Articles about Messaging and Collaboration

If you notice a huge drop in the amount of pharmaceutical spam you're receiving, you're not imagining things. Security researchers say they were able to take down "Grum", the spam server behind about 18 percent of global spam.

The process began when researchers blocked the botnet's command servers in the Netherlands and Panama on Tuesday. Grum's administrators acted quickly to restore the server, and shortly thereafter had set up new command servers in Russia and Ukraine. Researchers were still hot on their trail, and Militpas, Calif.-based security firm FireEye along with UK-based anti-spam group SpamHaus worked with Russian security experts to take down Grum again on Wednesday morning.

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After the furore surrounding Mozilla’s recent announcement that it’s to place its email client, Thunderbird, into an “extended support release”, the launch of Thunderbird 15.0 Beta 1 was always bound to attract attention. And it’s certainly turning heads, thanks to the official debut of a redesigned user interface.

Thunderbird 15 Beta 1 also debuts two noticeable new features in addition to the revamped user interface, extending the global search tool to cover the Chat module, plus implementing the “do not track” feature that debuted in Firefox last year.

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Mozilla has updated both its open-source browser and email clients with the release of both Firefox 14.0.1 FINAL, and Thunderbird 14.0 FINAL.

Firefox 14’s most notable new features are the switching on of secure connections when performing Google searches for better privacy, plus an updated site identity indicator system in the Address bar. It also introduces silent updates for Windows users for the first time, while OS X Lion users can enjoy native full-screen support for the first time. Thunderbird 14 contains no new features of note, in line with its recent move to an extended support phase.

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Microsoft has released Outlook Configuration Analyzer 2.0, an excellent tool for troubleshooting a host of common Outlook 2007/ 2010 issues.

As before, the program works by scanning your current Outlook setup and looking for known problems (file sizes, DLL versions, missing updates, whatever it might be). But this release adds 75 new rules, helping it to detect more issues than ever before.

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Facebook has really made waves among its users by changing the contact email address information in personal profiles.

In a move meant to popularize Facebook's own email service, users have been given an @facebook.com email address with the same address as the one in their personal URL. For instance, now you have [email protected] if you had the URL www.facebook.com/idontcareaboutfacebook. I believe that is the best news Facebook could have given to those 800 million users, and I think it’s the best thing they’ve done so far.

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FireTrust has today revealed MailWasher 2012 Free, a new version of its popular spam filter. The latest release will provide all the features of the full commercial MailWasher Pro edition for its first 10 days of use, but after that introduces four main restrictions.

There’s no Recycle Bin, which means you can’t browse or restore deleted emails. Preview options are limited, so it may be more difficult to manually determine whether a particular message is spam. Technical support is unsurprisingly reserved for paying customers. And, probably most crucially, the program will be limited to checking 1 email address only, perhaps a deal-breaker for many people.

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Skype has just launched Skype 5.10 for Windows, and 5.8 for Mac, and both releases contain small but worthwhile tweaks that should make the upgrade worthwhile.

The Windows client sensibly merges the Facebook and Skype contacts into a single Contacts list, for instance. And if you’ve so many friends and colleagues that it becomes tricky to manage, no problem: it’s now possible to pin your most important contacts to the top, so they’re always immediately accessible.

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The need to prioritize emails is an idea that has been around for some time, starting with spam filtering that aimed to reduce the amount of junk reaching your inbox. Google and other email providers have made further advances by highlighting emails believed to be more important than others you receive based on content, sender and previous correspondence. EmailTray provides you with even more control by automatically filtering your mail into high priority, lower priority, no priority and spam.

This is a desktop app that can be used to check as many email addresses as you want providing you are working with POP3 or IMAP accounts, but all of your email is made available in one place. The program analyzes your email messages as they arrive and filters them in to inboxes of different priorities. Emails that are sent by people with whom  you regularly communicate with will be assigned a higher priority than other emails, and all of your mail is sorted into ‘Top priority’, ‘Low priority’, ‘No priority’ and Spam.

