Spam is 95% of All Email
The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has released its new spam report that indicates about 95% of emails are spam. The survey found that 95% of all email is spam. 70% of the respondents consider spam extremely significant or significant for their security operations.
Company Wants to End Email Senders Remorse
Reuters says a technology company called Bigstring.com wants to put an end to "senders remorse" with erasable, recallable and password protected email.
Yahoo Working on Anti-Spam Technology
The BBC reports that Yahoo is working on a new email technology to battle spoofed email message called DomainKeys. The technology could help fight email fraud tactics where fraudsters send email that pretends to be official email from an online bank or auction website. eBay's auction website and payment system PayPal have been plagued by these phising tactics.
The firms are supporting the emerging standard known as domain keys, which block fake e-mails by validating the sender with a digital signature.
Spammers hide their identity by using a false, or spoofed, address in the millions of messages they send out.
The technology, called the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), will be available to millions of Yahoo Mail users worldwide in the coming weeks.
It is a big step forward for consumers in defence against the bad guys," John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, told Reuters news agency.
DomainKeys relies on the use of encrypted digital signatures to prove that an email come from the domain it claims to come from. Both the sender and the recipient need the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) specification for the technology to work effectively. A faq on Yahoo's DomainKeys website explains how this technology could help stop spam.
Several ways. First, it can allow receiving companies to drop or quarantine unsigned email that comes from domains that are known to always sign their emails with DomainKeys, thus impacting spam and phishing attacks. Second, the ability to verify sender domain will allow email service providers to begin to build reputation databases that can be shared with the community and also applied to spam policy. For example, one ISP could share their "spam vs. legit email ratio" for the domain www.example.com with other ISPs that may not yet have built up information about the credibility and "spamminess" of email coming from www.example.com. Last, by eliminating forged From: addresses, we can bring server-level traceability back to email (not user-level - we believe that should be a policy of the provider and the choice of the user). Spammers don't want to be traced, so they will be forced to only spam companies that aren't using verification solutions.
The BBC article says Yahoo developed the technology and they are backed by AOL, Google, IBM, Sendmail and Verisign. More information about DKIY can be found here. The BBC also says there is another email technology called Sender Policy Network (SPF) that is backed by Microsoft, Amazon and eBay.
Ads Now On AOL Email
Now that AOL has become free for broadband users they are running ads on emails sent from AOL.com addresses. Here is a sample of the ads.
Check out free AOL. Most comprehensive set of free safety and security
tools, millions of free high-quality videos from across the web, free AOL
Mail and much more.
**************************************
Check out free AOL at
http://free.aol.com/thenewaol/index.adp. Most comprehensive
set of free safety and security tools, millions of free high-quality videos
from across the web, free AOL Mail and much more.
It will be interesting to see how customers react. The ad could probably be much shorter and less intrusive. The URL in the ad just advertisers the new AOL service that works with your broadband access.
Google Opens Gmail. Invitations No Longer Needed
News.com reports that Google's email service called Gmail is now open to everyone -- an invitation is no longer needed. A BBC news story has a couple interesting facts. They say Gmail is Google Mail in some countries including the UK. They also note that the opening of Gmail to everyone should stop people from selling Gmail accounts -- which apparently has been happening somewhere.
Known as Gmail in most countries, it had to change its name to Google Mail in the UK and Germany due to trademark disputes.
A by-product of moving from the invitation only system should bring to an end a current spate of people making money by selling Gmail addresses.
Gmail was already freely available in US and a few other countries.
Google Operating System says Google's definition of the world is limited.
Although Google posted in Gmail's help that "anyone in the world is now welcome to create a Gmail account at mail.google.com/mail/signup", Google's definition of the world was pretty limited.
Gmail is now a public beta in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Brazil, Australia, Russia and Japan, according to BBC. If you live in one of those places, you can go to Gmail.com, and look for "Sign up for Gmail" or you can visit this page to create an account.
So, Gmail (or Google Mail) is now a public beta in many countries but not all.
New Spam Trick: Pretend to be an Email Newsletter
The Associated Press reports that spammers are disguising their annoying spam messages as legitimate email newsletters.
