I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Anyone with a slight understanding of how email works would have to laugh over the the Don Brash email affair. The media makes you feel that to get email you need to sneak into Don’s personal machine.
It’s far more white collar than that. Emails are stored on email servers and therefore can be easily obtained without touching Don’s PC.
More interesting however is that Parliamentary Services shows no sign of wanting to plug the gaps.
This Parliamentary Question was asked the last time leaked emails hit the news …
5728 (2006). Craig Foss to the Minister of State Services (18 May 2006): Which departments have email archiving and/or tracking software programmes and systems; what is the name of the software and when was it installed?
Hon Annette King (Minister of State Services) replied: Hon Parekura Horomia (Acting Minister of State Services) replies: All government departments operate email archiving and tracking systems. These vary across agencies. The State Services Commission does not hold information as to the names of all of the various packages that departments are using to perform this function. To undertake this function for its own operations, the State Services Commission has installed Aftermail, sourced from Quest Software. The decision to purchase was made in December 2004. It was installed and became functional from March 2005.
Well that’s clearly not true. A minority of Government Departments run email archiving software that allows instant searching over data. But good on you SSC for supporting us.
Caught out ….
7063 (2006). Craig Foss to the Speaker of the House of Representatives (16 Jun 2006): How quickly can Parliamentary Service check all emails for a leak, and is there a full text index over all emails and attachments?
Hon Margaret Wilson (Speaker of the House of Representatives) replied: HON MARGARET WILSON (Speaker) replied: The Parliamentary Service cannot easily, or necessarily, check all e-mails for a leak. The time to check emails that can be checked varies, and depends on the existence and ease of recovery of an identifiable log record; and the existence and ease of recovery of a recoverable copy of an email. The time to do this can vary widely. At present there is no full text index of all emails and attachments sent from the Parliamentary Service network.
Every-time there is an email leak, everyone scrambles and then the the fuss dies down. It annoys me how much time is wasted when it can be simply fixed with our world class, made in NZ, solution.
blog
How does Archive Manager stop the leaks from happening in the first place?
What’s an American “bagman” as referenced by the stuff.co.nz article?
John. Immediate audit - where you can see immediately how email flows around - very quickly stops leaks
Unless the leak comes from IT itself :-)
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/frustrations/31fb/
It would be interesting to see if it was personal email or work-related email. I guess for a politician either one could be compromising. Doesn’t work related mail belong to the employer (for a politician isn’t that us) ?
I wonder if the IT induction for politicians explains how email works, gets tracked and can be accessed ?
I also wonder how they can stop the emails being published in another country ?
I was keen for Archive Manager but was told the minimum seats was 400 or something. So if your a smb forget about Archive Manager
Tony. That’s FUD. AM is effective and can be brought for small businesses. We’re just getting it going for a team of 14. The reason we’re using it is because it allows us to track all customer email interactions so we know exactly where we’re at on a deal/support etc.
For small business use AM is fantastic. It’s like having perfect customer knowledge.
Also it means we don’t have to worry about Exchange Quota’s etc.
I was asked how many users we had which is 25.
I was then told sorry the minimum users was 400.
Like you say, I think AM would be great for us but I was told to go look elsewhere.
I had one last ditch attempt at buying AM and was told this.
“Quest have recently put a $15K US minimum order on the product. (approx 22K NZ)”
This is typical of what happens when a small company gets bought by a corporation.
Gotta chip in here.
I love Aftermail. It has saved my bacon and butt too many times to remember. There’s no excuse really for not having it.
But since Quest has taken over, the ongoing support levels have gone down down and down. When Aftermail were based out of Welly the service was BRILLIANT. Now it’s worse than average, bordering on poor - (is this just me?)
Sorry to break this, and it pains me to say this, but I agree with Tony in that this is what can sometimes happen…