I’ve always thought you can tell a lot about a person by the music they listen to, what they’re reading and their shoes. And, based on a nation wide poll about email user demographics, it seems you can also tell a lot about a person by their email address… right down to their weight and the types of snacks they prefer (which probably says something about their weight).

In this infographic you’ll get insight into who the prevailing email providers are right now, from Gmail to Outlook on the hosted Exchange platform, as well as what percentage of the email market share they make up, and what kind of person is most likely to use which personal email provider. If you’d guess that someone with an email address like cutsiebaby99 probably ends with @yahoo.com and that someone using their real name has a Gmail address, you’re right on!

See if you can pinpoint who out of your family, friends and foes fits into these categories.

(Click to enlarge)

Do you believe these findings are accurate? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.
Where Do You Fit in the Email Market Share Infographic Embed Code
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When it comes to hosted email services, Google’s Gmail service and Microsoft Exchange are at heads. Both boast an array of great features—email management, convenient collaboration tools for both desktop and mobile…But in organizational setting Exchange still seems to offer a reliability and security that Gmail has not yet lived up to.

Here we will look at why Exchange continues to thrive in the domain of email hosting for business.

Image Source: Life Hacker

1) Ease of migration

Google, still relatively young to the world of email hosting has not yet perfected its migration process. Whereas an established and sophisticated Exchange provider offers a simple and automated migration process that will seamlessly import all your existing email setup to the new environment, Google’s Gmail service requires a more manual and labor intensive setup.

I have heard that Gmail imposes a daily bandwidth limit (which could be about 2GB). If you hit this limit, the migration process will just stop. To work around this you have to use IMAP retrieval to import the email and the migration wizard to optionally import your contacts and calendars. You then have to wait for everything to be imported then you can remove the IMAP retrieval account.

All to say, long and pretty inconvenient process.

2) Reliability

A sophisticated hosted Exchange provider can guarantee 99.999 percent uptime, which is something Gmail has had some trouble with in the past.

Recently, Google removed its Service Level Agreement clause that allowed for scheduled downtime. This made them one of the first major cloud providers to eliminate maintenance windows from their service agreement. How Gmail’s uptime will compare to Exchange still remains to be seen.

3) User Features

Finally, there are a number of great user features that are offered in Outlook that you can’t find in Gmail.

1) Exchange 2010 has productivity features which help you organize and prioritize all the communications in your inbox in a highly efficient manner. For instance, Outlook gives you the option to have to-do flags and reminders which highly surpass Gmail’s way of organizing you and your emails. While Gmail has recently added the “Important” function to mark messages, it is not yet up to par for business.

2) Gmail does not support syncing of groups and multiple contact lists. Outlook 2010 on the other hand does.You can sync your Microsoft Outlook Contacts between your desktop, laptop, mobile and even other computers.

3) You have a lot of power and control with Outlook Messages and can even send (.msg files) to other e-mails, folders, etc. Gmail items on the other hand are not files, so you don’t get the same type of item-level control for archiving.

4) Outlook 2010 help avoid email mistakes with automated guidance. This will notify you when the recipient is out of office (before the message is sent), or give you a heads up when you may be sending your email to a large distribution list.

It is quite clear that when it comes to the best email hosting solutions for business, Exchange 2010 is the way to go.

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Who needs another email address? Facebook thinks… We do. Facebook ‘Messages’ is a service the company is rolling out, in which users can opt-in and receive their very own “@facebook.com” email address that matches their public username.

What they’re offering is not really email nor is it as sophisticated or business-oriented as SharePoint hosting. However, here you can chat, text message, IM or email. Facebook calls it the “next evolution of messaging”. Rather than having intermittent exchanges of content, as is the case with traditional email, this new messaging medium will support “ongoing conversations”. Entire conversation histories going back years will be saved into users’ accounts. No subject lines, no cc, no bcc, just long threads of individual conversations.

The three features that define Facebook’s new offering include:

• Seamless messaging: users can chat with people through whatever medium they choose, be it SMS, email, or IM
• Conversation history: see everything you’ve discussed with each friend as a single conversation
• Social inbox: for filtering exactly the messages you want to see and having a spam-free inbox (theoretically)

Hasta La Vista, Email?

Zuckerberg says “This is not an email killer. This is a messaging system that includes email as one part of it.”
While Facebook may not be driving the knife into email, it is swinging its sharp edge at email service providers, particularly Google’s Gmail service. There’s a long standing issue with Facebook not letting people import their contacts into their Gmail account, even though Gmail lets Facebook do it.

Facebook’s system doesn’t play well with others, and a recent Gizmodo post went as far as to say that “[Facebook] wants to be Netflix, it wants to be your Xbox, it wants to be Foursquare, it wants to be Gmail—Facebook wants to be the internet.”