Those ubiquitous Viagra ads have been disguising themselves as e-mail newsletters, the kind you get to find out the latest airline deals or keep up with your fantasy football team.
Spammers haven't actually broken into legitimate marketers' computer systems to send out the messages. Rather, like the phishing scams that lift the code off the real Web sites of financial institutions, spammers have tweaked legitimate e-mail and sent them through normal spam channels.
The technique appears aimed at bypassing human and software controls. Recipients might not immediately realize they are opening spam, and anti-spam filters might not be able to aggressively block them for fear of blocking legitimate newsletters as well, anti-spam experts say.
These messages started appearing a month ago, and so far, they have been relatively small in numbers, said Doug Bowers, senior director of anti-abuse engineering at Symantec Corp., a vendor of anti-spam products. He suspects spammers are fine-tuning their techniques to see what works.
There is no end to the tricks spammers will take. This is sure to irritate readers of newsletters and create confusion as some newsletter subscribers may may a the false assumption that the publisher sent the spam. Spam has not been kind to email newsletter publishers and this just more bad news as spam continues to ruin email for legitimate publishers.
Google Terminates Buggy Gmail Feature
Several blogs (see here, here, here, here, here, here and here) have been discusses a Gmail bug that exposes your Gmail contacts. Engadget summarizes the Gmail security problem.
As reported on Digg, the exploit takes advantage of the fact that Google puts your details into a JS file. As a result, if you're logged into Gmail and browsing the web, any rogue website can declare the function "google" and then parse all your contacts. The only way to safeguard yourself is to disable Javascript in your browser (or enabled it for trusted sites only) or simply climb into a hole and not browse while logged into Google services like Gmail, Blogger, Orkut, Reader, Calendar, etc. -- you know, the sites you typically have open all day long. For obvious reasons, we will not link directly to the site which demonstrates the exploit on your personal account due to the risk of running possibly malicious code. However, we tested it and found our most precious account -- and those of our contacts -- correctly identified and ready for harvest. But hey, even though Gmail has been out since 2004, it is still "beta"... right?
Fortunately, the security problem has now been plugged by Google.
The Value of TinyURL
David Berlind at ZDNet may have completely lost his mind. Berlind says that the TinyURL site, a website that makes long URLs shorter so they can be posted in emails and newsletters, is "is the next YouTube." He goes on to say that is even better than YouTube and says TinyURL is very important to Madison avenue types.
Well, Madison Avenue thinks something can be said about a person who visits a Web page. If that's the case, then, much like the difference between magazine subscribers and newsstand buyers, imagine what you can say about someone that goes to the trouble of turning a URL into a tiny URL. To that user, that must be one friggin' important URL. That's all I can say. It's not a major effort to use TinyURL.com. But compared to clicking on a link? It's monumental and I think it says something about intention.
The lightbulb in my head went off when I realized that multiple submissions of the same URL to TinyURL generate the same exact TinyURL. In other words, if you and me both enter the exact same long stretched out URL from some car manufacturer's Web site into TinyURL.com, we'll both get the same exact tiny URL back. So, let's triangulate the data. TinyURL.com knows the exact Web addresses people are turning into TinyURLs. And, TinyURL can easily figure out how many people are accessing each URL. And, with the help of a college intern, TinyURL.com can establish a industry category (eg: automobiles) for almost every URL that it shrinks.
David Berline has made a good point that TinyURLs database of URL usage is valuable. However, a lot of people never use TinyURL and some websites may be in there more frequently just because they have more annoyingly long URLs than other sites. TinyURL is worth something but it isn't anywhere near as valuable as YouTube. TinyURL also has some competition including Shorturl.com, Snipurl.com, Metamark and lnk.in. But none of these sites have the brand power of TinyURL. TinyURL is a terrific service and likely contains a goldmine of data about what URLs users are shrinking but it isn't worth hundreds of millions or anything like that. The technology is very easy to duplicate so TinyURL's value would only be its database and its traffic.
