Email Clients Research Articles

Salsa: Leveraging Email to Create a Social Network for the Enterprise

In this paper we describe Salsa, a plug-in that aggregates social and other content into an email client. Information in Salsa is collected from a variety of sources both inside and outside of email to create a profile for each person in our corporation that contains a photo, organizational details, friends, and an aggregated feed of shared content. Thus, Salsa uses a social networking approach to add social awareness to email. Salsa was deployed internally within our corporation and we trace its growth for six months and describe the results of a targeted user study. Findings demonstrate the extent to which and what type of social awareness is useful in our organization. Use of the aggregated feed is also discussed. In addition to identifying features that are useful for social networks in the enterprise, we explore the benefits of situating this type of application in email.

Use and importance of the Internet at the University of Maiduguri, Nigeria

The objective of this study was to evaluate the use and importance of Internet at the University of Maiduguri, Nigeria. The results from the analysis showed that Internet is very important for 60.77 percent respondents, with 74.62 percent of the respondents using the Internet for research. Yahoo is the preferred e-mail client for 79.23 percent of the respondents and 71.54 percent of the respondents use Google as their favorite search engine. Necessary facilities should be provided to faculty and students to make use of information resources available on the Internet.

The ascent of smartphone

Smartphones are evolving rapidly in sophistication. What will they be capable of in a year or two or even five years' time? How do you define a smartphone? Devices like Apple's iPhone, RIM's Blackberry and, say, a Nokia E61, are clearly the physical manifestation. But what identifies them as smarter than ordinary mobile phones? Is it just down to functionality? Smartphones now carry email client, Web browser, GPS functionality, desktop synchronisation tools, as well as organiser-type functions such as diary, contacts, notepad and voice recorder.

Camouflages and Token Manipulations-The Changing Faces of the Nigerian Fraudulent 419 Spammers

The inefficiencies of current spam filters against fraudulent (419) mails is not unrelated to the use by spammers of good-word
 attacks, topic drifts, parasitic spamming, wrong categorization and recategorization of electronic mails by e-mail clients and of
 course the fuzzy factors of greed and gullibility on the part of the recipients who responds to fraudulent spam mail offers. In this
 paper, we establish that mail token manipulations remain, above any other tactics, the most potent tool used by Nigerian
 scammers to fool statistical spam filters. While hoping that the uncovering of these manipulative evidences will prove useful in
 future antispam research, our findings also sensitize spam filter developers on the need to inculcate within their antispam
 architecture robust modules that can deal with the identified camouflages.

Smart encryption channels for securing virtual machine‐based networked applications

AbstractWe present PARAGON, a novel security protocol for efficiently securing the network communications of web‐deployed enterprise applications. PARAGON relies on an application tag set, which is a collection of metadata entries that specify the backend servers with which the client application is expected to communicate during its lifetime. The application tag set controls the quality of the security mechanisms established on each backend server connection, and allows the security protocol to utilize the trust relationship present between the deployed application and its source server to create a set of public‐key security associations between the source server and the enterprise backend servers on behalf of the client. PARAGON is a multi‐phase security protocol that matures with time. Incrementally, PARAGON approaches a fully symmetric‐key encryption system. The performance advantage becomes evident when the client application communicates with a relatively large set of remote servers. Examples of such clients include web browsers, email clients, file torrent clients, stock exchange applications, etc. A prototype implementing PARAGON's specifications and showing its performance advantages is shown for SUN's J2SE 1.6/J2EE 1.5 platforms. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Monitoring and diagnosing software requirements

We propose a framework adapted from Artificial Intelligence theories of action and diagnosis for monitoring and diagnosing failures of software requirements. Software requirements are specified using goal models where they are associated with preconditions and postconditions. The monitoring component generates log data that contains the truth values of specified pre/post-conditions, as well as system action executions. Such data can be generated at different levels of granularity, depending on diagnostic feedback. The diagnostic component diagnoses the denial of requirements using the log data, and identifies problematic components. To support diagnostic reasoning, we transform the diagnostic problem into a propositional satisfiability (SAT) problem that can be solved by existing SAT solvers. The framework returns sound and complete diagnoses accounting for observed aberrant system behaviors. Our solution is illustrated with two medium-sized publicly available case studies: a Web-based email client and an ATM simulation. Our experimental results demonstrate the scalability of our approach.

