bruceb news

If you’ve been following along, you know that you can get a free Hotmail address and use the very attractive new Windows Live Hotmail online service to read your mail.

Microsoft has now released the free “Outlook Connector” that allows you to use Microsoft Outlook 2003 or 2007 on your home or office computer, and always be in sync with the online webmail. E-mail and contacts are synced immediately and continuously.

• I’ve been talking about this for a while – here and here.
• Microsoft’s team developing Windows Live Hotmail made this announcement.
• Microsoft set up this page with more information.

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Windows Live Mail has been released in nearly final form for Windows XP and Vista. It’s an important step forward but only if you’re able to keep Microsoft’s e-mail programs straight.

These programs run on your computer:

• Microsoft Outlook – full-featured mail/calendar/address book program sold as part of Microsoft Office
• Outlook Express – streamlined mail program included with Windows XP
• Windows Mail - updated version of Outlook Express included with Windows Vista
• Windows Live Mail – the brand new mail software for Windows XP & Vista; when installed, it replaces Outlook Express and Windows Mail

These e-mail services run online in Internet Explorer:

• Hotmail – Microsoft’s longtime free webmail client
• Windows Live Hotmail – the new name for Hotmail, now with an optional new interface that closely resembles the various desktop programs

Windows Live Mail was released a few days ago. […] continued

Windows Live Hotmail got its official launch yesterday, and the announcement included a compelling detail: Microsoft will make a free connector available to sync Windows Live Hotmail with Outlook. This may affect you more than you expect.

A month ago I wrote up some notes about the improvements in the new generation of web mail clients – Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Yesterday’s announcement adds an important piece that wasn’t clear before. Let me try and explain why this is exciting news for individuals and small businesses without a server.

• Many of us prefer using Outlook for its rich integration with other programs on our computers, for the well-designed e-mail interface, the junk mail filter, and the full-featured calendar and address book.

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The Wall Street Journal has a front-page story today following the path of an e-mail message by a 22-year old Kaiser employee criticizing the technology being rolled out by Kaiser for patient records. The article isn’t so much about the pros or cons of Kaiser’s Health Connect system. Instead, it’s a sobering reminder to reflect before pushing the Send button, because information can spread further than you might guess.

The Kaiser employee had reviewed publicly available information about the Health Connect technology and accumulated a large list of internal e-mail addresses to receive his message. He wrote 2,000 words about why he thought the project was wasteful and reflected poorly on Kaiser leadership, and sent it out on a Friday afternoon. […] continued

Here’s two good tips to configure the junk mail filtering in Outlook 2003 and 2007. There’s an easily overlooked checkbox that will automatically add everyone you e-mail to your “Safe Senders” list. There’s also a list of countries whose mail can be turned off – most of us can turn off mail from all countries except the US. (The column suggests leaving Canada turned on also. That’s fair. I like Canada.)

Follow the link for complete instructions and screen shots.

There’s a massive spam blast in progress. ComputerWorld reports that the spam outbreak is setting records, 50 to 60 times the normal volume of spam, with subjects like Worm Alert!, Worm Detected, Spyware Detected!, and Virus Activity Detected!, and carrying ZIP file attachments containing the “Storm Trojan” virus.

“Postini has already counted nearly 5 million copies of the spam in the last 24 hours, and calculated that the run currently accounts for 87% of all malware being spread through e-mail. Spam rates have jumped as well; Postini said 79% of all e-mail is now spam, while rival MessageLabs Ltd. reported a 13% jump in spam’s slice of all messages in just one hour.

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Many of us cannot imagine life without Outlook. In addition to e-mail, it handles our calendar and address book and to-do list; it fills our handheld devices and addresses envelopes in Word. But it typically lives on a single computer and is not readily accessible anywhere else.

Small Business Server users have it easy: they can use Outlook Web Access, a reasonably good imitation of their Outlook folders presented in Internet Explorer; and Outlook can be set up on a notebook or home computer with a live connection over the Internet to Small Business Server at the office, allowing Outlook to be used from anywhere. […] continued

Two clients reported problems printing e-mail messages from Outlook 2003 – the message headers weren’t printing, the part that shows Date:, To:, From: and Subject. In each case, it was erratic – some messages would print correctly, others would be missing the header info.

Apparently there’s a bug in the way Outlook 2003 interacts with Internet Explorer 7 – something to do with the IE7 feature that shrinks pages so they print properly. (Have you noticed that the right side of the page isn’t cut off any more on your printouts from web pages?)

Microsoft has issued a hotfix – the information about it is here. […] continued

Yet another tale of woe.

1and1.com is one of the largest web hosting companies in the world. They established themselves in Europe before making a big splashy entrance in the US a couple of years ago, with huge advertising sections on thick glossy paper in dozens of magazines. They offer rock bottom prices, a wide range of services, and well-designed online control panels.

I started using them and recommending them for domain name registration ($5.99/year), web hosting, and hosted Exchange mailboxes. A year ago I had a couple of reasonably good experiences with customer support.

A client called up a few months ago and complained that he had a terrible experience with an aggressively incompetent tech support person in India. […] continued

Changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have imposed new requirements for retention and production of electronic records in federal court litigation, especially e-mail. Here’s my notes when the changes first came to my attention.

A quick reading of some of the articles about the new FRCP revisions gives the impression that businesses should drastically change their practices to ensure long-term retention of e-mail and backup tapes, but that’s not quite correct. Here’s some quick thoughts on a more nuanced reading of the new rules:

“As long as in the normal course of your business you routinely make backups over the top of the same data, routinely delete emails, routinely… etc etc…..

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