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A State Department official asked Twitter to postpone scheduled downtime to keep a channel open for Iranians protesting the country's contested election, according to the NY Times.

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Every IT person has dreams about the technologies they really want for their business. In current economic conditions, however, you may need to downsize your expectations.

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Oracle hopes its Beehive collaboration platform will lead to sales of other Oracle products. And if it happens to shove Microsoft Exchange out the door, that's a bonus.

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The rules of social networking get hazy when your business and personal lives intersect online.

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A new survey from Barracuda shows compliance is the most important reason to archive mail, but not the only driver.

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These days, everyone's talking about saving money on technology, but where do you start? To help, bMighty.com has put together a slide show with a dozen practical ways to shave a few bucks off your IT budget without impacting productivity.

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Acquisition of MessageLabs fills a major gap in Symantec's software as a service portfolio, but the software giant also may be aiding a smaller competitor

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Feel that? It's the economy quaking. With the House rejecting the $700 billion bailout bill, stocks seesawing, and loads of uncertainty looming, it's possible you'll have more candidates than you ever imagined applying for jobs at your company. Are you ready to handle that?

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When I woke up Saturday morning, I found a text message waiting on my iPhone from the Barack Obama campaign, informing me that the candidate named Joe Biden as running mate. But I already knew that, because I'd already gotten the news the night before -- from newspapers. Old-fashioned journalism -- wordslingers working contacts inside the Obama campaign -- leaked the story in advance of your new-fangled text messaging. Score one for the old school.

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In the e-mail world, where possible, I used to urge organizations to stick with the Internet-standard Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) instead of using the addictive proprietary alternatives from Microsoft and IBM Lotus (found in Outlook/Exchange and Lotus Notes). Now, thanks to Google's GMail service, I realize I may have been mistaken.

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I’m not an Outlook user, but most e-mail clients I have tried -- and even Outlook back when I used it -- seem pretty self-explanatory, so I'm a little unclear about the need for ClearContext. This product aims to make Outlook e-mail more manageable, more efficient, more automated. Maybe this is just one of those things where you don't know you're missing. Since our company is moving to Outlook in the next few months, maybe I'll have to see for myself.

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It's safe to say that once the online magazine Slate writes about a tech trend, that trend is either over or rapidly becoming passé. So it is with last week's story, "The Death of Email." The notion that e-mail, shoved aside by more youthful and immediate forms of communicating such as IM, text messaging, and Twitter, is going the way of the fax machine has been around for some time.

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While the young people nowadays are all about their "instant messaging," and "social networks," e-mail is still the switchboard through which most of my business communication flows. Apple Mail 3, the upgraded mail client included in Mac OS X Leopard, is a very good mail client and a significant improvement over previous versions. It has a few features I love, some I hate, and some that are frustrating because they're good but could be so much better.

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Abaca, a startup that launched at last week's Interop NY show, claims to have developed a new approach to spam filtering that guarantees a minimum of 99 percent accuracy.

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Where do telecom carriers draw the line when it comes to blocking text messages that they deem controversial or inappropriate? Just take Verizon Wireless as an example of a carrier that's feeling a lot of heat after refusing to allow an abortion rights advocacy group to set up a text message alert system on its network.

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Are you impressed when you receive an e-mail with the tagline "Sent from my BlackBerry"? A writer on Slate says it "sends a subtle signal to my correspondents that I'm getting a lot done." I found the statement startling, because that interpretation never even occurred to me; I think those taglines are just a waste of time.

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With Paypal unveiling payments via text messaging on cell phones, the debate has already started over the market for payment services on mobile networks. I use the word "market" because, while Paypal doesn't necessarily need to make money beyond the payments it is already owed, someone does. At least that is one side of the argument.

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Applause goes out to Esther Dyson for her recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, You've Got Goodmail. She points out that Goodmail's service is like "FedEx for e-mail," except that Goodmail provisions its service atop the ISPs' services. So it's more like FedEx without its own planes. But I sort of like that analogy because the opposing forces seem to be conveniently overlooking some obvious facts here.

