Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The blog about mobile tech

Tag Archives: Email

Modern Times in Email

Virgin Media is drawing attention to an anachronism of today’s world – the restrictions in files sizes in emails.

UK ISP Virgin Media Business has revealed that 69% of office workers cannot send or receive emails larger than 10MB MegaBytes in size, which rises to 89% for messages larger than 15MB. These restrictions mean that many people are unable to share large documents, slideshows and video content by email, with big messages often bouncing back.

via ISP Virgin Media Business UK Calls for End to Email File Attachment Bottlenecks − ISPreview UK.

It is not just the file limits though that need to change, it is also the mailbox size limits that many companies are keeping at incredibly low levels of 200MB to 400MB. All this has meant is that employees offload the email to local file storage otherwise known as the black hole. All that body of information is mostly lost to a company after that, and can even be lost by the employee because this storage can be easily lost, destroyed or stolen. In parallel with increasing file sizes, companies should take a leaf out of Google’s book and give employees almost unlimited storage so that all of the email keeps within the company managed realm, and not lost on the 4GB memory stick that was a freebie from the last conference they went to. By the way, unlimited storage is currently running at between 7GB and 25GB … just a hint there. It is also important that employees are taught email/communication management techniques as well as providing archival capabilities where it is possible.

Spambayes – Spam filtering

Anti-Virus The news of the shutdown of a major spam source in the US gives you some warm feelings about the constant stream of poorly targeted rubbish in your inbox, but the rate at which you will see them will grow again soon enough. So as a small business or independent consultant/freelancer what do you do about it?

One thing you can do is use an email client with built-in Bayesian filters for spam such as Thunderbird, but what happens if you are using Microsoft Outlook or Windows Mail? Outlook has a basic tool for filtering spam but frankly it is just a simple blacklist mechanism and not worth actuating it for what it does and I recommend not activating it.

Well what you can do is use Spambayes, a slowly/quietly developing solution which is a simple Bayesian spam filter implementation primarily for Outlook, which is open source and therefore freely available. I have used this for going on four years and it is very effective even from the start without any learning. Once it has learned up on the steady stream that you highlight, it operates very well with few (if any) false positives and it comes to the point that you forget that you have it implemented for the amount of Spam that you actually see.

One thing though, periodically (about once a year), the constant anti-spam filter methods of the spammers does have an effect, so you do have to reset the rulebase but this is so easy that it is not a problem at all. Highly recommended, and you can download it here.