Just hours before South Hadley, MA high school student Phoebe Smith committed suicide due to bullying, she was the victim of a a vicious verbal barrage at the school library that included derogatory comments and slurs in front of many witnesses. This situation was documented and put before a court by the Northwestern District Attorney in April.

However, within the 53 pages of emails released to the Boston Herald as a result of a Freedom of Information request, are sad tales of a school district overwhelmed and not knowing what to do.

Why didn’t a school staff member do anything about the bullying in the library?  One released email reports:

“While the staff member was in the library proper, the staff member did not observe the bullying,” high school principal Dan Smith wrote on March 31 in response to an inquiry from an Irish reporter. “There is a very big difference between those points.”

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A new study released today by ExactTarget found 58 percent of U.S. online consumers begin their day interacting with companies on email.  The report, entitled “Digital Morning,” compared that with the 20 percent who start their day on search engines and 11 percent on Facebook.

It was not too long ago, that many articles exclaimed that social media would eclipse email as a primary form of communication.  But, the latest study shows that the day is far off. Of course, ExactTarget is an email marketing company.  They may not be the most unbiased source.

Public officials need to be careful when using their personal email addresses for anything that looks like official business.  Not only can it violate state Freedom of Information Act laws, but their mail can lead to problems.

Our tale begins when Escondido, California resident Tom Albergo wrote to high school district trustee Jon Petersen and the other trustees about the district’s plans to build
a magnet high school  near his home. Albergo expressed concern about a planned soccer field at the school, saying that other schools with fields have created problems for neighborhoods, such as criminal activity and public urination, the North County Times reports.

Read more →

At today’s Apple Computer annual developer conference, Steve Jobs stood in front of the throngs on enchanted attendees and told them that the iPad was “magical.”  It was so magical that it could even attract girls.  His proof?  An email he received:   

“I was sitting in a café with my iPad, and it got a girl interested in
me. Now that’s what I call a magical device!”

John Connolly, the former coach of the Australian rugby team, the Qantas Wallabies, is suing the Australian Rugby Union (ARU) and its chief executive John O’Neill for $1-million (Australian dollars) over an allegedly defamatory email sent after Australia’s 2007 World Cup defeat.  He claims that he has not had a coaching job since the email, including a position with his former team, the Queensland Reds.

Connolly says ARU chief executive John O’Neill urged top officials to shun him after Australia’s loss.  O’Neill accused Connolly of spreading “evil and malicious propaganda”, AAP news agency said, citing documents lodged at Brisbane’s Supreme Court. He told the officials to “reconsider” their contacts with Connolly, calling him “a person who adds no credit to the game”, and asserting ”his involvement in rugby is at an end from an ARU perspective”, it said. (Rugbyweek.com)

Tip of the Hat to Stefan Mehlhorn

You have been invited to an important business conference.  Major industry players are speaking.  The event is coming at a well-known venue, the AXA Equitable Auditorium, a 400 seat auditorium in New York City.  And, to top it all off, your air and hotel expenses are to be paid in full.

You are honored.  You are excited.  And, you are a victim of the latest scam.

Forget wiring money to Nigeria.  This spam is so highly tailored to you, that it has a good chance of being successful.

Bob Grant, staff writer for The Scientist, writes about the details of the scam he received:

In the message, (Alyssa) Logan invited me to the "Seventh Annual International
Global combine Conference on Global Economy and Human Welfare" that
AWIO was hosting. The conference would take place over the course of
ten days at two separate sites, the first in New York City and the
second in Dakar, Senegal in Africa.

All I had to do was get in contact with the conference
secretariat, one Grace Nathan, and I could be on my way to the
meetings. And — get this — I would even get my airfare and
accommodation paid for!

….

(I) discovered that they have posted an agenda
for the meeting. Several prominent doctors and researchers who work in
the public health field are listed as speakers on the agenda, so I
decided to contact them and ask about their involvement in the
conference.

"I've never heard from them," said Kevin Schulman,
director of the Center for Clinical and Genetic Economics at Duke
University, who was scheduled to give the opening speech on February 1
in Senegal.

The level of sophistication for the invites are quite high.

The roll call of speakers seems to have been copied directly from the
agenda of an actual meeting that occurred earlier this year. Schulman,
Berenson, and Steele all spoke in February at the 2009 National Health Policy Conference
(NHPC), hosted by health services research center Academy Health and
held in Washington, DC. Many of the other NHPC participants are listed
in the fraudulent agenda for the AWIO meeting. (Even Senator Ted
Kennedy, who died in August, is listed as a speaker at the upcoming
conference.)