First, and most important, it doesn't matter if the letter is sent bulk, first class, second-day or overnight, somebody has to open it on the other end. And much, if not most, of the bulk mail addressed to "resident" goes straight to the recycle bin. Wouldn't it be great if you could say, "Please stop wasting paper on me" or "keep me on your mailing list."

That's the service that Goodmail is offering e-mail senders and receivers. It's good for legitimate senders because they don't want to be continually annoying people with unwanted messages anymore than they want their messages filtered out as spam before the receivers have a chance to decide for themselves. And it's good for receivers because they can see before they open a message if it is coming from an approved sender.

The other thing that the coalition of public interest groups and non-profit organizations known as DearAOL.com seem to ignore in their arguments is that major ISPs like AOL need to continually find better ways to hinder those that abuse the "free and open Internet." If they don't, they will lose customers. I'm not convinced that Goodmail is the ultimate solution for the heavy volume of virus-laden spam and phishing attacks but, as Dyson points out, it's an idea and ideas need to be explored because Spam is the real enemy here.

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The can of worms that has become America Online's certified e-mail delivery strategy just won't go away. It's not that other e-mail providers haven't offered the very same or similar services; it's just that this can of worms is being used to catch the biggest fish in the lake.

AOL will soon begin offering a fee-based, guaranteed e-mail deliver service based on GoodMail's Certified Email technology and the DearAOL.com coalition is ratcheting up the pressure against the move. One assumes that the coalition's strategy to get AOL to cave would send the message to other providers that they're next.

The coalition, now over 500-members strong, continues to mount a PR campaign. The latest move brought California Senator Dean Florez (D) into the fray with a comment and a promise that he would look further into the "risks faced by consumers under the AOL proposal." In fact, a new California task force, the Select Committee on E-Commerce, Wireless Technology and Consumer Driven Programming, plans to hold a hearing on the matter later this month.

I'm still a little hazy on what those "risks" might be. While AOL is effectively setting up another tier of service, it isn't changing its existing service. So what are those risks? It all seems to hinge on the coalition's speculation that the existing e-mail service will deteriorate as AOL invests more in the new service. I can't really believe that AOL would do something so foolishly detrimental to is core business, but if it did, the risk would be that customers would walk.

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You can't have message management without messaging policies and you can't have policies until managers can decide and agree on what they should be. Ferris Research recently published a list of some of the key decisions in implementing messaging a document archiving projects.

The first thing on the list should be rather obvious, but determining who has responsibility for archiving can set the tone for the whole project. Raise your hand IT department because it can't be left up to users. Users will apply their own logic to the problem or just assume that someone else is doing it behind the scenes. And who else can build a policy-driven automated archiving system that makes you users' assumption valid?

The next tip from Ferris: make sure your mobile users are kept in the archiving loop. Not only do you need to make sure the documents housed on mobile devices get properly archived, those road warriors also need access to their archived messages. Ferris recommends they access their repositories in an offline state. That means you need to make it easy to sync with the archive when they connect to the network.

The next decision will cut across many functional boundaries and bring the legal and compliance folks to the table in a big way: deciding what types of documents need to be archived. This decision can cause so much internal debate that organizations end up throwing in the towel and instituting an archive-everything policy. There's not much to offer in the way of advice here because every organization has its unique requirements and obligations. Archiving everything might remove the debate but leave a mess on the back end when documents need to be discovered and produced. There are no standards to rely on here so if you opt for an archiving system with its own policy engine, do plenty of testing before you deploy to make sure it is archiving what you tell it to archive. For now, err on the side of caution.

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AOL must be feeling a bit picked on at this point. A collection of organizations that starting making noise last week about its upcoming fee-based certified e-mail service has banded together into a coalition of at least 50, mostly non-profit, organizations decrying the service provider's plan to deploy Goodmail's Certified Email as a destructive "e-mail tax."

And AOL has a right to feel singled out since it is far from the first e-mail provider to engage a third party like Bonded Sender, Habeas and Goodmail to provide a fee-based service to authenticate senders. In fact the list is fairly extensive. In addition to Yahoo, which has a similar deal with Goodmail, Microsoft, Earthlink and Google also offer similar services.

In a sense, it's more a testament to the size of AOL's customer base that, suddenly, another such move could spell the demise of the "free and open Internet." When AOL makes a move in the public e-mail realm, everyone feels it.

