In your average office building, there are few incidents as fascinating and laden with Schadenfreude as when someone accidentally sends an email crammed with lurid personal revalations to the entire contents of their address book, and then attempts to make use of Outlook's "Recall Email" feature in a desperate attempt at damage limitation. While the unfortunate sender is desperate to put the genie back in the bottle, a good 1/3 of the recepients will have already opened it, read it, saved it, forwarded it or printed it off, while anyone outside the building who isn't hooked up to the same Microsoft Exchange server will be able to read and re-read it at their leisure, without fear of it being clawed back out of their inbox. "Recall Email" is undoubtedly a nice idea but, as someone on Wikipedia points out, it doesn't actually work very well in practice...( Read more... )

Google have launched a couple of features this week, with the aim of placing the Golden Amulet of Power into the hands of its Loyal Brethren. (Sorry, I've been back playing World of Warcraft again. Must stop. Must.) Basically, they're offering us customisation options. The first of those is a selection of skins, or themes, that'll make your GMail interface look vastly more unattractive than it used to. As I said in Wednesday's column, if you'll permit me the conceit of quoting myself: "The aesthetic quality of any website has an inverse correlation with the amount of freedom we're given to mess around with it."

( Read more... )

You might wonder why your email is clogged up with hundreds of messages informing you that your sexual potency is to be found wanting. Well, the answer has emerged from a study at the University of California: it's because spammers need to send approximately 12,500,000 messages in order to get one positive response from a recipient.

I'm not sure about the ethics of their study, seeing as the researchers actually conducted their own fake spam campaign in order to assemble the results – but after they'd sent some 350 million email messages to gullible punters such as ourselves over a period of 26 days, they secured just 28 orders. Now you might think this a fantastic ratio, a testament to the power of spam filtering and the public's ability to identify a spam message and make the correct decision not to respond to it. But the Storm network – the colossal botnet responsible for a significant proportion of the world's spam – is still estimated to bring in some £4,430 every day, despite the miserable conversion rate. Which, by my rough estimates, means a billion spam messages sent every day by that one network alone. Terrifying.

Confused about technology? Submit your queries to Cyberclinic using the comment form below or email questions here.