Enterprise email: News of its death greatly exaggerated

  The Long View (Computerworld)

Email is dying, say the pundits. It's being replaced by social media and texting, they claim. Balderdash, say I. Email is alive and thriving in the enterprise. Even if Robert X. Cringely disagrees with me. See what I mean, in The Long View...

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Facebook social inbox: Disaster for enterprise email

  The Long View (Computerworld)

What can enterprise messaging developers learn from Facebook's email 'Project Titan'?
Monday's Facebook Messaging announcement wasn't quite what many had expected. It's not the latest step in some naively-imagined death-march of email. But it does have some interesting things to say to today's email developers, in enterprises and smaller businesses everywhere. What can enterprise email developers and administrators learn from Facebook's new ideas? Let's take a look, in The Long View...

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Arabs ban BlackBerry? No, not exactly.

  The Long View (Computerworld)

You may have read that Research In Motion is in trouble with authorities in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. It's said that certain BlackBerry services, including email, will be banned unless the governments are allowed to spy on messages going back and forth. Banned? Seriously? Well, let's take a closer look, in The Long View.

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Spam Causing Email Exodus?

I was asked an interesting question earlier this week. Paraphrased:

With the sheer number of people using semi-proprietary closed systems such as Facebook or Myspace for their personal and business communication, might they be serious contenders for a real spam solution?

Some time ago, I wrote about the, "People are stopping using email" meme. I said then that it's not so much that people are turning their backs on email as a medium, but that they have a wider choice of media available to them now -- such as IM, SMS, and social network websites. They're just more likely to choose the medium best suited to the task. Nothing's changed my mind since then.

Having said that, feel free to poke me, follow me, LinkIn, or whatever.

To paraphrase Meng Weng Wong's recent curry-inspired trendmap, all such media attract spammers if they become sufficiently popular. Lest we forget, spam was first a big problem on USENET -- email came later.

Naive Bulk Emailers Howl in Protest

This is Andy Oram: pianist, CPSR member, and O'Reilly book editor. Andy's latest weblog post is a quiet rant about how difficult it is for new bulk email senders to navigate around a twisty maze of spam filters.

For example, he writes:

Just this morning, board members of a non-profit I volunteer for were complaining to me that email to board members gets trapped as spam
...
Ryan Bagueros ... told me lots of promising social networking companies are stymied because the emails they send members and prospective members get trapped by spam filters–especially at the major email hosting sites.

My sympathies. But there are two sides to every story.

On the other hand, some social networks behave idiotically and totally deserve to have their mail eaten.

Case in point: tagged.com, which -- let's be charitable -- was less than transparent in its description of what happens when new users signup.

Actually, no. Let's not be charitable. Let's tell it how it is. Email from Tagged.com is spam. It asks new users for the password to their [Hotmail|Yahoo|AOL|Gmail] account. Then, without warning, it spams all the addresses in their address book.

I carefully went through the signup process, using a test Gmail account. This is not a case of clueless users blindly clicking OK.

While I'm on the subject, a general point about email n00bs.

There's a pervasive naivety about what it takes to successfully send legitimate bulk email. It's not as simple as popping a default install of Sendmail onto a DSL connection someplace and expecting the whole world to be overjoyed that you're sending them mail.

Often, people don't know they need help, blindly assuming it's their "right" to have their email delivered to anyone they choose, regardless of how poorly they send it.

Two examples; there are plenty more:

1. Get your FCrDNS right. Don't know what that is? Look it up in Wikipedia. Still don't understand? You probably need help.
2. Behave correctly when presented with a greylisting tempfail. Don't know what that is? Look it up in Wikipedia. Still don't understand? You probably need help.

As I say, plenty more where those came from...