"E-mail tax" is an emotionally charged term right now and the coalition is making the most of it. But in reality, Certified Email is an optional service. I haven't heard of any taxes that were optional. And last I heard, AOL wasn't changing any of its free services.

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Isn't it about time business organizations put some teeth behind their messaging policies? I mean e-mail has been a staple of business communication for a least a decade, and we still treat it with kid gloves. But the medium has become so ubiquitous and so darn easy that we don't stop to think before banging out a missive and tapping the send button.

For some reason, we can distance ourselves when communicating via electronic messaging. A thought pops into our heads, we send off a message. If we have to confront someone, e-mail keeps our exposure to a minimum. If we have a problem at work, we can easily go over someone's head, start rumors, or talk to the competition. If we have a simple question, why figure it out for ourselves when we can spam our co-workers and make them do the work? Why explain something when we can just include an attachment? And never mind that the attachment also includes sensitive information that may not be appropriate for everyone on the distribution.

A business-related phone conversation is still a more intimate interaction. It often requires more forethought to navigate the intermediaries, and more composure when speaking in real time. But e-mail has broken down all the boundaries, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it has also apparently removed the need for forethought. You can Cc: the CEO on the most mundane questions, which creates a new and unnecessary stream of follow-ups. And e-mail makes it easy and compelling to over-delegate.

The problem is also manifesting itself in higher education. Professors routinely give out their e-mail addresses to students, and the result, according to a recent New York Times article, is that it has made them too approachable and hinders their productivity. In the article, To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It's All About Me, professors lament that e-mail has made them available around the clock and open to a barrage of questions, demands, complaints and critiques that border on inappropriate. If an issue is not important enough to meet with the professor during office hours, it can be communicated via e-mail. And students don't seem to understand that what they write in e-mails reflects on their judgment and can result in bad recommendations.

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To illustrate the challenges of managing e-mail, Osterman Research took a humorous route in its survey of more than 100 IT pros, sponsored by Zenprise, with a series of "which would you rather" questions.

I guess this group of administrators has it pretty tough. The survey focused on a single support ill; they were asked to rate the level of difficulty in determining the underlying cause of e-mail problems. The Survey revealed that:

• 80 percent of e-mail administrators found determining the underlying cause of e-mail problems is as painful or more painful than shopping with their significant other. (Now, come on, not all e-mail admins are male)
• More than 72 percent found sitting in traffic is as painful as or more painful than finding the underlying cause of e-mail issues. (Depends on where you're sitting. At least the LA freeways are interesting to watch)
• 70 percent thought waiting at the Department of Motor Vehicles is as painful as or more painful than finding the underlying cause of e-mail issues. (I just don't buy that. I'd gladly take a month on the help desk over an hour at the DMV. Those people are scary)
• Only 39 percent revealed that a colonoscopy is as painful as or more painful than finding the underlying cause of e-mail issues. (That proves it. These folks do lead tough lives and they've been doing it for awhile if 39 percent of them have had colonoscopies)
• More than 60 percent concurred that visiting the dentist is as painful as or more painful than finding the underlying cause of e-mail issues. (That's an old one, and only proves one thing: the dentist chair has become a lot less painful in recent years)

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A little while back I blogged about how messaging technologies have become "cool" and are enjoying "hip" status among those that define "hip" standards for our society, the youth and young adult markets. Well, I'm thinking the vendor and service provider communities are finding this all pretty cool, as well. The Radicati Group Inc., in a series of recent reports, projects some pretty heady growth for messaging-related products and it's not all coming from messaging security.

For instance, the e-mail client installed base will increase, according to the market watcher, from about 1.9 billion seats in 2006 to nearly 3.6 billion seats in 2010, representing an average annual growth rate of 18 percent. Now, Radicati didn't say how many of those mail clients will be desktop clients and how many will be mobile, but based on the hip, trend-setting youth and young adult thumb-typing set, I would assume a growing percentage of that installed base becomes more mobile.