And yes, it certainly does impose its own proprietary system in favour of systems that work well and are widely-used.

But as much as I love a good conspiracy theory, (and I do believe that Facebook is trying hoard the web’s social space) email won’t die. Not at the hands of Facebook. After all, Facebook is a social utility and though email is a way of connecting with people, Facebook Messages is optimized for socializing and strips down many of the important functions that email offers. Functions which are indispensable in a business setting.

The CEO of a huge financial firm isn’t going to scroll through an entire conversation history to find a document that was sent 2 weeks ago. Being able to separate topics is a fundamental aspect of email. Plus, the Facebook Messages method of prioritizing messages is only useful in a social context.

Can We Trust Facebook With Our Email?

Naturally, because the company has taken the do-and-get-forgiven-later approach with its users, and has been flawed with privacy so often, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised that users’ chat content will not be used for advertisement positioning analytics.

However, Facebook will analyze who you send messages to most. As part of Facebook’s ‘smart filtering system’, it will automatically prioritize the messages sent from people who you’re already Facebook friends with. Emails from friends and friends of friends will go directly to your main messages folder- everything else to your “Other” folder. Basically, if you’re not Facebook friends with someone who sends you a message, it’s going to get a lower priority.

Facebook says that spam and bulk email will automatically go to the “Other” folder. How effective that will be, remains to be seen…

In the last year, Facebook has encountered major spam and malware problems.

Last summer, users were receiving messages from friends on their walls and in their inboxes saying “LOL is this you?” with a malicious link. Spammers have also infiltrated the Chat system posing as a friend wanting you to “Try this game”- even referencing a mutual friend of yours who beat them.

Sophos, a security software and hardware company, produced a FAQ guide to help users understand the security implications of having a Facebook email address before they sign up.

They say spammers will have more of an incentive to hack into Facebook accounts using phishing attacks and exploiting weak passwords.

Before signing up, users need to realize that these new features increase the attack surface on the Facebook platform. Cybercriminals are already compromising and using their accounts to spread spam messages. Spam sent via social networks can be more effective than traditional email spam, as users are more likely to open and trust a message which appears to have been sent by someone they know – one of their Facebook friends.

If your username is public, than anyone can find out your Facebook email address and send you a message. Allowing “Friends Only” to message you and choosing unique, hard-to-crack passwords will be essential.

All in all, I do think Facebook is offering its users a cool service and in many ways it will force other email providers to innovate. But I do have to agree with Jason Falls at social media explorer who sees this move by Facebook as yet another way to make Facebook a necessity for people.

Zuckerburg has always billed Facebook as a social utility. It now becomes much more of one as people will begin to rely on the network for unified communication. Facebook smart phone apps will become the mobile destination of choice (if they aren’t already) for many people, and not just young people. Like it or not, this will drive even more users and more interaction on the site and make Facebook more of a necessity for people, rather than an entertainment option.

For those interested, here is a video of Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 Summit discussing Facebook Messages (while being interrogated by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle) as well as other aspects of the company and its future:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Emails, hard to imagine a time when they didn’t exist.  How on earth did business’ function?  Oh yeah, people talked to each other, either face-to-face, on the phone, or in a letter.  Whatever the case, whenever business was concerned, you can be sure these conversations were professional.  Letters were always addressed to specific people, double and triple checked for spelling, and always ended with a “sincerely yours”.  No matter your tools for communication, how you communicate is a huge reflection of who you are as an employee, and an employer.  Email exchange hosting takes care of the medium, you need to take care of the message.

Image Source

1.   Not proof reading what you wrote.

Sometimes we can get so busy that we quickly type up an email and hit send without thinking twice.  This is arguably the leading cause of grammatical and spelling errors, misinterpreted information, and the classic forgotten attachment.  Before sending off that email to the entire company, take a few minutes to review and edit what you’ve written.  The last thing you want is for everyone to know you still haven’t figured out the difference between their and they’re.  Okay, leprosy is probably the last thing you want, but a misspelled email should be pretty high on your list as well.

2.  Emailing instead of talking

The more advancements we make in communication technology, the less we seem to actually communicate with each other face to face.  Emails are of course a key player in the dissemination of information in the office-sphere, but they shouldn’t be when the recipient is sitting right next to you.   Always try to get out of your chair and go TALK with the people in your office, not only can you pass on the information quicker and clearer than any email, but you might actually get to know the people you work with.  This notion might seem terrifying I know, but it can be an enriching experience.

