Users of Yoomba can make calls or send instant messages to anyone with an e-mail address and a telephone headset. The service, similar to Skype, is completely free, no matter the location of your call, and it also has a voicemail feature for any missed calls.

Yoomba connects users using nothing more than their email address. It doesn’t matter who provides your email or what free email service you use.

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More than a third said they thought they checked their Inbox every 15 minutes and 64 per cent said they looked more than once an hour. When researchers fitted monitors to their computers, workers were found to be viewing e-mails up to 40 times an hour. About 33 per cent said they felt stressed by the volume of e-mails and the need to reply quickly. A further 28 per cent said they felt “driven” when they checked messages because of the pressure to respond. Just 38 per cent of workers were relaxed enough to wait a day or longer before replying.

Researchers found that many workers felt “invaded” by e-mails interrupting them as they tried to concentrate on their work. They felt pressured to switch applications to see whether the e-mails were urgent.

Female workers felt under greater pressure to respond than men. Karen Renaud, a computer scientist at Glasgow University, and Judith Ramsay, a psychologist at Paisley University, surveyed almost 200 workers. They concluded: “E-mail has become an indispensable tool in business. However, there is evidence that e-mail can exert a powerful hold over its users and that many computer users experience stress as a result of e-mail-related pressure.”

Ms. Renaud said: “E-mail is the thing that now causes us the most problems in our working lives. It’s an amazing tool, but it’s got out of hand. E-mail harries you. You want to know what’s in there, especially if it’s from a family member or friends, or your boss, so you break off what you are doing to read it.

“The problem is that when you go back to what you were doing, you’ve lost your chain of thought and, of course, you are less productive. People’s brains get tired from breaking off from something every few minutes to check e-mails. The more distracted you are by distractions, including email, then you are going to be more tired and less productive.”

Workers in creative occupations or jobs involving periods of concentration focussing on getting an important project finished — such as academics, writers, architects and journalists — were likely to be worst affected, she said, while those in call centres for whom constant e-mails were integral to their work would not have the same problem.

Source: Times Online

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The European content security market is gathering pace, particularly with enterprise security gaining priority due to the ever increasing need to protect critical information from the emerging threats and attacks. Furthermore, employee productivity is becoming an area of focus and in the recent past, Europe has also been reviving its legislative directives, necessitating greater investments in security. These factors, coupled with the growing consolidation, are like to provide entry and exit options for the investment community.

“The European security industry at large is in the limelight, as growing signs of market maturity in the North American region have heightened the focus on the less mature European and the growing Asian markets” notes Frost & Sullivan Senior Research Analyst Raja Srinivasan. “Regulatory compliances, employee productivity concerns, and the growing demand for proactive solutions to counter new and innovative security threats are all expected to drive content security investments across Europe.”

Source: Frost & Sullivan

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BlackSpider is a key asset for Websense in the acquisition because it provides email and web filtering managed services, protecting companies from viruses, spyware, phishing, and other malware, Gene Hodges, CEO at Websense, said in a conference call.

Websense plans to leverage SurfControl’s small business savviness as well as incorporate elements of its channel strategy, said Doug Wride, CFO at San Diego-based Websense. Wride will take over as president of Websense and lead the SurfControl integration efforts.

Websense sees strong demand for managed web and email security services, which makes the BlackSpider portfolio a good fit, Hodges said, adding that the two companies would have more than 41 million seats under subscription if the deal is approved.

Source: CRN

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They are targeting anyone who targets our members with email spam, comment spam, or harvesting. This lawsuit is unique because they believe it is the first major case in the US to bring a claim against spammers for harvesting email addresses.

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spam-bots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it

For more info visit, http://www.projecthoneypot.org/index.php

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MessageLabs’ Email Content Control 3.0 and Email Image Control 2.0 are offered as managed services that scan inbound and outbound e-mails for inappropriate, confidential or malicious content sent or received by an organization’s employees. The services help companies implement acceptable e-mail use policies and ensure compliance with a range of government and industry regulations, according to company officials.

The upgraded services now feature the ability to scan within Microsoft Office document attachments and include customizable notifications, so that e-mail administrators can change the text within a notification to better fit the organization, they say.

Email Content Control 3.0 also features a reorganized management interface that makes rule details easier to find, and can decompress files for scanning. The service can use the same security policies implemented by a company’s e-mail system, and rules can be set on a user-by-user basis, officials say. Email Image Control 2.0 includes new algorithms for analysing image attributes in order to accurately distinguish inappropriate content, officials say.

“Businesses are increasingly dependent on email as a primary communication tool,” said Michael D. Osterman, President, Osterman Research. “But it presents several risks for controlling confidential and valuable information from leaving the organization. Content filtering — inspecting the content of messages before they are sent — will assume a more important role within messaging management as a means of mitigating risks and managing corporate liability, and to make businesses feel more confident about their email systems.”

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Most recently, Cisco Systems in January announced it has agreed to acquire IronPort Systems, an anti-spam and spyware protection services company, for $830.0 million in cash and stock.

The networking equipment company said the acquisition is a natural extension of its existing security products, which include threat mitigation, confidential communications, management and policy control.

In fact, some observers say the major consolidation in the space is over.

“It’s pretty much done,” said Peter Firstbrook, research director at technology researcher Gartner Inc. However, he speculated CA might be interested in doing a deal. “They don’t have anything is this area,” he said, adding that IBM Corp. might enter the space, too, but has not yet shown any interest.

Gartner projected that mergers and acquisitions in the e-mail security industry will reach their zenith in the next 12 months.