And how important is this group? Radicati reports that people under the age of 29 will account for 44 percent of worldwide e-mail users in 2006. And worldwide, the importance of the North America market begins to decrease as messaging technologies take hold in Asia/Pacific and the rest of the world. North America currently accounts for 22 percent of the global e-mail user population, according to Radicati, which projects that percentage to decrease to 18 percent by 2009.

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The integration of collaboration and presence technologies continues to fascinate me for two reasons. First, because it all makes so darn much sense. I mean you can work with a virtual room full of people from your PC in Timbuktu or down the hall. Presence capabilities take the remoteness out of remote collaboration.

And the other reason it's fascinating is because the enabling technology is all available, but it requires vendors and service providers to work together to integrate and provision it, so it's been slow to happen.

So when the key players start playing together, it starts to get very interesting. That's what happened this week when America Online Inc. and WebEx Communications Inc. teamed up to offer a version of the AIM client with the WebEx collaboration and conferencing tools built in.

The intent is to deliver the AIM Pro version of the instant messaging client for business users in a hosted fashion with the full WebEx collaboration suite available from the AIM interface, according to Brian Curry, AOL's vice president of Premium and Subscription Services.

That means business users can use their IM client to initiate online conferencing, calendar sharing, desktop sharing, audio and video conferencing, multimedia presentations, webinars, online training, remote support, etc., in a addition to the instant messaging features of AIM.

The other piece of good news is that AIM Pro users will have access to all the participating IM federation networks that AOL works with, including IBM/Lotus users, so your base of collaboration contacts is larger than the AIM universe.

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Anything that ISPs can do to prevent spam from reaching my inbox is usually just fine by me, except when it bars the door on messages that I was supposed to get. But the recent news that AOL and Yahoo plan to charge bulk e-mail senders for "guaranteed delivery" sort of misses for me.

One gets the feeling that we'll be seeing just as much or more spam and the fact that someone is chipping in a little more to get it sent doesn't lessen the annoyance.

The service, The service, which would be provided through Goodmail Systems, is said to certify the e-mail as coming from the actual retailer or marketer it purports to come. And for its part, Goodmail says the recipients must agree that they wish to receive e-mail from the sender. So in that sense, it's not just opening the floodgates. But hey, you still have to get the e-mail to opt in or out.

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College students have long been amenable users of any technology that allows them to communicate about common interests and now they can combine the best of all the social networking sites and the available social media on one site.

The new Uspot service, from Los Angeles-based Uspot, allows college students to create, share and communicate in one location and through common interests such as entertainment, social events and hobbies.

Uspot claims to unite two of the hottest on-line segments today, social networking and social media. It is the first site to offer the unique blend of social networking and rich media sharing technologies. Unlike typical social networking sites that focus on meeting people nationwide, often strangers, The Uspot connects people with common interests and allows them to explore those interests together, according to company officials.

The difference, I guess, is that the focus is not so much on meeting or, in some cases, dating other people, but rather in finding out how deep those common interests go. The site doesn't feel like a dating service, and it isn't.

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There's no getting around the fact that the current generation of knowledge workers is overworked. The messaging technologies that promised to make our lives easier have, instead, made us more efficient and elevated performance expectations. We are now able juggle more balls at once and require less support personnel to accomplish bigger projects in less time.

And we're working harder than ever.

David Ferris of Ferris Research recently wrote down his thoughts in the Ferris Journalist Insights newsletter on why this is the case. He observes that all of the stages in the work processes before messaging technologies took hold are now compressed or eliminated. Often times, there were breaks between the various stages, hand-offs that allowed natural breathers or downtime. Documents were dictated and prepared, sent somewhere and sent back again. It all took days and weeks.

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Will IT managers throw up there hands trying to manage multiple messaging environments from multiple vendors while trying to prevent malware attacks and meet compliance requirements? And by throw up
their hands I mean hand the whole mess over to a service provider.

That seems to be what Postini is hinting at in its annual Message Management & Threat Report, which was released earlier this week.

In the survey-based report the message management provider said 2005 was a "saturation point" for IT managers. I can
certainly believe it. Combating the constant e-mail and IM threats alone was reason to call in reinforcements. But throw in archiving, disaster recovery, backup, VoIP management and other responsibilities and messaging became a major time sink for IT last year.

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Did ya happen to notice that messaging is really cool?

