campus information technology infrastructure, what role would remain for administrators who previously oversaw e-mail services?

----
Many students have come to demand e-mail access at close to real time, integrated chat and several gigabytes of space because that’s what’s freely available from such competing services as Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail. The ad-supported offerings have taken advantage of massive economies of scale to effectively make storage limits and e-mail clients a thing of the past. At the University of Pennsylvania, where 2 of the 12 schools are phasing in Microsoft’s Live @ edu, there was no comparison between the old 75-megabyte limit and the five gigabytes now available, said Ira Winston, the executive director of computing and educational technology services for three of the schools.

“We just can’t keep up with the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo,” he said. Since students are already coming in with their own accounts, and with 30 percent of them forwarding their college mail to personal inboxes, the debate wasn’t whether to partner with one of the Web services — it was “who to outsource to.”

The outcome of that decision didn’t necessarily weigh heavily on Winston. Since Google and Microsoft’s contracts are relatively short-term and non-exclusive, choosing a provider won’t lock in a college indefinitely, and different units within an institution can potentially use separate e-mail systems. Students can still always forward their e-mail. For Winston, the most important element was “providing the best services to our students and not constraining them to any one provider,” he said. “It almost doesn’t matter who you pick.”

Comment: Outsource your email and your users will be happy (imagine 5 gigabytes of email space instead of 10 or 20 megabytes!) and there will be no Exchange servers to be upgraded, have a BCP plan, etc.

Gmail now supports IMAP

Tip of the Week: Viewing Gmail From Anywhere

By J. D. BIERSDORFER
Published: November 8, 2007

If you’re a Gmail user, you can now set up your account to use Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) with your favorite e-mail program. Unlike the older POP mail system, which typically confines message downloads to the computer or the device you are working on, IMAP is server-based so your mailbox has all the current messages no matter where you use it — on a computer, Web browser or mobile device. Using IMAP with Gmail is free, and instructions on setting it up with different mail programs are at http://preview.tinyurl.com/yofbl9.

What is IMAP? Wikipedia: Internet Message Access Protocol. Earlier CFG post on IMAP. Notice the NYTimes use of TinyURL!

AutoMailer - 1st try

AutoMailer

I tried AutoMailer today for the first time for production.

I had to email about 200 workstation users.

Here are the steps:

1. Sendto file: Prepare a .txt file (or .csv) with a list of email addresses. (I imported the list into Microsoft Access and then did a "SQL DISTINCT" command to eliminate duplicates). I added myself at the head as a confirmation step that the emails were sent
   
2. Message file: Prepare a message file. This can either be .txt or .html. I chose the html option and included a cascading style sheet in the <HEAD>. I also had an embedded image using a fully qualified link (instead of a relative link) in a <img> tag.
   
3. Automailer works separately from Outlook! I appreciate this!
   
4. When Automailer is invoked, the user is prompted for the mail server and the "from" address. I have a second impersonal email address so that it does not appear to be sent from Jim Peet.
   
5. And then the SEND. The send was processed in 22 seconds.
   
6. A log file is created. Successes and failures are noted. My job was 100% successful (keep in mind these are email addresses internal to my company so no issues with invalid email addresses this time). The log file is a .txt file that can be saved (for project tracking purposes).
   

Auto Mailer

Auto Mailer

From the website:

Auto Mailer is easy to use, yet powerful bulk email software. Use Auto Mailer to send individual, personalized emails to your customers, contacts, or newsletter subscribers.

You can send plain text or HTML messages quickly with parallel threads. You can send email using the built-in SMTP server, your own ISP's SMTP server, or your MAPI email client (such as Outlook Express). It includes mail merge capabilities so you can personalize your messages. It also includes a "Verify" mode so you can validate your email addresses without actually sending a message. You can schedule a mail job to run unattended at a later time, or use the command line interface to run Auto Mailer unattended from a batch file. All emails are sent just as you compose them, there are no banners or ads appended to your messages. Auto Mailer has built-in provisions to prevent it from being used to send spam. Auto Mailer comes in 3 versions: Free, Standard, or Professional


Comments:

1. I downloaded this at work today and put it through it's paces.
   
2. Input "sendto" file is either plain text or comma delimited (like an export from Excel).
   
3. The message file can either be plain text or HTML. I used the HTML option.
   
4. My manager authorized me to purchase the professional version which has a command line interface. This mailer is completely separate from Outlook.
   
5. Runs on both XP and Vista
   

Very cool and I recommend it.

Technical read but interesting

ReiserFS bugs, 32-bit vs 64-bit kernels, cache vs inode memory

Comment: I use Fastmail as my email server. Because I work with servers regularly I found this article interesting.

More on inode and the Reiser File System

IMAP

Internet Message Access Protocol

Last night was my first experience utilized IMAP. Most email clients utilize Post Office Protocol (POP)

Last night I set up Fastmail with the Apple mail client utlizing IMAP.

IMAP advantages:

1. Faster response time because not all of the message is downloaded
   
2. The use of an email client on a main workstation (actually multiple clients are supported!) while still enabling web access from many workstations
   

You have mail

Spam King and the zombie computers

1. 2.4m: the number of spam emails MSN says it blocks daily
   
2. $100bn: cost of computer repairs and lost productivity this year
   
3. 71%: of email users filter spam
   
4. 51%: of internet users say they have lost trust in email because of spam
   
5. $5.5m: the amount MySpace won from TheGlobe.com in spam compensation in February
   

Sources: Pew Research Center; ePrivacy Group; insideSpam.com; Ferris Research

Comment: The absolutely best system I have found to block unwanted email is www.bluebottle.com