3.  Emailing when angry

Did somebody drink the diet Dr. Pepper you left in the office fridge?  While some countries chop off the hands of thieves, it is unprofessional to blast the whole company with an email requesting that the culprit meet you at the bike rack after work.  Sending emails when angry is always a bad idea, no matter how badly you want people to know what a screw up they are.  The satisfaction from pressing send will very quickly be replaced with guilt as you start to calm down and realize what a fool you’ve made of yourself.  This does not mean you shouldn’t write the email.  Write it, save it, and then look at it the next day.   The writing will act as an emotional pressure valve, and the next day you’ll find that although delicious, a stolen Dr. Pepper isn’t worth the email blast.

4.  NSFW

There is a reason we have personal email and work email.  As funny as you think your joke or picture or video might be, you don’t know the sensibilities of every employee you work with and you run the risk of offending them.  These videos and pics can also be distracting, interrupting people from important tasks and thought processes.  Unless they are industry specific and 100% clean, save the jokes for your friends.

5.  LOL, OMG , TTYL

When composing emails within the company it can be very easy to get a little too casual with the writing.  As was mentioned in item #1 on this list, it’s important to send grammatically correct, properly spelled emails.  They are a representation of your professional self, and for the same reason sneakers are reserved for Fridays, winking smiley faces should be reserved for Facebook.

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The most recent cyberattacks were laid against the Canadian government by Chinese hackers, who penetrated the computer systems of two key agencies, the Finance Department and the Treasury Board, forcing them offline. With advances in network collaboration tools, from email toSharePoint 2010, there is incredible potential for sharing and collaborating ideas and information. Unfortunately, malware can spread just as easily.

As computers have evolved, so have the attacks against them. But before the Internet became so widely accessible, viruses spread mainly through floppy disks and other removable media. The following article will explore some of the most notorious email hacks and viruses from the past, to the present.

Creeper

Type: Worm
Year: 1971
Users affected: DEC PDP-10 computers running the TENEX operating system.
Infection and spread: Using the Tenex operating system and ARPANET, a self-replicating virus spread between DEC PDP 10 systems displaying the message, “I’M THE CREEPER CATCH ME IF YOU CAN”.
Hacker Motivation: (Experiment) Not intended to be malicious, the virus was designed by BBN Technologies engineer Bob Thomas to explain how a virus could infiltrate, and be replicated throughout a localized computer network.
Damage caused: (Minor) Some sources claim the Creeper replicated so many times, that it crowded out other programs, but the extent of the damage is unspecified.
Aftermath: The “Reaper” was created to fight the Creeper. It was the first piece of anti-virus software, also a self-replicating program that spread through the system, removing the offending virus from infected computers.

Elk Cloner

Type : Boot sector
Year: 1982
Users affected: Apple DOS 3.3 computers
Infection and spread: Spread “in the wild” via floppy disk. Once an infected disk was booted, the virus loaded into the memory and infected the boot sector. Elk Cloner would be copied to the disk, allowing it to spread from disk to disk.
Hacker Motivation: (Practical joke) Authored by Rich Skrenta, a ninth-grade student who wanted to play a joke on his schoolmates. An infected computer would display the short poem displayed above on every 50th boot.
Damage caused: (Minor) Infected all the computers used by Skrenta and his friends, even some used by the staff at his school.
Aftermath: Skrenta wrote countless other computer programs and also started the online news business Topix. But, he is still remembered most for unleashing the “Elk Cloner” virus on the world.

Name: Brain

Type: Boot sector
Year: 1986
Users affected: Computers running Microsoft Corp.’s operating system (only infected 360k floppy)
Infection and spread: The boot sector virus would fill unused space on the floppy disk so that it could not be used.
Hacker Motivation: (Publicity) Two young programmers from Pakistan wrote the boot sector program, targeting people who spread pirated software. A form of advertising for the company, it displayed the phone number of the brothers’ computer shop for repairs.
Damage caused: (Minor) Brain was pretty benign and due to its partial non-destructiveness, went undetected. Most users at the time paid little attention to the slow speed of floppy disk access.
Aftermath: Other viruses soon followed Brain. Among them were Alameda, Cascade, Jerusalem, and Lehigh. These viruses were able to infect .COM and .EXE files.