Grant tells the story of contacting the offices for the conference and receiving detailed information.  While he never got to far, we can only assume that this would follow the path of the Nigerian scam.  Perhaps they would ask for some personal data for the agenda, a credit card for a room deposit, etc.

The details are becoming very sophisticated.  They clearly took the time to target their victims and research the field.  Watch your mailbox and be very careful.

(Tip of the Hat to Kira Matus)

Verizon, Motorola and Google got together to create a new wireless device/smart phone to take on the Apple iPhone.  Is it the long promised iPhone killer?  Absolutely not.  Is it the smartest device for creating emails?  I actually think the Motorola Droid has taken the crown away from my once beloved BlackBerry.

Let’s get some perspective.  I have been using the Droid for a little more than 24 hours.  Not a lot of experience.  But, I have also used all of the following devices at one time or another as my primary wireless email machine:

• Palm VII
• Danger (T-Mobile) Sidekick
• Palm Treo, Treo 650 and Centro
• BlackBerry 7100, BlackBerry 7200, BlackBerry Curve 8320
• Apple iPod Touch
• BlackBerry Storm, but only casually in a store — never my primary device

So, I think I have some experience with how the devices work for email.  Until yesterday, I would have said that the BlackBerry Curve was the best device that I have used.  My guess is that the BlackBerry Tour would be my highest ranking device.

But now, I am passing the crown to the Motorola Droid.  There are still some things that it could learn from the BlackBerry.  But, overall, it is easy to use and has the best features for creating an email.

KEYBOARD FOR CREATING EMAIL:

it is easier to type on this device than any of the other ones I have tried. Let’s put it into perspective:

• Palm Treo 680 – Nice keys, easily defined, a little cramped.
• Palm Centro – Probably the world’s most cramped physical keyboard in a commercial product.  Horrible.
• BlackBerry Curve – Great physcial keyboard. But, no on-screen error correction.  I was prone to typos.
• BlackBerry Storm – Do I really need to press down so hard?  I made lots of errors.
• Apple iPhone / iPod Touch – Really nice on-screen keyboard. But,
  the word suggesting feature makes one guess. Touch it and it keeps the bad word and not the correction.

Read more →

Can you believe that there are 54 companies in the email archiving market?  My product, InBoxer, of course.  There are also names that you have heard of like Symantec EnterpriseVault, IBM Commonstore, Mimosa Systems Nearpoint, Google's Postini, Barracuda Networks, and so on.

It is so confusing, that it is hard to make sense of the differences.

So, I have taken a stab at discussing the critical issues in a new whitepaper entitled, "There Are 54 Email Archiving Vendors.  How Do You Choose?"  I am covering topics such as:

- Speed and accuracy of archive search
– Why Microsoft says stubs "should be avoided"
– How Microsoft Exchange 2010 archiving cuts storage costs
– Evaluating Exchange journaling versus MAPI or Exchange log files
– Importance of litigation hold techniques
– Legal reasons for real-time monitoring
– On-premises versus the cloud

I invite you to download it and to place your comments here.  (I am sure that some competitors may want to express their point of view as well.)  Please join in.

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."  -  First moon mission.

"Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you."  -  First phone call.

“What hath God wrought!”  -  First telegraph message.

And, on October 29, 1969, what was the first word communicated from one computer to another computer across a long network? 

This word was communicated from a small unknown lab at UCLA in Los Angeles to the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, California.  The computers were the size of a small apartment and had less processing power than your BlackBerry.  Yet, the word that will stand up to all those other phrases was …..

"Lo"

Actually, the word was supposed to be "Login," but one of the machines crashed in the middle of the communication.  So much for critical moments.  The bug was fixed within minutes and the word "Login" was finished.

It is actually hard for us to remember — or to imagine — that in those days, computers were not interconnected.  We did not have a digital telephone network.  (Remember the acoustic coupler?)  Computers were generally not even interactive.  Most communication was via cards, paper tape, and a few terminals.  So, sending a message from one machine to another was pretty radical.

Charley Kline, who was at UCLA, and Bill Duvall, his SRI counterpart, gave a special presentation at the Computer Museum to mark the 40th anniversary.  They have a video that describes the moment and shows pictures of the equipment like what they used.

It wasn't exactly and email message.  As a matter of fact, I doubt that they even imagined email at the time.  But, this is the anniversary of a fundamental building block of what makes email possible.  Happy Anniversary.