I'm not basing this observation on the fact that our nation's youth are walking around clicking on their cell phones like there is no tomorrow. They obviously think its cool, and so do the service providers, but the software development community must think messaging is pretty cool, too. All the recent really big, really cool software product announcements have included some form of integrated messaging.

Yes, finding unique and useful ways to integrate, e-mail, instant messaging and voice messaging into applications is becoming a key differentiator and looks to represent a major battleground for upcoming heavyweight clashes.

Just since the start of the year we've seen Microsoft, IBM, Google, Yahoo, AOL and Research In Motion all starting to move their chess pieces with greater urgency and form various alliances, all in an effort to strengthen their positions in the messaging space and bridge the enterprise and wireless worlds.

One might think Microsoft would get a little sidetracked dealing with all the security issues that its messaging technologies have wrought lately (did you catch Fox Sports personality Terry Bradshaw asking Microsoft's billionaire co-founder Paul Allen if he could help him with a little e-mail problem?), but the Redmondites seem to be keeping their eye on the ball. We saw reports that Microsoft's Office Live service will likely include a Web-based e-mail client dubbed "Office Live Mail."

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I've always assumed that smaller business bore a disproportionate load of spam. It just sort of made sense that would be the case since they are not able to deploy the technology or the resources against the problem that larger enterprises are able to muster.

So when Postini said that one of its survey findings in it's upcoming Message Security & Management Annual Report for 2006 was that small businesses receive five times more spam per user/per day than larger companies when comparing smallest to largest companies, I said, "ah ha."

So then I wondered if the anti-spam tools and firewall appliances targeted specifically for small businesses were not up to the task. I didn't think that would be the case, and I didn't think that SMBs would be leaving themselves completely unprotected. Not even individual users can afford to do that anymore.

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Making users responsible and accountable for managing their own e-mail is one way to reduce the burden on overworked IT staffs. And according to a recent Osterman Research survey, that is exactly what is starting to happen.

It's not like the technical staffs managing large corporate e-mail servers don't already have enough on their hands taking care of things like disaster recovery, legal discovery, compliance and storage management. So why not make it possible for users and compliance managers to perform their own search and discovery on current and historical messages without relying on IT administrators?

The Osterman study, commissioned by Mimosa Systems, found that those responsible for managing large MS Exchange installations were actively looking for self-service tools to help lighten the load. Now these were big Exchange shops with an average number of mailboxes of more than 9,000. So you know the burden on staff is already heavy before you throw in demands from internal compliance officers and external legal counsel.

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Reading all the year-end wrap ups and 2006 projections for the messaging market, you'd think messaging and collaboration were a scourge rather than a productivity enhancing technology. All the reports I've seen talk about viruses and worms, phishing attacks, regulatory demands for retention, archiving and discovery, and warn of all the new problems we'll face when mobile messaging really takes off.

And after the past year, who can blame the pundits for painting such a dark picture? But still, there must be some good things to say about messaging. I mean, if these technologies were not so wide spread and gaining in popularity, we wouldn't be seeing all these issues, right? Sure, the security and compliance issues will probably mount in 2006, but aren't there other things going on of some import in this market.

OK, I know what the benefits of messaging and collaboration are to an organization, but we don't see much discussion of how new capabilities and new applications of the technology will move the needle in a positive direction 2006. In fact, when you read about great new integrated messaging systems, combining voice, text, and conferencing with real-time presence capabilities, the next sentence is usually about the all new ways that attackers will find to bring these systems to there knees or turn it into a cyber mule for carrying undesirable payloads.

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The new year kicked off with a mobile slant, not surprising since the giant Consumer Electronics Show also kicked off this week in Las Vegas.

Microsoft got things rolling quickly at the event by telling its MSN Messenger users that it isn't about to let Skype consume all of its VoIP lunch. Deals with Philips Electronics and Uniden to make VoIP phones available for use with the new Windows Live Messenger should make Microsoft's VoIP partner MCI plenty relieved, but it will have to wait until Windows Live Messenger 8.0. is released later this year.

Speaking of Skype, Skype users learned that they will soon be able to make VoIP calls without their PCs acting as the mediator. The new Skype Internet PhonePLUS from Creative Labs Inc. is said to connect directly with a router via an Ethernet cable. The phone will be available in the spring.