Name: Morris

Robert Tappan Morris

Type: Worm
Year: 1988
Users affected: Infected an estimated 6,000 university and military computers connected over the Internet. Became one of the first worm’s to spread extensively “in the wild”, and one of the first well-known programs exploiting buffer overrun vulnerabilities.
Infection and spread: Exploited known vulnerabilities in Unix sendmail, Finger, rsh/rexec, and weak passwords. An unintended consequence of the code, was that a computer could be infected multiple times and each additional process would slow the machine, eventually making it unusable.
Hacker Motivation: (Experiment) Morris was written by Cornell University graduate student, Robert Tappan Morris. He claims it was not written to cause damage but to gauge the size of the Internet.
Damage caused: (Medium-Major) The U.S. Court of Appeals estimated the cost of removing the virus from each installation was in the range of $200 – 53,000. The U.S. General Accounting Office estimated that damages may have cost as much as $10 million. Harvard spokesman Clifford Stoll estimated the total economic impact was between $100,000 – $10,000,000. There were an estimated 60,000 computers attached to the Internet at the time, and the worm might have infected about 10 percent of them.
Aftermath: Robert Morris was tried and convicted of violating the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. After appeals he was sentenced to three years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,000.

Name: Michelangelo

Type: Boot sector
Year: 1991-1992
Users affected: PCs running MS-DOS versions 2.xx and higher.
Infection and spread: Michelangelo was a variant of the already endemic Stoned virus. It remains dormant until a system is booted on March 6 of any year, (the birthday of Renaissance artist Michelangelo). The virus overwrites parts of the hard disk with random data. This renders the hard disk of the system, and all of its information, inaccessible.
Hacker motivation: (Unspecified) Michelangelo was first recognized by the media when Leading Edge shipped 500 PCs infected with the virus in January 1992.
Damage caused: (Medium-Major) Millions of dollars were spent by companies, institutions, and government agencies to prepare for the digital Apocalypse expected from the Michelangelo virus. The virus affected 20, 000 systems, though media estimates claimed as many as 5 million computers could be hit.
Aftermath: People bought and installed anti-virus software in droves. Critics pointed out that the people making the huge claims stood to profit–because they were also selling anti-virus programs.

Name: Concept

Death skull not included

Type: Macro
Year: 1995
Users affected: Microsoft Word systems
Infection and spread: Infected data files. The macro in the template would copy the virus to the master template on the system and every Microsoft Word document passing through the “Word processor” carried along an infected template. Concept’s payload displayed the virus author’s message: “That’s enough to prove my point”.
Hacker Motivation: (Proving a Point) Concept was the first reported macro virus seen in the wild by AV researcher Sarah Gordon.
Aftermath: Macro viruses become the dominant type of virus.

Name: Melissa

Type: Mass-mailing macro virus
Year: 1999
Users affected: Microsoft Word 97 and Word 2000, Microsoft Excel 97, 2000 and 2003. Can mass-mail itself from e-mail client Microsoft Outlook 97 or Outlook 98.
Infection and spread: When a Word document containing the virus was downloaded and opened, the macro in the document runs and attempts to mass mail itself to the first 50 entries from the user’s address book. Appearing as an important message from a colleague or friend, it reads: “Here is that document you asked for … don’t show anyone else;-).”
Hacker Motivation: (Love) David Smith, 34, developed the Melissa virus and named it after a Florida stripper he knew.
Damage Caused: (Major) Caused more than $80 million in damage, infected more than 1 million personal computers in North America and flooded corporate networks with e-mail messages, forcing some companies, including Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp., to shut down their e-mail systems.
Aftermath: Network Associates and other anti-virus and computer security companies issued warnings and supplied fixes to counteract Melissa. Smith was sentenced to 20 months in prison and ordered to pay $5,000 in fines. Prosecutors suggested a lesser term because he had assisted the authorities in thwarting other viruses.

Name: ILOVEYOU a.k.a The love Bug

Type: Worm
Year: 2000
Users affected: Computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system
Infection and spread: The worm appeared in email inboxes, posing as a contact, with the message “ILOVEYOU” in the subject line. Once the attachment was opened, the worm sent a copy of itself to everyone in the person’s Windows Address Book. It also made a number of malicious changes to the user’s system.
Hacker Motivation: (Revenge) Two young Filipino computer programming students, Reomel Ramones and Onel de Guzman, created the virus. De Guzman was already familiar with computer viruses. He had proposed to create one for his undergraduate thesis, which was not accepted, forcing him to drop out.
Damage Caused: (Major) Infected over 50 million computers in 9 days. It caused the CIA, Pentagon and British Parliament to shut down their systems.
Aftermath: Caused upwards of $5.5 to $10 billion dollars in damage. Since there were no laws in the Philippines against writing malware at the time, both Ramones and de Guzman were released, with all charges dropped by state prosecutors. The Philippine Congress enacted Republic Act No. 8792 otherwise known as the E-Commerce Law, in response to this event.

