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February, 2005



The Collaborative Communications Summit will take place October 18-19, 2005 in San Francisco, California. This conference will focus on real time presence-aware collaboration tools and services, including video communication, VoIP, instant messaging, team collaboration environments, and mobile collaboration tools. More

Generally, Ferris Research reports and webinars are only availabile for a fee: either to subscribers or for a one-off payment. Occasionally, we run free webinars.

Wednesday March 2 is the date for the next free webinar. David Ferris and Richi Jennings will be discussing the cost of spam, covering the global costs and helping you understand how to calculate your organization’s costs.

Mark your calendar for 8:30am Pacific, 11:30am Eastern, 4:30pm UK, 5:30pm Central European.

More details below; you can sign up to attend here.

Continue reading ‘Free webinar: The Cost Of Spam’

Yesterday, we talked about the UK Government’s ITsafe security alerts system, and how it uses a "safeword" in an attempt to reduce spoofing attacks. We have some concerns:

Continue reading ‘ITsafe safeword concerns’

McAfee released results for 4Q2004, ended December 31. Revenue decreased 10% to $244 million with net income of $44.5 million. More

We assess the economic cost of spam, focussing mainly on the waste of users’ time, the cost of technical support, and the cost of anti-spam technology.

This report presents a financial model, in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, that allows readers to calculate the cost of spam in their organizations.

As reported elsewhere, The UK government today launched a service, ITsafe, for advising citizens about viruses and other threats. It comes from the NISCC (National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre).

To quote the website:

ITsafe is designed to provide both home users and small businesses with proven, plain English advice to help protect computers, mobile phones and other devices from malicious attack. It consists of both the Advice on this website, and a low-volume Alerting Service.

While this is potentially good news, that’s not directly the point of this blog entry. However, one tiny aspect of the alerting service shows an interesting idea.

Continue reading ‘UK Government has an idea’

There’s already been a lot of interest in our two spam cost reports (here and here), released yesterday. One of the questions that’s coming up is about how the costs will likely change in the future. Will they go up, down, or stay the same?

In the future, the cost of spam should reduce, because the spam volume will substantially reduce. This seems like a bold claim, we know, but hear us out; here’s the logic:

Continue reading ‘The future cost of spam: an FAQ’

As regular blog readers know, we went to LinuxWorld last week. It was held in Boston, as opposed to the previous Winter LinuxWorlds, which were in New York. An interesting and busy event.

Continue reading ‘LinuxWorld: A Messaging Perspective’

California State Law: Click Here for Story

Military forces throughout the world send email. They have a number of special requirements, focussed around reliability, accountability, delivery guarantees, and message integrity. Surprisingly, encryption is fairly low on the list. The main requirements are:

  • Digital signatures, to identify senders, and ensure the message hasn’t changed

This report describes 3Com’s Email Firewall, a new email hygiene appliance that sits at an organization’s Internet boundary, and which is aimed at small and medium sized businesses.

This product brief explains the three main options available for archiving email and concludes by focusing specifically on the solution offered by Fortiva Inc.

Cisco Systems, Microsoft, and Symantec are promoting Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), a rating system that will standardize the measurement of the severity of software vulnerabilities. Would provide a common language for describing the seriousness of computer security vulnerabilities and replace different, vendor-specific rating systems. More

This report describes Borderware’s Email hygiene appliances.