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With all the year-end and New Year IM network attacks and threats of attacks, perhaps it is time for another look at instant messaging federation, especially if your users are becoming avid IM hounds while you are trying to discourage internal use of consumer IM services on your network.

While secure, real-time collaboration and presence are valued capabilities, you've learned the hard way through your experience with corporate e-mail systems that company communications need to be be authorized, and based on trusted relationships. At the same time, you can't make verification so onerous to users that it defeats the simple, real-time nature of IM.

That is were federation comes in and Maxime Seguineau, CEO and chairman of Antepo Inc.
provided a detailed look at federation, its benefits and its alternatives. In this week's feature story,
Setting A Course Toward Instant Messaging Federation, Seguinea explains the various federation models for enterprise IM, from closed, VPN-like networks to third-party
clearinghouses.

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New plot twists in the never-ending Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice saga of public messaging . . . As we spy on our free-loving foursome—Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Google—, we see them still in the throes of monogamy but don't expect that to last.

AOL has now cozied up with Google, leaving Microsoft somewhat rebuffed. I say "somewhat" because Microsoft has never been an easily discouraged suitor. Don't forget that Yahoo was also pursuing a similar deal with AOL. I guess that under the porch light only Google found AOL's charms irresistible.

For it's billion big ones, Google gets a 5-percent stake in AOL and continues to provide AOL with its search technology. In addition to some cross promotion stuff, Google also gets to run AOL-sold ads on the Google network and run AOL's video clips. So where's the gravy for Google?

I'm going to say it's in the instant messaging aspect of the deal. As long as Google's GoogleTalk customers sign up for an AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) screen name, they will be able to communicate directly with AIM users.

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Remember when time capsules were all the rage. You could bury or otherwise hide objects and documents from the present time in hopes that sometime in the distant future, other beings from other worlds or maybe just future humans would uncover them to help answer questions about life "back in the day." The only problem with time capsules is that they are rather unfulfilling. You could only imagine the curiosity, confusion and shock that some distant traveler might display upon uncovering your boxer shorts with smiley faces.

But if relatively instant gratification is your bag, a Web site called FutureMe.org. is one of a handful of sites that let you send e-mail to yourself in the future.

We're not talking about sending reminder messages to yourself. What is required in this case is the ability to store a message for much longer than most e-mail providers will retain messages and then send it back to you on a specified date.

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We tend to splurge in large amounts on New Year's Eve, so why should our messaging activity be any different? According to messaging provider Mobeon, based in Stockholm, Sweden, New Year’s Eve 2005 will see the largest number of video mail messages ever sent.

With the growing installed base of 3G phones out there, and the proclivity of teens and young adults to employ the multimedia capabilities of these handsets, Mobeon believes this younger market will use the celebration to launch the largest video mail barrage we've ever seen.

That makes sense. Last December 31st broke all records for SMS messages sent and received (111 million messages) so we already know it’s a popular time to click out a mobile missive. Mobeon predicts we'll see upwards of five million video clips making the rounds to ring in the New Year.

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Microsoft hasn't provided much on an overall strategy for melding its instant messaging and VoIP technology yet, but the software giant is sure interested in keeping skin the game.

A week after Yahoo! announced it would add computer-to-phone calling capabilities to its instant-messaging service, Microsoft said it is expanding its VoIP offerings via a deal with MCI to let PC users place calls to land line telephones and mobile phones. Oddly enough, the service will only permit outbound calls, while Microsoft's chief competitors at this point, Yahoo! and AOL both offer services that allow IM users to receive and make calls out.

But Microsoft said it is currently just testing the service, called "MCI Web Calling for Windows Live Call," so when it's ready to formally roll out next, perhaps it will go both ways. At the very least, they should shorten the name. At any rate, Microsoft gets to start making use of the Internet telephony software it acquired when it bought out Teleo Inc. in August.

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Oh, what the heck. I made a prediction for the New Year yesterday, so I'm on a roll. Here's another, albeit no so far fetched prediction: We will see true interoperability between the major instant messaging services in 2006.