Zimbra Has 4 Million Paid Accounts
TechCrunch profiles a company called Zimbra that has found success offering online mailboxes and collaboration software. Zimbra has 4 million accounts according to TechCrunch.
Founded in 2003 in San Mateo, California the company today announced that it has passed four million paid hosted and on-site mailboxes. That's a small but growing and very significant number compared to the 150 million plus seats sold by Microsoft Exchange. Assuming a basic price of $25 per seat per year (more for professional edition, less for standard edition in bulk) then 4 million paid users means Zimbra is probably doing at least $100 million in annual revenue. All of that is presuming these numbers are accurate, of course. That's pretty good for something that only a few years ago would have been unimaginable - an open source, Ajax rich, webmail, mobile and online collaboration suite. Zimbra took $16 million in funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Capital.
We’ve profiled the moves toward a web based office by Google, Zoho, Microsoft and countless small startups. Zimbra includes a long list of features that other companies are just beginning to offer. Microsoft says that Exchange Server 2007 is due out at the end of this year or early next year; if it does in fact become available as a final release in that time frame it will be interesting to see if it can do what Zimbra can do.
Zimbra is much more than an email tool. It also offers features like document sharing. Zimbra's features include shared calendars, web document sharing, syncing with mobile devices, VoIP integrationa nd compatibility with office tools like Microsoft Outlook and Linux. Zimbra is also actually making revenues from paid subscribers which is unusual in today's Web 2.0 landscape.
Study Finds Google Mail Improving at Spam Recognition
The New York Timesreports that a study from Lyris has found that Google's Gmail service is getting much better at recognizing spam. Google improved 15% from Q1 2006 to Q2 2006.
In its latest quarterly test, Lyris tracked more than 57,000 e-mail messages, sent from 57 different businesses and nonprofit organizations to scores of e-mail addresses it owns in many different domains. The messages included marketing pitches for electronics and perfume, and noncommercial matter like a wine newsletter. None of the senders were Lyris clients; all the recipients had signed up to receive the messages.
In the most recent test, 3.3 percent of those e-mail messages were treated as spam by American Internet providers — something that marketers call a false positive.
Since the distinction between spam and legitimate e-mail is not always readily apparent, most providers have had to learn which marketers are legitimate. False positives result when they get it wrong. Individual marketers also get more false positives when they send badly aimed pitches, leading recipients to tag their messages as spam.
Spam recognition by email software programs must continue to improve. False positives with mail from marketers may be dissapointing to retailers but false positives involving personal mail are unacceptable. A 3.3% false positive rate is still troubling.
Free AOL Gaining Customers
Reuters reports that Time Warner claims its AOL service is gaining customers, including new customers, following the offering of free services to broadband customers.
Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner's chief operating officer, told investors at a Goldman Sachs media conference that its strategy had attracted new users beyond those who were once paying customers of the online service.
Some 40 percent of new users were not former subscribers, Bewkes said. "That means there is demand for AOL beyond the existing base," he said.
In addition, subscribers who formerly paid for AOL services were moving to its free services at a quicker rate than originally predicted by AOL management, Bewkes said.
Bewkes said advertising sales at AOL were "very robust," without elaborating.
Advertising growth would be unlikely to offset a drop in subscription revenue for another year or two but is a more profitable source of revenue, he said.
AOL's strategy may succeed but they will need to make their email software easier to use online. The current web-based email technology from AOL makes it too difficult to display a current list of all of one's email messages. AOL needs to focus on improving their web-based features to compete with Yahoo Mail and Gmail.
Spam Now 95% of Email
Spam now makes up 95%+ of all emails. The BBC reports that most of this spam comes from zombie computers -- computers taken over by spammers using bots and worms.
Analysis of the contents of millions of e-mails has revealed that less than 4% is legitimate traffic.
Further work has shown that most of this junk mail is originating on hijacked home computers.
E-mail security firm Return Path said 99% of the computers it monitors that send mail have been taken over by spammers or virus writers.
Return Path reached its estimate by calculating a "reputation score" for the 20 million net addresses of those machines.
Some of the spam is very strange and seemingly pointless like hobbit spam, which uses random bits of prose from Tolkein emails.
