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Today it’s impossible to think business and personal communications without email. Sending and receiving emails costs you and me nothing. It’s free! The zero cost (for users), the efficiency of delivery, and ease of use has made it so popular. But now email has become a victim of it’s own success. Just my quick test with one email server for 4 days showed that 96% of the emails received were abusive.

The email protocol (SMTP) was designed at a time when very few people were using emails and everyone basically knew each other. So, security was not a concern, but today the world has changed and that trust isn’t there anymore, but the SMTP protocol we’re using remains the same.

So, how is today’s technology dealing with this problem?

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It has changed the way we communicate and do business, with it’s ease of use, price (free for end users), and effectiveness, e-mail has taken our productivity to a whole new level. But there’s a darker side to it. Now people are getting addicted to emails. The misuse and addiction is doing just the opposite, costing businesses millions of dollars in lost productivity. But there’s a hope, reuters put it this way — “Alcoholics have one, and so do drug abusers. Now people addicted to e-mail also have a 12-step program designed to tackle their obsession.” Here are the 12 steps to manage your e-mail:

1. Admit that e-mail is managing you. Let go of your need to check e-mail every ten minutes.
2. Commit to keeping your inbox empty.
3. Create files where you can put inbox material that needs to be acted on.
4. Make broad headings for your filing system so that you have to spend less time looking for filed material.
5. Deal immediately with any e-mail that can be handled in two minutes or less but create a file for mails that will take longer.
6. Set a target date to empty your in box. Don’t spend more than an hour at a time doing it.
7. Turn off automatic send/receive.
8. Establish regular times to review your e-mail.
9. Involve others in conquering your addiction.
10. Reduce the amount of e-mail you receive.
11. Save time by using only one subject per e-mail; delete extra comments from forwarded e-mail, and make the subject line detailed.
12. Celebrate taking a new approach to e-mail.

Email has just turned 35 and it’s very difficult to imagine working without the emails today. Here are few interesting links to Email and it’s history.

IT programmer Ray Tomlinson sent the first message in late 1971.

The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them. Most likely the first message was QUERTYIOP or something similar.

Josh Burt of The Sun is reminding us of the top 5 embarrassing emails of last 35 years.

And a list of very useful tips from IT Security; Hacking Email: 99 tips to make you more secure and productive. The article include Etiquette, Communicating & Effectiveness, Mobile Email, Productivity, Folders, Filtering, Email Attachments, Tricks, Hacks, Backup, Software specific tips, Privacy and Security.

Google Apps for Your Domain is a new free service from Google that includes Gmail (with your own domain name) with 2 gigabytes of storage, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Page Creator. I’ve just signed up for this service to test internally within our office. It’s very easy to setup (just need to change the MX record for the domain) and found it very useful. I think it can be a great package for small to medium sized companies and startups. The privacy issues might hold some organizations from embracing the service. But no hardware, no software and free of charge for excellent email system, IM, Calendar and web for your organization, with Google’s backing is hard to resist. I think they’ll be adding Writely and Google Spreadsheets soon to make it something like Google Office, that everyone is talking about.

It’s very difficult to stay safe online today without understanding the security jargons.

Phishing is one of the most popular techniques used by criminals to fool the users (even quite experienced ones) in giving in their personal information.

Phishing - Fraudulent emails and pop-ups designed to fool you into revealing personal information, such as passwords, credit card details, and account numbers, for criminal gain.

Some of the latest phishing attacks in News:

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A serious flaw has been found in Sendmail that could allow an attacker to take control of the SMTP server running vulnerable version of the software. A remote attacker could send malicious data at certain time intervals, which can corrupt arbitrary stack memory and gain control of the Server.

This security hole affects all Linux and Unix versions of Sendmail 8 up to version 8.13.5. Microsoft Windows versions of Sendmail are not affected. Sendmail has released a new verion 8.13.6 to fix this problem and also patches for earlier versions are available at their FTP site.

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One of our customer was interested in a security solution that was tightly integrated, easy to manage and cost effective. After researching for a while I found that Astaro Security Gateway software (formerly Astaro Security Linux) was one of the best choices available in the market. The features were so appealing that I did a 30 day evaluation and this is what I found.

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I have to install email servers every now and then. Sometimes customers need a new email server, sometimes it’s scheduled upgrade or replacement of the old server and sometimes it’s because of failures. In carrying out these installations the procedure differs slightly depending on the reason why I’m installing the server. I’ve been doing this so many times that I happen to follow a certain pattern automatically which I’m listing out here.This should be useful for planning and looking at the bigger picture of an email server installation before plunging into the technical details of actual installation, configuration, testing and putting into production.

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There can be situations where we need to send and receive emails without having an access to the email clients. For network and system admins using command line can be a very useful technique. We can troubleshoot the email problems in the fly. I find it very helpful in solving most of the basic email problems. You can diagnose simple problems like; incorrect login name/password, connection problem to the server, mail box full etc… . To send and receive emails without an email client you need to have access to a PC with internet connection, your username, password and pop3/smtp server name.
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If your are a network or system administrator of a SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) then you’ll have to do a lot of things that go beyond the call of your duty. You need to find systems, softwares and tools, recommend them to the management, justify your recommendation and make sure everything runs smoothly. There is a never ending search for perfect systems and softwares which are of good qualities and cost as less as possible. A typical SME would need at minimum following servers in order to run their business smoothly:

Email Server
Web Server
DNS Server
File Server
Print Server
Internet Gateway (Firewall/Router/Proxy)

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