Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

Category: Email

  • Exchange Unwashed blog digest June-July 2012

    I was remiss in not posting a digest of June articles so here’s a bumper edition listing all of the articles posted to WindowsITPro.com during June and July. In passing, I should also point to my 4,000-word plus in-depth review of Exchange 2013 posted on WindowsITPro.com on July 23. This…

  • How much is your email worth?

    The nice people at Backupify have created a Gmail value calculator to help solve the question that I know has been keeping everyone awake at night: “Just how much is the email in my Gmail account worth?” Apparently the answer is in the order of $3,588, based on the average…

  • The ALL-IN-1 Mail Filter: Forerunner of modern email rules processing

    Email systems had a different ebb and flow twenty-five years ago. An average mailbox received perhaps 10-15 messages daily and the messages were simpler with fewer attachments and properties. Most messages were in the order of one printed page or less, or roughly 2KB of ASCII text. Some email systems,…

  • Computing survey reports on UK market – 2% still using Exchange 2000?

    The U.K. is Microsoft’s largest subsidiary and has always been an important and mature market for Exchange Server. The results of a survey about the pace of transition to Exchange 2010 reported by the well-respected Computing magazine are therefore interesting and deserve some commentary. According to Computing, Exchange has 80%…

  • Decision time: into the cloud or stay on-premises

    HP and Penton Media recently asked me to write a paper outlining the critical issues that surround the decision that many companies are currently considering whether they should continue to run Exchange on-premises, move into the cloud with Office 365, or deploy a hybrid solution. I think the decision is…

  • Forcing an Active Directory update with Exchange 2013 might not be such a good idea

    My post of May 4 exploring the question whether the upcoming Exchange 2013 release should force companies to upgrade their Active Directory infrastructures to a modern version generated a considerable number of messages. As you might recall, the question was originally debated at a spirited Q&A session at TEC in…

  • Should Exchange 2013 force an Active Directory upgrade?

    One of the interesting debates at the Exchange Q&A session at TEC 2012 was the question whether the upcoming release of Exchange 2013 should force companies who want to deploy the new software to upgrade their Active Directory infrastructure to a level higher than Windows 2003. Specifically, the proposal was…

  • Exchange 2010 SP2 RU2: Deep-dive into what’s in this roll-up update

    On Monday, April 16, Microsoft released roll-up update 2 (RU2) for Exchange 2010 SP2. There was nothing strange or unusual in this process because it follows Microsoft’s practice of issuing cumulative roll-up updates for Exchange at regular intervals. On the same day, Microsoft (or rather, the splendidly named Customer Experience…

  • DMARC and the continuing fight against spam

    According to its web site, DMARC, (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance), is “a technical specification created by a group of organizations that want to help reduce the potential for email-based abuse by solving a couple of long-standing operational, deployment, and reporting issues related to email authentication protocols.” Anything that helps…

  • Exchange ActiveSync books – one coming, one in production

    There’s no doubt that ActiveSync has been an enormous success for Microsoft. Every important mobile device vendor has licensed ActiveSync and although the implementation of the features enabled by ActiveSync varies from vendor to vendor, it’s still true to say that ActiveSync has now become a premier protocol when it…