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Paul Shin Devine, the former Apple manager who is facing charges of wire fraud used his company computer to provide information about pricing, product specifications and sales forecasts for products not yet released and allegedly profited some $1 million in kickbacks. Apparently the use of so-called freemail Hotmail and Gmail accounts didn't hide from prosecutors the cached messages confirming his fraud. Even the use of the Microsoft Entourage email client for Mac provided the necessary details about payments and the confidential information he had stolen from his employer.

He was aware of the company's practices of scanning outbound message flows for information on forecasts, costs and new model information and asked one conspirator in 2008 to avoid using that email to escape IT detection.

This raises the whole question of whether an employer can also investigate an employee's use of free webmail services on the company computer. To me, webmail is web browsing so it is like perusing what the employee is browsing, and therefore the employee has no privacy. The company has an interest in what you're browsing since they can be liable for endorsing a hostile work environment if employee's are always watching porn, or highly political sites, or terrorist websites.

In fact, I would think that many productivity-minded employers are considering the blocking of access to leading time-suck websites: porn, facebook, gmail, hotmail and even mail.yahoo.

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False positive is the little-known side effect of content-based filtering. For email security professionals, it's a cost of implementing spam filtering: that some legitimate email are caught in the spam filter. For most email users, it's that surprise in one's spam folder: a legitimate email in a swirl of spam, it's the pony in the proverbial pile of s--- and it's happening more often than you'd think.

This Google Trends report shows how users are search less frequently over time for anti spam, yet the search frequency for false positive is stable. Note how in 2009 the frequencies of search cross over such that there are more searches for false positives than for anti spam.

Manish Goel, the CEO of BoxSentry, the Singapore-based email security vendor offered a briefing earlier this month and gave me his views on the question of anti spam and false positives. The company which has been reviewed on this site before, has been developing new capabilities for dealing with email integrity that are well on their way to commercialization. In addition to enterprise appliances, the company offers solutions for ISPs and cloud services for enterprises.

These two new capabilities, LogiQ and TrustCloud address related, but different issues in the email quality market. LogiQ is an appliance or hosted service to identify, report on and otherwise minimize false positives. Fundamentally, the service manages automated accept lists. The appliance or service sits parallel to the spam filter. All addresses that a user sends to are automatically added to the accept list (as they should be). All incoming messages are received at both the spam filter and the LogiQ server/service. If a message coming from an accepted sender is passed to the email server by the spam filter, no action is taken by the LogiQ. If a message coming from an unknown sender of dubious origin (no DKIM supported, or non-Sender Policy Framework-compliant) is blocked by the spam filter, no action is taken. If a message coming from an unknown sender, where the sending server satisfies configured DKIM and SPF support requirements is trapped by the spam filter, the LogiQ can if so configured, pass a copy of the message through to the enterprise mail server.

If a message coming from a known sender and that message is trapped by the spam filter (a false positive), the LogiQ can deliver a copy of the message to the enterprise email server, or it can merely record that it happened. In this way Corporate Security Officers can capture statistics from an independent source on the true rate of false-positives, and can act on the message handling to facilitate higher employee productivity, since so many workers spend so many hours searching through spam folders, oftentimes vainly.

The second offering is called TrustCloud. This subscription service does the opposite of Spamhaus and other rejected emailer services. TrustCloud has compiled a list of hundreds of thousands of trusted email domains and offers subscriptions for ISPs and enterprise email operations professionals. Modern filters offer mechanisms where an administrator can insist on including a check against the TrustCloud list. If the suspected emailer is on the TrustCloud list, it's likely to be legitimate email and so the message can be cleared for delivery. In this way TrustCloud can further reduce the incidence of false positives.

It's good to see action on overcoming the costs and annoyances of false positives. Costs in terms of lost business, declining customer satisfaction, delays in the conduct of business and unnecessary retransmissions.

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In a update briefing last week with Zafar Khan, CEO of RPost, the electronic signature and registered email company that I first blogged about in 2008 while at Lotusphere, the company described its introduction of a new product for electronic signatures.