How Bill Gates Works
CNN has an article by Bill Gates about how he works and what kinds of hardware and software he uses. In this excerpt, Gates explains why three screens are better than one.
If you look at this office, there isn't much paper in it. On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you'll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.
The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I'm reading and responding to. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I'm working on something, and to bring up a link that's related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.
Ok, we're sold on the three screens. That sounds very handy. Here is a list of the tech gadgets and software Gates uses.
Hardware:
Dell Desktop and Motion PC running Windows XP
3 NEC 21-inch monitors
Microsoft wireless mouse
Logitech camera for videoconferencing
Software:
Outlook
Sharepoint
OneNote
Communicator
There are a fair amount of Microsoft products on the list as one would expect.
Email Filters and Fee-based Email
Wired has an interesting article about the rise of filters and how many ISP filters end up removing too much legitimate mail. They also discuss AOL's unpopular plan to charge email senders for a guaranteed delivery.
"If AOL or another ISP decides that someone's a spammer, then no e-mail from that individual gets through," said EFF attorney Cindy Cohn, whose group opposes the AOL plan. "But there's a fundamental difficulty at the heart of the spam debate: The only one who knows what you want delivered in your inbox is you."
For years, e-mail users complained that torrents of unwanted messages clogged their inboxes and crimped their productivity. Now, e-mail users, marketers and mailing list operators are more worried that spam filters are blocking out too many wanted messages.
AOL isn't the only company to face charges that it improperly blocks legitimate messages. But, as the world's largest ISP for years, it has long borne the brunt of complaints from mass e-mailers over the problem.
Those concerns are seeping into the debate over a planned AOL program, set to go live in the next month, in which approved e-mail senders pay to guarantee delivery of their messages.
The answer should be to develop better and better filters and not to start charging people to send email. The people who use AOL (or any other ISP that starts a fee-based mail service) want the legitimate mail people are trying to send them -- including legitimate emails that weren't paid for. AOL should be careful because users may depart AOL if people start realizing they are not receiving all the emails they should be receiving because of an overactive filter.
Tone of Email Messages Often Misunderstood
Wired reports on a new study has found that people only correctly ascertain the tone of an email message 50% of the time.
According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.
"That's how flame wars get started," says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. "People in our study were convinced they've accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance," says Epley.
The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers.
Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time.
If you are making a sarcastic comment or a joke it is crucial to include a smiley :-) or another emoticon if you think there is a chance your comments will be misunderstood.
Free as an Internet Business Model
A Financial Timesarticle offers an interest look at the buzz surrounding business models that offer a "free" product. Nowhere is this model more obvious then the Internet where free email, IMs and blogging tools are plentiful.
Google charges users nothing to search the internet; neither does Yahoo nor Microsoft MSN. E-mail? Instant messaging? Blogging? Free. Skype, the Luxembourg-based company that is now a multibillion-dollar division of Ebay, offers free VOIP - Voice Over Internet Protocols - telephone calls worldwide. San Francisco-based Craigslist provides free online classified advertising around the world.
In America, the Progressive insurance group gives comparison-minded shoppers free vehicle insurance quotes from its competitors. Innumerable financial service companies offer clients free tax advice, online bill payments and investment research. Michael O'Leary, Ryanair's colourful founder, predicts his discount carrier may soon offer free tickets to his cost-conscious euro-flyers.
Of course, Milton Friedman, the Nobel economist, is right: just as "there's no such thing as a free lunch", there is also no such thing as a "free innovation". These "free" offerings are all creatures of creative subsidy. Free search engines have keyword-driven advertisers. Financial companies use cash flow from profitable core businesses to cost-effectively support alluringly "free" money management services. Ryanair counts on the lucrative introduction of in-flight gambling to make its "free tickets" scenario a commercial reality. Innovative companies increasingly recognise that innovative subsidy transforms the pace at which markets embrace innovation. "Free" inherently reduces customer risk in exploring the new or improved -- and bestows competitive advantage. To the extent that business models can be defined as the artful mix of "what companies profitably charge for" versus "what they give away free", successful innovators are branding and bundling ever-cleverer subsidies into their market offerings. The right "free" fuels growth and profit. Technology has successfully upgraded King Gillette's classic "razor & blades" business model.