Name: Code Red

Type: Server Jamming Worm
Year: 2001
Users affected: computers running Microsoft’s IIS web server
Infection and spread: The worm exploited a vulnerability in the indexing software distributed with IIS, and spread itself using the buffer overflow technique (a long string of repeated character ‘N’ used to overflow a buffer). It defaced web sites with the text, “HELLO! Welcome to http://www.worm.com! Hacked By Chinese!” Once the system received more information than its buffers could handle it started overwriting adjacent memory.
Hacker Motivation: (Unspecified) eEye believed that the worm originated in Makati City, Philippines (the same origin as the ILOVEYOU worm.
Damage Caused: (Major) Released on July 13, 2001 by July 19, the number of infected hosts reached 359,000. Launched DoS attacks on several fixed IP addresses including the White House web server. Total damage was estimated at $2.6 billion.
Aftermath: Code Red II is released two weeks after Code Red.

Name: Nimda

And when I think of you Nimda, I hope you f-ing choke!

Type: Multiple (worm/file infector)
Year: 2001
Users affected: Windows 95-XP
Infection and spread: Used five different infection vectors to spread: via email, open network shares, browsing compromised websites, exploiting various Microsoft IIS 4.0 / 5.0 directory traversal vulnerabilities, and back doors left behind by the “Code Red II” and “sadmind/IIS” worms.
Hacker Motivation: (Malicious) BKIS, a Vietnamese security firm said the virus Nimda contained text indicating that it may have originated from China.
Damage Caused: (Major) Became the Internet’s most widespread virus/worm within 22 minutes. Nimda cost an estimated $635 million in damage.
Aftermath: Microsoft put up a $250,000 reward for any information leading to an arrest related to the case. Authorities never identified who was responsible for creating the virus.

Name: SQL Slammer

Type: Worm
Year: 2003
Users affected: Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE)
Infection and spread: Exploited a buffer overflow bug in Microsoft’s flagship SQL Server and Desktop Engine database products
Hacker motivation: (Malicious) Slammer was first brought to the attention of the public by Michael Bacarella who posted a message to the Bugtraq security mailing list entitled “MS SQL WORM IS DESTROYING INTERNET BLOCK PORT 1434!
Damage Caused: (Major) An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 systems were affected. Caused major denials of service and slowed down the entire Internet. Three hundred thousand cable modems in Portugal went dark, no cell phone or Internet service for 27 million people in South Korea. Continental Airlines was unable to process tickets, canceled flights. Large financial institutions’ ATMs were unavailable. Estimates of cost ranged between $750 million and $1.2 billion.
Aftermath: Slammer exposed previously unknown interdependencies that were thought to be separate from the Internet. Brought sweeping changes to improve security of Microsoft products.

Name: MS Blaster

Type: Worm
Year: 2003
Users affected: Various Windows operating systems
Infection and spread: Targeted Microsoft’s windowsupdate.com site with DoS attacks. Infected vulnerable Windows PCs causing them to repeatedly crash as soon as they connected to a network. The worm attempted to download malicious code and run it, however had no mass-mailing functionality.
Hacker motivation: (Attack against Microsoft) The original Blaster was created after a Chinese hacking collective called Xfocus reverse engineered the original Microsoft patch that allowed for execution of the attack. One of the messages left behind by the worm (shown above) was directed to Bill Gates telling him to stop profiting from his flawed software.
Damage caused: (Major) Cost an estimated $320 million in damage. Victims included the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, BMW AG, Philadelphia’s City Hall, and thousands of home and corporate users.
Aftermath: Despite cleanup efforts, and an anti-worm aimed at patching systems, the worm remained very much alive. Jeffrey Lee Parson, an 18-year-old from Hopkins, Minnesota created a B variant of the Blaster worm. He was arrested and sentenced to an 18-month prison term in January 2005.

Name: Mydoom

Year: 2004
Type: Worm
Users Affected: Microsoft Windows
Infection and spread: Transmitted mainly via e-mail, it appeared as a transmission error, with subject lines including “Error”, “Mail Delivery System”, “Test” or “Mail Transaction Failed”. If the attachment was opened, it would resend the worm to e-mail addresses found in local files, such as a user’s address book. It could also copy itself to the “shared folder” of peer-to-peer file-sharing application like KaZaA. It became the fastest-spreading e-mail worm ever.
Hacker motivation: (Organized crime) Law enforcement agents investigating the virus attributed the virus to organized online crime gangs.
Damage caused: (Major) CNN estimated that due to loss of productivity and costs of tech support, the estimated damage was $250 million though the mi2g consultancy firm estimated losses caused by the virus at $38.5 billon. At one point, 25 percent of emails in circulation had been infected by MyDoom.
Aftermath: Mydoom resurfaces in the July 2009 cyber attacks affecting South Korea and the United States.

