You Know It's Getting Bad When . . .

Message technology vendors and service providers: New capabilities and features integrations in the messaging space are fine and dandy but given their druthers, users would opt for just getting rid of the plague of spam/spim and other malware. Even the Holy Grail of the "universal inbox" takes a deep back seat to once-and-for-all locking out all the junk that continuously floods our message servers.

In our most recent reader poll, 85 percent of the readers said they would take a final heave-ho to spam and spim over a unified messaging environment. Now, does that mean that the remaining 15 percent who went for the ideal feature set have found a secret solution to the junk message problem? Please share. But for now, we all know what the real messaging technology Holy Grail is.You know its getting bad when the Navy pulls a flanking maneuver on all access to commercial e-mail services. That's right, the U.S. Navy said it no longer allows its military and civilian personnel to use the services of America Online, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others because they pose a security risk to its networks. Heck, it took them a long time to figure that out.

Of course the military has it easy. If it weren't for a little matter of customer access, I'm sure most other organizations would gladly cordon off their networks from these public services, too. But then what would their user's backup e-mail be? Well let's find out. It's the subject the next online poll.