We did see all this before with free homepage services like Geocities and Tripod and eventually the interest in communities died down. Now the free publishing software is back in the form of free blogs, newsletters and video publishing tools. However, this time the advertising technology and advertiser interest surrounding the Internet is a little stronger and that is keeping these new publishing tools alive and thriving.
AOL to Offer Free Content
BusinessWeek.com reports that AOL is removing the "walled garden"
approach to its huge collection of Time Warner content. Until now
Time Warner has been reluctant to give away much content for free
and only AOL subscribers were able to access some content from Time
Warner's magazines. The BusinessWeek.com article says that's all about to change:
Time Warner (TWX ) has decided that it's go-for-broke time at AOL,
as the beleaguered online division launches a last-ditch gamble for
survival. To generate growth even as its Internet service loses
subscribers, the online company is launching one of the most radical
strategic shifts in years -- throwing open its content for free in a
bid to cash in on a gusher of online-ad revenues.
According to the BusinessWeek article the aol.com relaunch will occur in July.
The refurbished aol.com is taking a different approach than the other
big portals, such as Yahoo! (YHOO ) and Microsoft's (MSFT ) MSN, which
hit their stride before broadband usage took off. AOL's site, to
launch in July, will put streaming video and audio content front and
center -- including exclusive live concerts, celebrity interviews,
and film shorts.
AOL's strategy should help drive more traffic to the aol.com
website. Bloggers frequently link to free content. Some
newspapers like the New York Times even set up
specific links so bloggers can link to them. However, AOL
will have to hope its email, communication and security features
keep AOL subscribers from leaving for free web services and content.
What Happens to Your Email When You're Dead?
After you are dead and gone from this world what happens to
your email, your blogs, your social networking accounts?
If it is hosted on a free account it might just sit there for a
very long time before eventually being removed by the host. Does
anyone else have the password besides you? Will your email provider
turn your emails over to a relative? Is that what you would
want to happen? The answer is somewhat unclear. The Mercury News
has an article on the topic that answers a few questions.
AOL has assigned a full-time person to help with these kinds of
questions:
America Online, with 28 million members, has assigned a full-time
employee to handle next-of-kin requests. Before releasing account
information, the company requires a copy of the death certificate
and documentation proving the person requesting the e-mail information
is the legal beneficiary or the estate representative, said America
Online spokesman Nicholas Graham.
MSN's Hotmail will provide a disk with data after it verifies the relatives
are related to the deceased.
MSN Hotmail will provide account contents on CDs or floppy disks to
relatives of deceased members after it verifies the legitimacy of the
request, said Brooke Richardson, MSN lead product manager, in a statement.
``We have tried to institute a policy that is very focused on
privacy, but at the same time honors the requests of bereaved
family members.''
And MercuryNews.com said Yahoo would not comment on its policy.
However, in another situation Yahoo terminates email accounts
if a user dies and won't turn over the emails without a court order.
After Lance Cpl. Justin Ellsworth of Michigan was killed Nov. 13 while
inspecting a bomb in Iraq, his father, John Ellsworth, wanted access to
his son's Yahoo email account. But Yahoo, whose policy is to terminate
email accounts upon a user's death, would not give him the material
until a probate judge ordered the Sunnyvale company to do so.
Danny O'Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco
non-profit that often gets involved in digital-privacy issues, said
it's difficult to find the right balance between personal privacy and
a family's desire to get all of a loved one's possessions.
``We are sympathetic to the pain families go through,'' he said. ``On
the other hand, there are a lot of things people want to keep private
from their close relatives. You need to have some way to do that.''
