Focus On: Email

Email authentication's lack of adoption isn't simply about technology. It's more about competing visions, and the powerful sponsors behind each. At least one experiment has badly stumbled on both counts. Others await the political settlement that must take place before a plurality of network managers bother adding the Last Authentication Technology Standing to their job jars. Email Battles gives you a treetop view.

The web is alive with complaints from Yahoo Mail account holders who didn't get mail, and legitimate senders whose mail never was delivered. Everybody seems to know it happens, but nobody ever figured out why... until now. After Email Battles mapped, analyzed and charted Yahoo Mail's mail servers, it's easy to see why the wealthy company wants to charge for certified sender services. It apparently needs the money for a new mail server.

Installing and maintaining a mail server or network spam filtering appliance is pretty easy, at least in concept. Unfortunately, in practice, it's full of gotchas, like mis-matched IP addresses in mailservers, filters, DNS and firewalls. That's why Email Battles has added Mail Server Profiler to its free on-line toolkit. To help professional and amatuer network managers alike get to the bottom of mail server headaches.

In the midst of Microsoft's Convergence Conference, which evoked memories of Tom Cruise "painting" data on a big screen in "Minority Report," Redmond's prophet staked-out a decidely prosaic vision. Bill Gates forsees vastly more powerful Outlook rules that let you tailor your message responses to the person, place and time... Easily. And in Gates' version of the future, it won't matter if the message came through SMTP or voice.

Heads are rolling at Red West (home of MSN), after upper management at Microsoft finally stopped drinking the Kool-Aid doled out for years by the Personal Services Group. As a flood of MSN execs slink out to "spend more time with their families," many observers can't figure out why Judgement Day took so long. After all, the current crew, led by David Cole, has fumbled everything from spam to advertising... and especially, public confidence.