Email is still at the core of business communications providing exchange of information and documents.  However, document sharing and collaboration has taken on its own specialized applications, servers and platforms.  The biggest concern with collaboration is security and tracking.  In a previous post I wrote about Google Wave and their push to expand collaboration beyond document sharing to live sharing of ideas, text, photos, media… a digital conversation really.  Microsoft has been in this arena for some time and has an established solution in its SharePoint brand.  SharePoint services and SharePoint Portal Server allow for extremely customizable online sharing of documents, projects, teams and more.

Exchange Server 2010 - Unified Communications, archiving, flexibility, data protection and more

Unified communications was a big buzzword several years ago; however, lately it is not thrown around in the media as much as it used to be but it is in practice at most businesses.  In fact Microsoft’s upcoming next version of it ubiquitous Exchange Server 2010 touts unified communications as one of it core features.  Unified communications allows for multiple communication channels to funnel to one platform to access, send and receive email and voicemail.

The recurring themes in this post and many of my previous posts are security and access to content.  As we’ve been hearing with cloud computing and hosted applications (Software as a Service – SaaS) security is an issue that is not fully addressed.  I recently read that even Amazon admits the platform is not compliant to store credit card numbers (EC2 and S3)…  In fact Amazon has come back to clarify their position on security in the cloud after the initial comments.  Hosted Exchange mail with Outlook Anywhere was the first widely accepted hosted solution.  It offers some good features for different businesses: remote access, web interface, mobile device integration, and more.  But there are some industries that cannot  (due to laws, regulation, compliance policies) move their entire organization’s mail to a hosted mail server.  So security will continue to be an issue that will garner much attention from the developers, CIOs & other executives, the media and the tech community.

Accessibility to data and ease of that access is the other theme that seems to play out in many solutions to business need and vision.  Users want to access their documents from the mobile device, whether it is a BlackBerry, iPhone, Palm Pre, etc…  They want to document and data to look and function the same on that mobile device (which is really a very powerful mini computer) as it does on their laptop and their desktop.  Something we’ve overcome for business recently was offering not just the ability to view data on mobile devices, but actually manipulate data, run applications and utilize the full functionality of the application from the mobile device.

I’ll trail off on that note for now.  There is so much common ground on the vision and implementation of technology driving business today.  Business evolves, and the businesses that adopt the right technology will reap its rewards…  waxing philosophic about technology, although, I am an engineer

Today I’ve seen some NDR (non delivery report) email messages bounced back to mail servers from earthlink.net:  #5.5.0 smtp;550 550 Dynamic/zombied/spam IPs blocked. Write blockedbyearthlink@abuse.earthlink.net>.  So at first I didn’t think much of it assuming it was a false positive and I would get with earthlink and have them review the server and they would see it is not an open relay, not sending out spam, not a dynamic ip address, etc… but when I send a message to earthlink form another mail server domain I got another ndr bounce message: #5.5.0 smtp;550 Unknown local part openrelay in <openrelay@abuse.earthlink.net>>

Spmahaus - one of the respected spam blocklists to reduce spam from dynamic ip addresses, known spammers, open relays and other offending mail servers.

Now this is when I have to think there is something strange going on because no changes have been made to these mail servers recently and have always been secured from the beginning.  I’ve had complete control over one Exchange mail server from setup and have been administering another of the Exchange mail servers for several years.  So to be sure I checked the cbl and spamhaus blocklists,the mail servers are not listed, I checked the spam database on dnstools and they are also not listed.  I checked to verify they are not seen as an open relay and they are not.  I checked the Exchange mail server settings in ESM.  Nothing has changed.

So, my question is what happens if the spam blocklists get it wrong (the large email providers)?  I’ve had some experience with sites being listed for a day or so due to some change by the blocklists, but were ultimately removed because the mail servers were in fact secure. The real issue in this case though, is that even when I send to request reconsideration for one mail server to be removed I get blocked even when sending from another mail server.  I even tried sending to openrelay@abuse.earthlink.net from my yahoo account and received an NDR from there as well.

So it seems earthlink.net is having some mail server issues at present.

As usual I thought it best to take a proactive approach to resolve this issue and visited the earthlink website to see if I can submit directly from their site or find out more information about their abuse and open relay block lists.  I do not see any message on their site about known issues under the mail server services support area, but I’m sure there are mail administrators and network admins working hard to resolve the issue.

I just received an email purporting to be from Wells Fargo, security@wellsfargo.com with the subject: Your account has been locked!
It has a link in the mail message to go to: http://www.wellsfargo/signon/reactivate?UNLOCK_CODE=M638G628A794C849?????3 but if you hover your mouse over the link in the email message it actually goes to a website in the Ukraine.  Not likely Wells Fargo opened up headquarters in eastern Europe near Chernobyl..

As I stated above, we all know we should not open these emails and certainly not open any links in them. But people still do it, even those that should know better.

I heard a similar story on the radio today that within hours of news of Michael Jackson’s death, millions of spam email messages were spewing from mail servers to unsuspecting victims to entice them to go to a website that downloads malicious software (malware) such as trojans, worms, bots, viruses, etc…

So this is just another friendly reminder to truly think about any strange or suspicious emails before your emotions take over and you open the email or worse yet go to a site to resolve your account issues, claim your millions or talk to that random girl/guy who just sent you a message.

A copy of the spam email is provided below:
Dear Wells Fargo client
Your account has been locked and placed on hold due to too many attempts to sign in to your account with an incorrect password.
In order to unlock your account please click the link below and log in with the correct password :

http://www.wellsfargo/signon/reactivate?UNLOCK_CODE=?????etc

If you choose not to complete the request, you give us no choice but to suspend your account permanently.
If you received this notice and you are not the authorized account holder, please be aware that it is in violation of Wells Fargo policy to represent oneself as an other Wells Fargo user. Such action may also be in violation of local, national, and/or international law. Wells Fargo is committed to assist law enforcement with any inquires related attempts to misappropriate personal information with the intent to commit fraud or theft. Information will be provided at the request or law enforcement agencies to ensure that perpetrators are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Wells Fargo Account Review Department.

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Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response.

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