I've been an enthusiast for digital signatures as popularized by the Public Key Infrastructure solutions from RSA or Entrust, blending strong cryptographic technologies with hash mechanisms for complete privacy, authentication, authorization, integrity and non-repudiation of communications. The pain has been the complexity, the infrastructure requirements and the discipline to use the technology regularly.

Many of these pains have been addressed by RPost. With a simple Outlook plugin button (or a simple email address extension where you send the message to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and the service performs the register value and delivers the message to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) delivers a receipt proving delivery, a document altering detection mechanism that proves content and a date-time stamping functionality for email messages called Registered Email. Registered Email allows for self-confirmation of authenticity, integrity (that no one changed the message in transit) and date-time stamps.

This service has been accepted by the US government, the insurance industry, the US courts since December 1, 2006 and many countries around the world as a definitive court-admissible mechanism for proving delivery, content and date-time of a communication. RPost has worked hard to enable the integration of their service in various high frequency business processes.

NOW, the company has expanded its offerings

Digital signatures are more than pixelation of your hand drawn signature. In fact, digital signatures are typically activated with a click of a mouse and involve a hash of the document, and public key encryption to activate software processes that are virtually impossible to replicate. The hash validates that the document being signed and the document in dispute have not changed. Digital signatures have been around for many years, but have not reached widespread usage in business or consumers due to user resistance. One of these factors of resistance is that digital signatures do not require the same or similar personalized drawing that is the written-on-paper signature we learn at an early age.

RPost's new service combines the digital advantages of the digital signature with the personalization aspects of the handwritten signatures. This way, users can assign the same emotional attachment to the process of digital signing as users assign to the process of analog signing ones name on paper.

Well, the new service, called eSignOff, lets users to send their Word, PDF, Excel or PowerPoint documents via email through the Outlook plugin or by sending the email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for eSignOff processing. It then encapsulates the document and presents it via email to the signer who can type anywhere on the document to fill in forms and use their mouse to create a mouse-drawn simulation of their written signature. PKI completes the process with a digital signature binding all the digital benefits (non-repudiation, integrity, authentication, authorization and privacy) with the mouse-drawn signature.

As shown in the graphic, this new service is optimal for high frequency, but relatively low dollar volume items such as:

• Recording sign-off of email-based purchase orders
• Routine Non-Disclosure Agreements
• Insurance claims processing
• Recording sign-off of change orders or terms and agreements
• Notice & acceptance of amendments to contracts
• Signing and counter-signing employment contracts
• Signing acceptance of corporate policies
• Sarbanes-Oxley conformance commitments
• Official vendor-supplier communications
• Shareholder voting processes

Overall, this new service will accelerate acceptance of the digital signature making its technology more transparent and therefore improving user acceptance. For business process owners, particularly in high volume low dollar value contracts, the functionality greatly reduces paperwork while improving signee confidence in their work. eSignOff is the 'missing link' to enabling the frequent use of digital signature technologies in high volume contractual commitment. Introducing it at this time in our economic recovery can further improve productivity in complex businesses like insurance and processes like purchase orders and compliance certificates and move our economy forward.

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I have written about how various folks are attempting to use Twitter for business in our January 2009 report, Twitter in Business and in general, it's not particularly successful.

I've experimented with Twitter myself in early 2008/9, but found it to be too onerous to stick with it. Ergo, my followers are only about 5 dozen friends, family and people who searched me out (scary thought). But, now I have figured out how to use Twitter in a way that integrates the service with my firm's web publishing engines - www.brockmann.com and www.mobileUC.net.

Using one of two commercial components that I have implemented on our sites, the Joomla plugin from TriniTronic called Nice Article Tweets Plugin, I have managed to send a tweet, automatically whenever I publish (or optionally update) an article on these sites. The post to Twitter incorporates the flag New-, the title of the post and a tiny url that links back to the article. Very cool.

In this way, Twitter becomes a kind of RSS stream. I'll see if my list of Twitter followers actually grows as a result, or better yet, if the typical average traffic to our site improves. Stay tuned...