Paul's Down-Home Page

Here’s an interesting idea: a small, silent spam-filtering appliance for the home. The folks at SpamCube may be on to something here– if, that is, their filtering works well. For $150 MSRP, it’s probably worth a good look, especially if their filtering works. (Their site does some unfortunate handwaving about “AI“, which always makes me suspicious!)

Morgan Stanley is in the news again because one of its former employees (who coincidentally was central in the Perelman affair) is suing for wrongful termination. Messaging Pipeline says it best:

A saga of inappropriate, incompetent, and potentially illegal conduct continues to unfold at Morgan Stanley, with the company’s own E-mail trail at the center of it all.

Man, I hate it when that happens. The plaintiff, Arthur Riel, claims that he was terminated after pointing out inappropriate emails, including requests by the CTO to fix things so no one except the CEO’s direct reports could email him. The company claims that Riel misused his access as head of the company’s archiving project to spy on others. I don’t know who’s right, but it’s clear that a) this case will get uglier before it’s resolved; b) there are probably other similar Lurking Horrors waiting in other companies’ archiving and retention efforts; and c) if I were a corporate counsel I’d be boning up on messaging case law.

Last week, I went to a press briefing to find out what had become of FrontBridge. The answer: a lot!

This press release sums it up nicely; the former FrontBridge services are now known as “Exchange Hosted Services” (EHS). Not a great name, since one of the first orders of business in the briefing was to clear up the difference between hosted Exchange services and EHS. That was easy enough, but imagine having to have that conversation over, and over, and over, and … well, you get the idea.

There are four EHS components: archiving, filtering, continuity, and encryption. The EHS filtering service combines all of the previously unbundled FrontBridge offerings into a single whole. The other services are, to me, more interesting because they provide pay-as-you-go options for services that formerly would have been required to be self-hosted. For example, the encryption service provides a simple way to send encrypted mail to outside recipients who may not have the capability to receive encrypted mail: you send a mail, the service captures it and sends the recipient an SSL-protected link, and the recipient clicks the link to go to the mail. This is a simple and effective approach that, in the past, would have required a hefty investment in Tumbleweed‘s products. The continuity component is interesting, too, although I’d have to give the nod to MessageOne’s EMS product because it supports calendar and contact data, has better synchronization options, and offers BlackBerry support.

My Exchange UPDATE column this week has more details (I’ll link to it once it goes live); the bottom line, though, is that the FrontBridge acquisition is complete, the new EHS products are commercially available and competitively priced, and they offer some interesting capabilities. In fact, you could even use EHS to provide filtering and policy enforcement for non-Exchange systems like Domino and OCS (both of which lack any serious built-in capabilities).

The Anti-Phishing Working Group has posted their phishing trends report for January 2006. The group reports 9,715 unique phishing sites in the month of January, up almost 35% from December 2005. That’s pretty scary. It’s interesting to see what major collaboration and messaging vendors are doing to address the problem, too: IBM and Oracle are ignoring the problem, while Microsoft’s already added anti-phishing features to Outlook 2003 SP2 and has shown both server- and client-based solutions for Office 2007 and Exchange 12.

From Chris Scharff, a pointer to Hz, a new service that works with mobile devices. You send mail to a special email address (like, say, hzFlightInfo@hz.com), and you get back a set of requested information. This is akin to the IM bots that let you do web searches or get product information, but it doesn’t require a special client, and it doesn’t require you to have data service on your device– if you can get email, you can get Hz service. There are agents for geolocation services (where’s the nearest ATM?), travel (is my flight delayed? when’s the next flight from point A to point B?) and others. I’ll be playing with this to see how well it works in practice.

My main homie Jim McBee has been working on a new e-book for RealTime Publishers: the Tips and Tricks Guide to Secure Messaging. It’s available as a free download (registration required) from Microsoft.

Jim also has a new book coming out May 1 — Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Advanced Administration (see?) It’s basically the second edition of Exchange Server 2003 24Seven, so it’s probably going to be worth picking up.

Arik Hesserdahl at BusinessWeek says that Apple needs a security czar. So does Microsoft’s Stephen Toulouse. So, I sent Steve Jobs a letter touting my qualifications for the job. We’ll see what happens.

I used to have separate categories for posts about Workplace and Oracle Collaboration Suite, but now that I’m starting to work with Zimbra and Scalix, I figured I’d lump all the non-Exchange material into a single category so that people who aren’t interested will only have one category to skip. Thus, the new “Non-Exchange” category.

Devin, Missy, and I will be doing a book signing for the Exchange Server Cookbook at the Orlando Exchange Connections show next month. The signing’s at 3:30p on 10 April; see O’Reilly’s page for details. C’mon by and say hello!