Name: Sasser

Type: Worm
Year: 2004
Users affected: Microsoft operating systems Windows XP and Windows 2000.
Infection and spread: Exploited a buffer overflow in the component known as LSASS (Local Security Authority Subsystem Service)
Hacker Motivation: (Fame) Authored by 18 year old German computer science student Sven Jaschan. He said he really wanted to develop an antidote to the virus and didn’t mean to cause any damage.
Damage caused: (Major) An estimated $500 million worth of damage was caused by the virus. Attacked tens of millions of PCs across the world. The virus caused the satellite communications of the news agency Agence France-Presse to cease and disabled the computer systems of U.S. flight company Delta Air Lines (who then had to cancel a number of trans-Atlantic flights). The British coastguard and a Finnish bank were among other big businesses affected.
Aftermath: Jaschan was found guilty of computer sabotage and illegally altering data. On Friday, 8 July 2005, he received a 21 month suspended sentence.

Name: Storm Botnet Worm

Image Source: Trendmicro
Type: Trojan horse
Year: 2007
Users affected: Microsoft Windows computers
Infection and spread: A Trojan horse spread through e-mail spam. It gathered infected computers into the Storm botnet through a remotely controlled network of hijacked computers. As of 2007, the botnet was considered powerful enough to force entire countries off the Internet, and believed to be capable of executing more instructions per second than some of the world’s top supercomputers
Hacker Motivation: (Organized crime) Thought to have originated in Russia, the Storm botnet has been used in a variety of criminal activities.
Damage caused: (Major) The Storm worm accounted for 8 percent of all malware on Microsoft Windows computers as of 2007. It had infected between 1 and 10 million computers between June and September.
Aftermath: The Storm Worm is constantly being updated by its authors to evade antivirus detection

Name: July 2009 cyber attacks

Year: 2009
Infection and spread: Malicious code tries to locate files with any of more than 30 different extensions, such as .doc, .pdf, and .xls, copies the data to an encrypted file that’s inaccessible to the user, and then overwrites the data in the original files.
Hacker Motivation: (Malicious) South Korea’s spy agency, the National Intelligence Service, stated the origin of the attacks were from North Korea’s telecommunications ministry.
Damage caused: (Major) 3 attacks were made- websites included the White House and The Pentagon, South Korea’s presidential Blue House, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Public Administration and Security, the National Intelligence Service and the National Assembly, as well as one of the country’s largest banks and a major news agencies.
Aftermath: Security experts said that the attack re-used code from the Mydoom worm. The virus had minor technological effects, but major implications for long-term foreign policy and economics.

In early 2010, Microsoft announced that there was a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) problem on some computers with a Windows based OS. Also, in January 2010, Google fell victim to attacks by China-based cyber spies who hacked into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists in China as well as the US and Europe. Google supposed the computers became infected when users clicked on links in their emails or malicious documents attached to them.
By the end of 1990, about 200 viruses had been identified. Today, that number has jumped to well over 70,000 with more to come… (Insert bad guy laugh.)

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Long time ago, before you could call for delivery, was Caveguy – let’s call him that! So Caveguy was standing next to a tree (not “standing” for long as a matter of fact!) while shivering briefly as the cool breeze that heralds winter made its way through his furry breeches. He was waiting patiently for lightning to strike wondering how long he would have to keep eating raw brontosaurus, for stone’s sake!

Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1981 "Quest for Fire"

(image source)

Back when fire was the actual latest technology, there was no wondering about one’s origins, and evolution was still a blurry concept. Blaze was not up for grabs and when Caveguy finally got a hold of it, his quest was only at a rough beginning.

Then, much later, Caveos Guyopoulos, one of many Caveguy’s earliest antiquity descendants, was a living witness of the original perpetual Olympic Torch. That torch represented the flame once stolen by Prometheus from the God of the gods that had whole Mt. Olympus exclaiming: “Great Zeus!” Fire was definitely a keeper.

The new BlackBerry Torch 6 OS

(image source)

As for our two fellows, nowadays Research in Motion (RIM) is aiming no less with its new BlackBerry Torch, the brand new 6 OS-featured smartphone that will ignite on August 12. The mission is clear: getting back the market share lost to Apple and its iPhone. Like Caveguy, BlackBerry needs its Torch under full control, but unlike him, BlackBerry DOES have the burning ambition to reduce the competition to ashes. Mobilo inferno!

SherWeb to take part in the bonfire

As for us at SherWeb, we are proud and excited to support RIM’s BlackBerry Torch.

“It is the first smartphone to support BlackBerry 6, which has been previewed recently on the Inside BlackBerry Blog.”, claims Pierre-Olivier Descoteaux, Marketing and Communications Manager at SherWeb. “It opens up many new opportunities for our developer community from enhanced Java applications to game changing web applications or Widgets using HTML5 and CSS3.”