AOL to Offer Free Email
Reuters reports that AOL will be offering free email accounts to users of the web-based AOL Instant Messenger service. While free email from AOL will probably be popular the risk is that they could lose subscribers to the free accounts. Many AOL subscribers hold on their paid accounts just for the AOL email. However, AOL said it will not giveaway AOL.com email accounts as part of the free service. Also, the terms of service on the free accounts might not be as customer friendly as with the paid service. The Washington Post reports on the risk associated with AOL's free email plan:
Analysts said the risk is that AOL may accelerate the steady decline in its subscriber base by causing more people to stop paying for content and services since they will be able to get them for free. "Maybe this will cause the access business to wind down faster before the advertising business picks up," warned David Card, an analyst with Jupiter Research.
The Pope Has an Email Account
Pope Benedict XVI now has an email account. Top Tech News reports that last Thursday the Pope was given the new address and the website was updated so people could compose and submit emails. The Vatican will certainly want anti-spam software and lots of disk space to handle the large volumes of incoming email. Top Tech News reports:
On Thursday, the Vatican modified its Web site so users who click on a "Greetings to the Holy Father" icon on the home page automatically activate an e-mail composer with his address in the send field.
The address for messages in English is benedictxvi@vatican.va. There are also addresses for e-mails in Italian, Spanish, French, German and Portuguese. Benedict's e-mail isn't the only address generating interest in an online world.
President Will Not Email
U.S. President George W. Bush admits that he will not send email because of privacy concerns. The Register reports that, "US prez George Bush has admitted he does not send personal emails to daughters Jenna and Barbara for fear that his 'personal stuff' might end up in the public domain. Bush made the admission on Thursday to the American Society of Newspaper Editors during a discussion centring on whether the US government is sufficiently forthcoming to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act, Reuters reports." Some may find President Bush's statement ironic due the diminished privacy everyone faces these days because of the Patriot Act passed after 9/11. However, the President is right to be concerned about electronic delivered mail. It is probably not a bad move for anyone deeply concerned about privacy to avoid using email or at least send only encrypted email messages.
AOL to Offer Free Email
Newsfactor reports AOL plans to enter the free email arena and compete with
Yahoo, Hotmail and Google which offer different free and fee-based email services. Hotmail and Yahoo were forced to increase the amount of free space they offer to customers when Google launched Gmail, a free web-based email service with a 1 gigabyte of free space. The downside for AOL could be that they lose AOL subscribers
who only stuck around to keep AOL's popular email tools. AOL has been
slowly losing subscribers to broadband providers and cheap dial-up
competitors over the past couple years.
Firms Monitor Outgoing Email
As reported on Security Pipeline, a study from security software provider Proofpointfirms found that 43% of companies are reading more outbound email than ever. The study also found that firms have employees that monitor these emails and over 20% of firms also monitor outgoing instant messages. While some of this activity is dedicated to scanning outgoing email for viruses, it does raise privacy concern for employees. However, many companies have been monitoring employee phone calls for some time now.
Google Attracts Surfers to Gmail and Orkut
In a recent article, The Media Cynic discusses the clever moves by Google to get their new products noticed. The new products include Orkut, a social networking website, and Gmail, a free online email service offering 1 gigabyte of email storage. Google has driven demand for these new services by slowly giving out accounts and making the rest of the web population have to be invited to join. As the Media Cynic reports, "People are frantically searching for invites to open a Gmail account."
80% of All U.S. Email is Spam
MessageLabs Inc., an email monitoring firm, has found that 2/3 of all email worldwide is spam and 80% of all email in the United States is spam. Brian Czarny, vice president of marketing at Message Labs, said that within one year spam could be over 95% of all email messages.
MiMail Virus Poses as PayPal Email
The latest version of the MiMail worm (W32.Mimail.H@mm) tries to steal credit card information by pretending that it is an official PayPal email. The email tries to con readers into completing a fake PayPal form (containing an actual PayPal logo) that then sends their credit card information to the people or organization behind the virus. Experts say the worm is another sign that viruses are becoming a tool of organized crime and much much more than a simple nuisance.
Email Problems Major Stressor for IT Managers
A recent BBC article cited a survey which found that 1/3 of information technology managers find a week's worth of email problems more stressful than getting married, getting divorced or moving. 1/5 thought they could be fired if the email was down for a day or longer.
Source: BBC, WWForums.com Discussion