Email is the new smoking
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in People, Enterprise, Business, Email on
Doing email has the same random gratification built in as playing the slots, with the added excuse that a lot of it is work-related and sending or replying to a lot of email and emptying your inbox feels like you’ve got a lot done. Usually though, you’ve either asked other people to do things or, in my case, confirmed what real work I’ll be doing when I can drag myself away from the inbox. After all, I have email in my pocket most of the time, I have a laptop in the bedroom….
Except. I check email on the go when I’m waiting for a message, or when I’m on a tube and don’t have a book. I use the bedroom laptop for email, LiveJournal (a mix of blog and social network), Web surfing and Spider in equal proportions. I scan the incoming alerts for mail on my main machine and only click into the inbox now and then. Over the weekend or on the road, unless I’m waiting for a reply from a friend or an editor, I ignore my email for a lot of the day. Yes, I get sucked into just getting through my inbox when I should be getting on with work a little too often, but I don’t feel actually addicted.
I do feel that far too many things that ought to have a proper workflow slosh over into email; you could save a lot of time by using SharePoint to store documents that you want people to review or using a self-service portal to book travel or update your detail with HR rather than putting unstructured info in an email that someone else has to transfer into an application later anyway. Automate the bits of the approvals process that currently rely on someone pulling out their BlackBerry on the train to give a routine ‘yes’ and you might be surprised what speeds up in your company.
Just as bad are the cc wars, where cc-ing people is a political chess move; I save it for a very, very few strategic emails myself, but then I don’t work in a department any more.
I agree with Jeremy Burton, the CEO of Serena about a lot of things like business mashups being the future of many line of business applications; they’re the Excel macros of Web 2.0. But, as I was reminded when I was writing a case study on him for an up-coming feature, he’s also the guy who invented no-email Friday when he was running Veritas. It’s good to pace yourself – I like quoting Charmaine Eggbury of RIM, who told me that “the most important button on any BlackBerry is the off button”. If you’re actually addicted and it’s interfering with other work tasks or your personal life, then maybe an enforced break will make you reconsider. I don’t agree that forcing people not to send and read email is realistic in today’s business world. An executive who finds they can get away without email probably has someone else picking up the slack, and last time I saw Jeremy he certainly had his BlackBerry to hand (although connecting to Gmail rather than Exchange as an experiment).
Does email suck up more time than I’d really like? Definitely. Could I give email up for a week and still have any work coming in? Probably not. What I really want it more tools like SNARF and Xobni that let me deal with the key messages without spending time wading through messages that can be filed unread in case I ever need the information in them.
My name’s Mary and I have 1,289 unread messages in my inbox.
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Spam Fighting in Exchange
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
How can you fight spam with one of the most common email servers out there? After all, surely that should mean it’s an easy play for the spammers, with enough holes to get every V1agr4 advert and pump-and-dump scam into your users’ mailboxes.
It turns out it isn’t - and that the built-in tools are effective spam blockers.
If you’re not using Exchange 2007 Content Filter (or Exchange 2007’s Intelligent Message Filter) turn them on. This is one of the most effective weapons in your arsenal. It’s regularly updated, and it scans messages for common spam formats. Mesages are categorised and given spam ratings, which you can use to reject, quarantine, or file messages in users’ Junk Mail folders. CF is surprisingly easy to use - set it up, set the basic filtering rules, and then occasionaly check your quarantine mail box for false positives.
Exchange 2007 has even added whitelisting for persistently filtered false positives. Once a domain is whitelisted, there’s no more delving in the spam folders for Twitter invites or press releases from Kaspersky and Sophos.
I’d been running my server like that for some time, when I discovered another trick that turned out to make a huge difference. Exchange actually supports using real-time block lists (RBLs), which are lists of spam IP addresses hosted by services like SpamCop and Spamhaus. It’s trivially easy to add new block lists to Exchange - just find the lookup address on the block list site (Spamhaus’ is zen.spamhaus.org), and add it and the provider name in the Block List Provider section of Exchange’s anti-spam tools.
Without RBL support turned on I was getting 500 or so spam messages in my quarantine a day, making it hard to filter out the few false positives. With it on, I’m down to less than 100. Managing my spam is a lot easier - and with whitelisting, I’m having to look in the spam folder a lot less often…
–Simon
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