“The more consolidation and the more people using the `good’ software, the better it is for marketers,” Firstbrook said. Firstbrook put together Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Email Security in September, ranking Cisco, MessageLabs, Microsoft, Postini, Secure Computing Corp. and Symantec Corp. in his “leaders quadrant.”

Some of the most attractive acquisition targets, according to some industry watchers, are MessageLabs, MX Logic and Postini.

Mullen, who heads a group called the EMail Experience Council, predicted that the major e-mail security vendors will get very cozy over the next 12 months to solve the security issues, and that in turn will spur further deal activity.

Source: B2B Online

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The IronPort acquisition will allow Cisco to move into the fast-growing e-mail security market, which is currently valued at approximately $850 million and growing at a rate of approximately 40% annually. The key technology value that Cisco will receive is a strategic foundation on which to begin building a security infrastructure for unified communications, including e-mail.

Gartner Analysis : The consolidation in the e-mail security market is now almost complete. Other vendors will find it difficult to compete with industry leaders Cisco, Microsoft and Symantec in the enterprise market. IBM and (potentially) Juniper Networks are the only other major vendors that have a strategic interest in this market, though BorderWare and Proofpoint remain as respected independent players. Gartner believes the two remaining service providers, MessageLabs and Postini, will likely be acquired by telecom providers in their respective markets.

Extracted from Gartner - IronPort Buy Will Make Cisco a Major E-Mail Security Player

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Postini has also expanded rapidly in the last few years, not quite at the rate of growth as spam itself but not far off that. It claims the number one position in the market for hosted email filtering. Expanding its business to include web filtering is an obvious choice for Postini as the email filtering nears saturation (although Postini continues to gain customers from churn in the market). Postini has 100s of ISP partners which could provide a lucrative route to market for its new web-filtering offering.

This has not gone unnoticed by other vendors. McAfee, the world’s largest pure-play IT security company, has itself formed a partnership with Postini and is reselling its managed filtering services. Microsoft made a couple of acquisitions recently—FrontBridge for email filtering and FutureSoft’s Dynacom I-Filter (buying its web filtering product, not the company)—so now has the capability to offer both services.

Two other UK companies, BlackSpider and SurfControl, got together in 2006 to achieve a similar goal. BlackSpider is a competitor to Postini that also provides a managed email filtering service. SurfControl has long been a competitor in the web filtering market. Along with companies such as Secure Computing and WebSense it provides filters for controlling what employees can do on the web. The aim of bringing the two companies together is to leverage one’s web filtering heritage with the other’s experience of providing a managed service.

Not to be left out, yet another UK company with a global presence, MessageLabs, also launched a hosted web filtering service in July 2006, to sit alongside its well established email filtering service. MessageLabs has a partnership with IBM, bringing the world’s number two IT vendor in to play (yes, if you haven’t already heard, HP’s latest quarterly figures allowed it to claim top spot).

Using managed filtering services is proving to be one of the most effective means of controlling web and email traffic.

Source : IT-director.com - 22/12/06 - Written by Quocirca

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New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, North American Content Security Market - Investment Analysis and Growth Opportunities, reveals that revenues in this market totalled $2.19 billion in 2005, and can reach $4.28 billion in 2012.

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According to the Radicati report, the worldwide market for compliance and policy management solutions will be “over $505 million by the end of 2006, up 38 percent from 2005.” By 2010, the annual revenues will reach $1.7 billion.

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The prospect of saving money in litigation searches, avoiding fines and lawsuits, could tip the scales in favor of outsourcing. For many firms, adding compliance and email security products on top of archiving could mean added cost and complexity, particularly given the costs of filtering software, which can be $25 per seat. (See Stop That Email!.)

End Result? If services function as promised, expect to see outsourcing grow in popularity as an email management option.

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The content filtering market is taking over the IM market as well, since most IM vendors have been bought by content filtering vendors and most content filtering vendors now possess IM filtering capabilities. The diversification trend also applies to delivery modes. Earlier, vendors delivered solutions in the form of either software, appliances or managed services. This trend has changed and vendors are now offering two or three of the options of software, appliances and managed services.

Vendors that are competing in only web or email filtering and rely on a single delivery mode are rightfully concerned about their competitive potential. In such a scenario, considering mergers and acquisitions, or partnering in order to diversify their product offerings will prove beneficial. Diversification strategies can include both web and email filtering, strengthening outbound email filtering capabilities, or adding hardware and/or hosted services to product portfolios.

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That could add up to a huge pile of unwanted e-mail. IronPort predicts that the number of spam messages will average 78 billion a day in December, up from 38 billion last year.

Internet service providers and anti-spam companies are working hard to fight this onslaught of spam. But it’s a game of cat-and-mouse, and right now, the spammers are slipping away, experts said. “The anti-spam vendors are struggling,” said Natalie Lambert, an analyst at Forrester Research. “The best vendors are able to stop about 98 percent of spam.” That still leaves 2 percent that gets through, which is a lot with the current, increasing spam levels, she added.

Source : c | net news

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Not only do the images elude anti-spam software, their malicious payloads are more likely to be launched by users. And they’re bandwidth- and storage-eaters; the average size of an image spam is 18 KB, compared to 5.5 KB for a text spam.

News Source : IT Business Edge

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This rss feed can be viewed in a browser, by visiting the web page below.

News Feed Aggregator for Email Monitoring | Email Filtering | Email Administration

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Dicontas provide unique outsourced services to allow organisations to safely and cost-efficiently outsource the heavy administration workload associated with the use of email monitoring and content filtering technology.

More info on Dicontas’s centralised email filtering administration services

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