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We all now communicate with people through so many channels that it is often difficult to put names to faces. You may know someone on Twitter and Facebook but when you receive an email from them you do not necessary make a connection between the two. This is where Rapportive can help, by providing you with extended information about the contacts you receive emails from in your Gmail inbox.

Rapportive is available as a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and Safari and appears as a right-hand side panel whenever you look at individual emails. The extension pulls in information from social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn and more to provide you with a more detailed profile of your contacts, and by connecting the service with your social networking accounts you can build up even more detailed information.

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I'm not the biggest Gmail fan. Sure, I use the service, but my inbox fills up too fast, and managing the madness is measured procrastination. Email in general is the problem; Google's service is simply easy to blame. But a new enhancement coming in days has me finally ready to adapt behavior to attitude -- and stop being the email file clerk.

Google is in process of adding nifty contextual, autocomplete capabilities to Gmail -- that is if you find this kind of soothsaying useful. I confess to making more typing errors when Google search autocomplete tries to anticipate my thoughts. Mind reader it is not enough, so what good is all that information Google supposedly collects about us all? :) As for Gmail, the new autocomplete starts with what you've got.

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It’s a strange day when some of the biggest news about the latest release of an application is a feature's removal, but this is the case with the latest version of FeedDemon. Some months ago, Google announced plans to make changes to its Reader service and this has ultimately led to FeedDemon removing the sharing features that relied on this particular service, but Google+ mostly been picks up the slack. The most recent version of FeedDemon also has a number of other changes and additions that are worth mentioning.

The program has long featured a recommendation engine that can point you in the direction of stories, articles and feed that you might well find interesting, and this has been improved to ensure greater relevance.  When you use the built in browser to view web pages, a new Ctrl+0 keyboard shortcut is available that can be used to revert to a 100 percent zoom level. If you have the Pro version of the program – as opposed to the free Lite version – you also have a new newspaper style Photo Strip view to make use of.

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SAP aims to show that it is a serious player in the cloud computing sector today, announcing several new cloud initiatives under what it calls an "accelerated" strategy. The company's deeper commitment to the cloud stems from its $3.4 billion merger with human capital management service provider SuccessFactors several months back.

Former SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard is now head of SAP's cloud unit, and he is tasked with turning the company's cloud business around. At the Sapphire Now Conference -- SAP's annual gathering in Orlando -- Dalgaard is showing off a line of solutions arranged around four different themes: people, money, customers and suppliers.

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One of the major drawbacks of switching to a web-based email provider like Gmail or Yahoo is that your desktop hasn’t cottoned on to your new way of working. Sure, you can access your email via your web browser, effectively liberating you from a single email program on a single PC, but it seems your desktop hasn’t caught up with progress.

You’ll know what we mean: click an email link on a webpage, or attempt to attach a file to an email directly from another program and you’ll either open an unwanted relic from the past like Outlook, or get some error message. Before throwing your PC out of the window, however, discover how a free software program called Affixa can soothe your furrowed brow.

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When you’re not around to monitor a PC then it’s often useful to get notifications of its key events. And so you might like to know when a particular program starts or ends, perhaps, or when the system closes down or restarts.

Some applications understand this already. Many backup programs are able to send email to let you know when a particular job has completed, for instance: very convenient. And Windows Task Scheduler can also send emails for a host of different events. But if that’s not enough then you can always manually extend your system with Blat, a simple command line tool which allows you to send emails as appropriate from your own scripts and batch files.

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Is your business getting good value from customer relationship initiatives, or are you even able to quantity it? Gartner says unlikely. Only half of all Fortune 1000 companies are expected to see a positive return on investments in social CRM through the end of the year. The findings call into question the effectiveness of using the social web to further business objectives, or whether companies even have the capability to measure success.

Of those failing to achieve positive ROI, only one-fifth can actually measure these failings. That means an overwhelming majority of enterprises are losing revenue through failed social initiatives and don't even know it, the analyst firm argues.

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