Sirana

Where's the pride of authorship?

By now, everyone's used to those constant phishing attacks claiming to be from PayPal. You know, the ones where they claim there's been a security incident, and you have to logon to the PayPal website to verify your credentials. I must have gotten 100 of them so far, maybe more.

Over the past several days, I've gotten some new examples that show just how sloppy these phishers have gotten. First, it was the standard PayPal account mail, but this time it came from a purported user with a Lloyds Bank email address. Then today, I get the email alerting me to a problem with my Lloyds TSB account (thanks, but don't have one). This email is from "Lester McGrath <mcGrathlb@paypal.com>".

So how stupid have these phishing attacks become? From time to time, we hear about how hard it is to tell legitimate messages from fakes. But messages like these just show how stupid some phishers really are.

SpamCenter news

Wanted to point out two things about SpamCenter that you might find interesting, and tease you about an upcoming item...

First, SpamCenter won the People's Choice award at MSD2D in the category of spam management for Exchange. This is a thrilling award, because it was voted by everyday users of the product, not editors or analysts. It points out what an impact that SpamCenter has made for regular users.  Thanks to all of you who voted.

Next, there is a new version of SpamCenter in development. This is planned to be a relatively minor upgrade, certainly not as extensive as the jump from 1.0 to 1.5.  In this release, we're switching the email handler software from one third party component to another. We've seen problems with the original vendor's email parsing capabilities, so we're adding in software from Dart. Although there are a lot of email components on the market, they all have different capabilities and interfaces, so it will take a bit of time to move from one vendor's solution to another.

Although this upgrade is relatively small, the release beyond that is already taking shape, and is planned to be a great upgrade.  Users will see incredible new capabilities in their spam management interface, allowing them to automate how they handle quarantined message.  You'll see a lot of Ajax in this release. This release will also likely be based on .Net 2.0.

Lastly, a teaser....

On August 1, Sirana will announce the most important news in the company's history since it was (initially) acquired by NetIQ and then subsequently restarted as an independent company.

Stay tuned.

Mac Followup

I said I'd followup to my last post about switching to a Mac, giving you an idea of some of the things that are not so great about that experience.

On the Mac OS side, I'm really happy.  Tiger continues to make me happy.  For example, user switching is really great. My wife has an account on the machine, and she can press a button on the top portion of the screen and switch or log on to her account. Tiger has a really nice animation that shows the switch transition.  Again, the people designing the feature really cared about what they are doing.  While she works in her session, the apps in my session continue to run, doing things like downloading email, etc.  Our Mac Mini came with 256Mb of Ram standard. We quickly upgraded to 1gb.

I Switched

Most people who know me understand I'm a pretty Microsoft-centric guy. I worked at Microsoft from '93 to '99.  I run Sirana Software, which is a Microsoft Certified Partner.  And, at last count, my family and I have 9 working Intel-based Windows XP/Windows Server machines running somewhere in the house. All of these are daily-use machines; no doorstops.

However, I just added a new machine to the lineup that's getting a lot of use: a Mac Mini.

John, meet Ari

I've been a huge fan of John Mayer for years.  He plays a great live show, his albums are not one-song wonders, and he seems like a generally nice guy. Unfortunately, his last real album came out almost two years ago, and his tour schedule looks light this summer.  What's up John?

For those in John Mayer withdrawl, check out Ari Hest.  I just bought his new album on iTunes, which is his first major label release. You can get full streams of much of his album here. Ari tours like a maniac, and I'm catching his live show at the 220 seat Triple Door here in Seattle on May 31.

JL Halsey acquisition of Lyris: Another View

Note: This post was originally created for blog.ferris.com

My esteemed colleague (and boss) David Ferris just blogged about how great the purchase of Lyris by JL Halsey was, in terms of price, fit, etc.  He went on to say that JL Halsey could easily flip Lyris to some other, presumably more stupid buyer, for $100m. But that's just wrong.

First, we don't know anything about whether this was a good deal or a bad deal in terms of price.  Lyris was purchased for $23.9m in cash, up front, so that's probably good for its shareholders. Plus, they can make another $5.6 million in two years if they hit certain sales targets. But speaking from experience, I can tell you that you can't really rely on any future expectation in deals like these. So we should just look at the deal for what it is: $24 million, plus a potential kicker.

Blogging and independence

One of the issues that organizations will have to wrestle with now and over the next several years is how to handle bloggers that may have views that differ from their employer.  For every Robert Scoble that is enabled to publish their personal views that may differ from their employer (in that case, Microsoft), there are probably 10 bloggers that publish and end up getting fired.

Many people know that I write for Ferris Research, a fine analyst firm that focuses on messaging and collaboration technologies. Recently, David Ferris posted about the acquisition of Lyris by a company called JL Halsey.

Too Long

It's been wayyyy too long since I've posted here. Lots of things have come and gone without the briefest recognition. So I'll try to briefly catch up.

• SpamCenter 1.5 shipped in April. The release had all of the features that I blogged about previously, and more.  You can read about it here and here. In conjunction with the release, I altered the pricing somewhat to reflect overall lowered market pricing for spam management products.
  
  The release seems to be getting good traction from customers.  It seems to do particularly well in the under 50 person organizations, perhaps because it's relatively easy (and inexpensive) to implement.  But we also added a 600 person company in Europe as well.

New version of SpamCenter coming

I've been working on a new version of SpamCenter, my company's end user spam management product for Exchange.  I thought I'd provide a first peek into some of the features.

• RSS feed of spam notifications - This really blew me away when I first got it working.  It's an RSS feed of the spam that just hit your quarantine. So, instead of getting a nightly email, or manually checking the web page, you can just point your RSS client at the right URL. It's really unique to see spam subject lines and SCL levels in the RSS client. 
  
  Even if you view the straight XML page of the RSS feed, I've added an XLST transformation so that everything's pretty.

Microsoft Anti-Spyware to be Free

Microsoft announced at RSA yesterday that the Anti-Spyware product they acquired from Giant Software in December would be distributed for free. They also announced that they would release a new version of Internet Explorer to be called IE 7.0.

Generally this is a Good Thing which will reduce the costs of managing the Windows platform for organizational help desks and others.  But it raises the question of just how Microsoft will productize the Sybari applications that they acquired this month.