Until the BB Torch strikes, stop aping Caveguy and get a head start by downloading the new developer tools and simulator supporting BlackBerry 6.
BlackBerry demo

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BlackBerry smart phones have changed the mobile phone industry with revolutionary functions that turn your phone into a mini computing device. In today’s fast-paced business environment, Blackberries are ideal for multitasking as they support emailing and instant messaging, enabling business people to stay in touch with clients and colleagues while on-the-go. But there are many other interesting Blackberry applications specifically designed for businesses. Following are some must-have BlackBerry business apps to organize your contacts, create and view documents, manage your work and keep track of expenses, all from the palm of your hand.

Contacts: Gwabbit
Price: Free (paid version: $9.99/year)

Say goodbye to cutting and pasting contacts one field at a time from your emails into your address book. Gwabbit automatically scans incoming BlackBerry emails, finds contacts, and transforms them into contact records within your address book. This award-winning technology monitors opened emails, and if they include the signature of the sender, the information is sent to the server for processing. The server then returns the results to the client and if a signature is found, the client prompts the user and asks if the user wants to save the contact information. Gwabbit is compatible with current generation BlackBerry devices with 4.2 OS and higher.

Documents: Documents To Go
Price: $49.99

Documents To Go gives users the ability to view, edit and create Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files and attachments as well as view PDF files all on their BlackBerry smartphones. In a recent study conducted by Brighthand, they found that Documents To Go does a significantly better job of handling Word and Excel documents than  a Pocket PC using Pocket Word and Pocket Excel. Documents To Go includes Slideshow To Go, which supports Microsoft PowerPoint presentations (something Microsoft does not offer in its Pocket Office suite).

Management: Maximizer Mobile CRM Software (Blackberry OS 4.6 or higher)
Price: $229

Maximizer ‘s mobile CRM software is simple to use and manage and gives you real-time wireless access to your entire Maximizer CRM database. This means access to all your business accounts, sales deals, notes, leads, sales opportunities, service cases and schedules all while you’re on- the-go. You can monitor the status of your business and team performance with real-time dashboards and reports on your BlackBerry. It can work as a stand-alone CRM program, or with your company’s desktop and browser-based products.

Finances: Expense Manager
Price: $14.99

Expense Manager by Total Wireless Solutions helps you keep track of your daily expenses. It supports multiple accounts and generates customized expense reports which are then transferred by email or saved to a memory card for integration with Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheets. You can set a monthly budget for each account, category and payment method so not only is it helping you track your expenses, it is also an effective budgeting tool.

Sherweb also offers hosted Blackberry services so that businesses of all sizes can synchronize wirelessly to Outlook and get instant access to e-mails, calendars, notes, tasks and contacts, with encrypted technology that secures all information.

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Being bombarded with spam can be a real nuisance and in a business setting you want to be extra careful about ensuring the safety of your emails. There are different types of anti-spam filtering software available depending on your particular needs. Spam filter software should be: 1) easy to customize (the program should allow you to tweak settings and create ones of your own) 2) offer a wide range of features 3) easy to install 4) reliable (the program should be stable and consistent).

Sherweb for instance, is one of the few hosting providers to include advanced protection free of charge with every hosted exchange mailbox. Sherweb protects its clients with its free anti-spam and antivirus technology that combines MailChannels Traffic Control with Cloudmark intelligent content filtering technology. Traffic Control reduces spam at the connection layer by up to 98%. Traffic Control also stops spam based on the reputation of email senders, rather than the content of messages. The Cloudmark spam detection engine is also quite innovative in that it relies on the collective intelligence of 180 million reporting sources from the Cloudmark Global Threat Network. This provides an extremely rapid response to new and mutating threats.

Here are some top reviewed anti-spam programs that will ensure the best protection against unwanted SPAM.

SPAMfighter

SPAMfighter ranked #1 out of 10 spam filter products which were reviewed and compared on Top Ten Reviews. A community-based spam filter allows users to blacklist or whitelist incoming emails. This means that if a particular email address or domain is blacklisted by a certain number of members of the SPAM fighting community, it will be banned forever. Some highlights of this software include protection against phishing, identity theft and other types of email fraud, protection of all the email accounts on your PC as well as recognition of spam sent as pictures.

CA Anti-Spam Software

CA Anti-Spam software, (former Qurb Anti-Spam software, which won PC Magazine Editor’s Choice for three years running), works immediately upon installation following a quick download. CA Anti-Spam automatically builds your whitelist of approved senders by scanning your saved/sent email and has tight integration with Outlook and Outlook Express. You can download the free 15 day trial and if you are happy with the software you can buy it for $29.99.