Hey! No fair, you cry. Microsoft and Yahoo! have already struck a deal to have their networks talking to each by mid next year. That's not a prediction, you say, it's just an expectation that they will carry through with the agreement.

Well, yes and no. We're still waiting to see what level of interoperability is actually achieved between the MSN and Yahoo! IM networks in 2006. But the larger question is whether the granddaddy of IM networks, AOL, is going to make an interoperability play.

So then you tell me that you can already get interoperability between disparate, competing IM platforms by using one of the third-party IM clients like Trillian or Meebo that allow access to all the major IM networks for text chatting and certain other features. True enough, but that's not "true" interoperability and they don't provide access to all the features provided on the native IM clients.

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Here's a shocking prediction: The volume of spam is going to fall off in 2006. Why? Because it has to. It will outlive its usefulness to spammers. It's become it's own worst enemy, too prevalent to be effective. Spam needs people to open e-mails and attachments, and no matter what new enticements are tried anymore, we don't trust them enough to do their bidding.

Ok, some of us are still learning, but we've all had to deal with spam. We know what it looks like, smells like and feels like, even when it purports to be something else. For most of us, it's more annoying than dangerous, because we toss everything that might be spam. We have to. The attachments are just as likely to come loaded with worms and viruses as come-ons for winning a free I-pod.

Spam will eventually crumple under its own weight. Can those that employ spam for marketing and advertising find the techniques even remotely effective anymore when we just delete what doesn't head straight for the spam bucket?

At this point, you've already asked yourself, twice, what I've been smoking. If you're like me, you're looking to change your ISP yet again because you've just deleted your 83rd spam e-mail before noon. It sure doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon.

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I can see it now. Your restraint has reached its breaking point. You are a nanosecond away from bursting into your boss's office and hurling forth with a resounding "I-told-you-so," the vehemence of which can result in only two outcomes, your firing or your promotion. There is no in-between.

Ever since the first employee sparked a support ticket to get his Blackberry device hooked to the network, you've felt the ill wind of insecurity, knowing it was only a matter of time before mobile devices achieved their full nuisance potential.

So when a Federal judge ruled yesterday that the $450 million settlement in March between Research In Motion and NTP Inc. was invalid, and a possible injunction preventing RIM for offering its mobile e-mail service in the U.S. was back on the table, you felt a little vindication, didn't you? Be honest.

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If you've spent any length of time supporting users, you know that there is no end to the imaginative workarounds they can come up with when a system goes down and they have work that still needs to happen. Yes, necessity is the mother of invention, or some other kind of mother, but when it comes to e-mail workarounds, the inventiveness of users can cause problems.

And it's hard to quibble with their intent. Businesses can no longer build slack into their schedules as a just-in-case measure when making deals. Communications technology has made immediacy the norm, so when a critical conduit is temporarily unavailable, the show still must go on, no excuses.

In our most recent poll we asked you what your users resort to when their corporate e-mail is down. As we anticipated, a majority (51 percent) of you said they just go out on the Web and use their personal e-mail accounts. Not a pretty picture if you're monitoring e-mail for compliance and security purposes.

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"The operating system doesn't matter." -- Research In Motion Co-CEO Jim Balsillie, keynoting the recent Harvard Cyberposium 11.

It's not the first time such a sentiment has been uttered by executives who find themselves competing against Microsoft. And many, many more of us wish it could be the case but Balsillie and the rest of us know that Microsoft continually makes the operating system matter.

At the core of his argument Balsillie is right. While Research In Motion is running into Microsoft everywhere it turns these days, and Windows Mobile 5.0 with Exchange Service Pack 2 offers the intriguing push e-mail capability, he downplayed Windows in his speech noting that "The operating system in the device is 200 kbytes in code. It's a bit element in the system. A task manager."

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It can't be possible. Has it really been 20 years since I took those 5.25-inch floppy disks and loaded a new operating system called Windows, of all things, on my PC/XT clone with the amber monitor, and remarked to myself, "Now What?"

The answer to that question was not immediately forthcoming. In fact, it took a few years to figure out why Windows would ever be important, and perhaps a decade before we all went, "A-ha." Windows in the mid-80s was essentially DOS with a graphical overlay. It came with a few utilities, a precurser to Word called Windows Write, and Windows Paint, which didn't work near as well as the Macintosh drawing and painting programs.

In those days, while DOS still ruled the business desktop and the Mac was this cool thing you could play games on and do "art stuff" with, Windows was just another PC operating system in search of applications. All the business applications ran on proprietary mainframes and minicomputers or one of the Unix derivatives. Businesses ran "personal productivity" applications like word processors, spreadsheets, and "personal" databases on DOS. That's what a PC was back then; a personal productivity tool.

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Controlling the use of the messaging infrastructure is a fight as old as business itself. The challenges today are more complex, to be sure, but essentially unchanged since the Romans, Egyptians, and Babylonians sent teams of runners covering more than 200 miles per day.

We want our communications to be secure, accurate, and limited to the mission(s) of the enterprise. In my own experience, that quest has led to some rather extreme and unsuccessful attempts at control.

I've worked for a company that installed pay phones on the premise and forbade the use of the company phone system for personal calls. Certain classes of employees could not even receive incoming calls. Receptionists took messages and calls could be returned during scheduled breaks from the pay phones.

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In case you are among the lucky few who never get those annoying phishing e-mails—the ones that inform you that your account with an organization that you don't do business with is going to be suspended unless you respond and give them all your personal information— here's the top 10 phished organizations on the Internet, according to data collected by CipherTrust from thousands of customers using its IronMail gateway appliance.

Now these are all reputable organizations that would never make the requests for personal data contained in typical phishing queries, so even if you have conducted transactions with these companies, never respond to such online requests. In fact, companies with the best reputations make the best phishing fronts because unsuspecting customers are more likely to trust the brands represented in the fraudulent messages.

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. . . or are IM users still in school? AOL today released the results of its annual Instant Messaging Trends Survey which reported a significant spike in IM usage over last year.

At first blush AOL's survey, conducted by independent researcher Opinion Research Corp. and based on responses from more than 4,000 Internet users in the 20 largest U.S. markets, would seem to fly in the face of comments I made in an earlier blog entry about my fear that IM usage would fall off among the teenage population unless steps were taken to quickly eliminate the spim, phishing and other malware attacks that are now plaguing IM networks.

I based that on my own anecdotal evidence of watching how the teens in my life had cut back on e-mail in favor of IM and were now enthralled with SMS messaging on their cell phones. Well, the AOL survey seems to back up the first part of that observation, noting that 66 percent of teens and young adults (ages 13-21) now send more IMs than e-mails, up from 49 percent last year.

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Message technology vendors and service providers: New capabilities and features integrations in the messaging space are fine and dandy but given their druthers, users would opt for just getting rid of the plague of spam/spim and other malware. Even the Holy Grail of the "universal inbox" takes a deep back seat to once-and-for-all locking out all the junk that continuously floods our message servers.

In our most recent reader poll, 85 percent of the readers said they would take a final heave-ho to spam and spim over a unified messaging environment. Now, does that mean that the remaining 15 percent who went for the ideal feature set have found a secret solution to the junk message problem? Please share. But for now, we all know what the real messaging technology Holy Grail is.

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I was chatting today with Paul Fulton, CEO of Orative, a maker of enterprise mobile telephony software, and he said something that got me thinking once again about this whole notion of presence and the intersection of enterprise applications and mobile voice and messaging technology. Fulton mentioned the old separation-of-church-and-state that has kept mobile devices from truly integrating with enterprise communications and data systems: Consumers own the devices; carriers own the networks; and enterprises own the data.

Now Orative and a handful of other vendors are starting to nibble away at that barrier without treading too heavily on the carriers' toes, and one suspects that the heavy shoes have yet to fall. Once they do, we'll notice a suspicious amount of Northwest soil stuck to the bottoms of those stompers, but that's another topic.

What players like Orative have hit on is that employees are just consumers that go to work in the morning, and those cool little consumer handsets have the potential to deliver much more value if you could bolt their mobile capabilities to the enterprise voice and data applications that are housed behind the firewalls. They're right, and some of the presence capabilities they are already providing are delivering dividends in applications like field sales, investment banking and other professional services where immediate decisions are critical.

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