Email Remover

Email Remover connects to your ISP and retrieves mail header information (sender, subject, date, etc…) letting you pick mail you don’t want to receive and deleting it from the mail server. It will optionally run your regular email client when it’s done so that you can transfer and read the mail you do want. Best of all, it’s free.

Cloudmark Desktop

Though mentioned briefly at the beginning, Cloudmark is specifically for Outlook / Outlook Express users, and relies on the collective opinion of over one million+ users. Cloudmark will inconspicuously work away removing unwanted mail from your Inbox. One of the best features about this product is that it will never delete your genuine personal mail by incorrectly classifying it as spam. The Cloudmark networking approach catches phishing hoaxes as well as spam.

ChoiceMail

With ChoiceMail you can accept and reject emails by domain, IP address, or block email from known spam senders. ChoiceMail assumes everything is spam until you grant permission to let it through. You may find the setup process a little long and tedious at first. Once you’re done however, you will find that this is a worthwhile tool. ChoiceMail has some built-in rules but also allows you to create your own. Overall, the program does an excellent job controlling spam using a permission-based method. This product costs $29.95.

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This post was inspired by a comment from user Gregorio on a previous post.

Over the last few years, SherWeb has developed an exclusive Control Panel using unique proprietary .NET technologies. One of SherWeb’s most used web interface, it allows customers to easily and intuitively manage their Hosted Exchange, SharePoint, CRM, mobile and BlackBerry synchronization. SherWeb’s team of developers is always on the lookout to update and improve it. The original Control Panel was revamped this winter with a new interface and improved features.

So far, users have not been informed of updates made to the Control Panel, but from now on, we intend to regularly blog about new versions and updates. To make sure these posts don’t become confusing, we will identify them by version number.

The following features were added in version 2.10 published two weeks ago and in version 2.11 published this week.

1. New distribution list features (2.11)
2. BlackBerry wiping (2.11)
3. SharePoint URL reminder (2.10)
4. Organization summary page (2.10)
5. Manager and direct reports (2.10)
6. BlackBerry PIN message

New distribution list features (2.11)

You can now change the display name for all of your distribution lists, which will also change the name displayed in the Outlook address book. You also have the ability to grant or deny permissions on your distribution lists; allowing you to determine who can send messages to a specific distribution list. A select/deselect all checkbox has been added to the “manage members” page as well.

BlackBerry wiping (2.11)

This feature has been requested a few times by our customers. It has been added to the BlackBerry command list in a user’s home page and allows you to wipe a device clean.

SharePoint URL reminder (2.10)

Every user of an organization can now see the organization’s SharePoint URL on the Control Panel’s home page when they log in.

Organization summary page (2.10)

Want to know what’s going on with your organization? The summary page gives you a one-glance view of how many Exchange mailboxes you have, which plan they are using, and which mailstore they are on. It’s a quick way to make an inventory of your assets and a useful tool to understand what you pay for.

Manager and direct reports (2.10)

This handy feature allows you to set a user’s manager. The changes are reflected through Outlook’s user property page and through the Control Panel’s user property page.

BlackBerry PIN message

A very useful feature that has been on our Control Panel for a while but doesn’t get much attention. It allows you to send a PIN message to a user’s BlackBerry device. A PIN message has the same format as an email, the speed of an SMS message, but it doesn’t go through Exchange and doesn’t cost a thing. The BlackBerry server receives the message and immediately pushes it to the device. You can also send a message to an organization, through the organization’s main page, in the BlackBerry section.

Although it is only a few months old, SherWeb’s new Control Panel is already a mature project. It is developed and fixed as soon as feature requests and bugs come in. The development team works closely with the support team to ensure they can efficiently serve our customers and make sure our clients have the best user experience with our products.

by Christian Droulers. A software developer at SherWeb, Christian works mainly on the Control Panel. He has been with the company since April 2008.

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Since RIM officially launched its BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 last spring, we at SherWeb have been conducting numerous tests and simulations in order to offer it to our customers. The wait is finally over! SherWeb’s servers were upgraded with the new software version during last week’s regular maintenance.

Not only does this new software version offer peace of mind with a stable platform engineered to meet the demands of mission critical enterprise environments, it offers the end-user great features such as the ability to:

• Flag emails for follow-up
• Forward calendar entries
• Manage personal folders
• View and manage personal contact subfolders
• View and use contacts in public folders
• Listen to .wma files

Starting now, BES 5.0 will be available to all our Hosted Exchange 2007 users. SherWeb’s Hosted BlackBerry solution allows businesses of all sizes to benefit from wireless synchronization without having to invest large sums of money on server hardware, software and ongoing IT support involved with managing a BlackBerry Enterprise Server internally.

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