Virtual reference services: Evaluation of online reference services

Virtual reference services: Evaluation of online reference services

Remote-Access Real-Time Laboratory: Process Monitoring and Control through the Internet Protocol

The development of a remote-access real-time laboratory (RART-Lab) is described, and a case study is presented of its application to a real-time mechanical engineering experiment, namely a study of thermo-hydrodynamics of flow through mini-channels. (The study of such flows is vital for many applications, ranging from electronics thermal management to fuel cells.) The RART-Lab concept encompasses data acquisition during the experiment, storage, post-processing and online transmission of data to multiple users logged on to their respective web browsers. Control of the experimental process parameters (e.g. liquid mass flow rate and heater power level) from one (or more) remote stations over the web in real time is also incorporated. Online video images of the experimental facility, visualization modules and color-indexed temperature data can be transmitted by webcam. The system developed has a friendly graphical user interface. It also allows transmission of process parameter alarm signals via an e-mail client server or via an SMS text message to a mobile telephone. Simultaneously, conventional chatting has also been incorporated to add vibrancy to inter-user communication. In addition, three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics simulations have also been done simultaneously with the real-time laboratory to mimic the experiments. Such an integrated development greatly widens the possibilities of collaborative research, development, simulation and experimentation, to overcome the need for the physical proximity of the experimental hardware and experimenters. Such generic tools not only make academic interactions and real-time data sharing more fruitful but also greatly facilitate joint research and development activities between academia and the industrial community.

Living in the comfort zone

A comfort zone is a tested region of a system's input space within which it has been observed to behave acceptably. To keep systems operating within their comfort zones, we advocate the interposition of rectifiers between systems and their input sources. Rectifiers are designed to transform inputs to ensure that they are within the comfort zone before they are presented to the system. Rectifiers enforce a highly constrained input format and, if necessary, discard information to force inputs to conform to this format. Potential benefits of this approach include the elimination of errors and vulnerabilities, the excision of undesirable excess functionality from large, complex systems, and a simplification of the computing environment. We have developed a rectifier for email messages and used this rectifier to force messages into a specific constrained form. Our results show that this rectifier can successfully produce messages that keep the Pine email client strictly within code previously confirmed (during a small testing and training session) to function acceptably. Our results also show that the rectifier completely eliminates a security vulnerability in the Pine email client. And finally, the rectifier is able to accomplish these goals while still preserving an acceptable amount of information from the original messages.

Getting Started with RSS Feeds

Many health sciences library staffers who might benefit tremendously from the utilization of an RSS aggregator are intimidated by the mistaken impression that setting up and using a feed aggregator is difficult or requires technical knowledge. The truth is that anyone who can use an e-mail client can quickly learn to manage an aggregator, and can begin benefiting from its use right away. This article seeks to walk the less technologically inclined health science library staffer through the necessary steps to begin reaping the benefits of utilizing RSS feeds, including setting up an aggregator, finding useful feeds, subscribing to feeds, and managing them. This is accomplished with only an absolute minimum of geekspeak or technobabble.

Proving thread termination

Concurrent programs are often designed such that certain functions executing within critical threads must terminate. Examples of such cases can be found in operating systems, web servers, e-mail clients, etc. Unfortunately, no known automatic program termination prover supports a practical method of proving the termination of threads. In this paper we describe such a procedure. The procedure's scalability is achieved through the use of environment models that abstract away the surrounding threads. The procedure's accuracy is due to a novel method of incrementally constructing environment abstractions. Our method finds the conditions that a thread requires of its environment in order to establish termination by looking at the conditions necessary to prove that certain paths through the thread represent well-founded relations if executed in isolation of the other threads . The paper gives a description of experimental results using an implementation of our procedureon Windows device drivers and adescription of a previously unknown bug found withthe tool.

A Case (Study) For Usability in Secure Email Communication

As a network security researcher, the author finds it very disappointing that most users can't, or simply don't, secure their Internet communications. For good reason, usability in security has received a fair deal of attention in the past few years. To push the issue further, the author decided to initiate his own informal case study on the usability and practical relevance of standard security mechanisms for email communication. The author focused my attention on available public-key cryptography techniques for digitally signing and encrypting email. His first step was to establish a public-private key pair to use with email. The author chose to use Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME), a standard for signing and encrypting email, because it's already supported by popular email clients such as Apple Mail, Outlook Express, and Mozillas Thunderbird. Unlike S/MIME, the author found that pretty good privacy (PGP) and the GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) were unusable with nontechnical correspondents because it required them to install additional software. S/MIME, it seemed, was the better solution for these everyday users, for whom the concepts of public-key infrastructure (PKI), PGP, certificates, keys, and so on remain elusive. Additionally, I decided to get my public key certified by Thawte (www.thawte.com), an online certificate authority (CA)

Secure communication via public key infrastructure

One of the information flows in a computer communication domain is accomplished by sending an e-mail, but in order to accomplish demands for information qualitativity that the e-mail contains, it's necessary for a computer network to provide the major four security services confidentiality, data integrity, authentication and non-repudiation. This work represents one of the possible solutions of secured communication applying a secured e-mail client with advantages that PKCS standard brings.

Inferring binary trust relationships in Web-based social networks

The growth of Web-based social networking and the properties of those networks have created great potential for producing intelligent software that integrates a user's social network and preferences. Our research looks particularly at assigning trust in Web-based social networks and investigates how trust information can be mined and integrated into applications. This article introduces a definition of trust suitable for use in Web-based social networks with a discussion of the properties that will influence its use in computation. We then present two algorithms for inferring trust relationships between individuals that are not directly connected in the network. Both algorithms are shown theoretically and through simulation to produce calculated trust values that are highly accurate.. We then present TrustMail, a prototype email client that uses variations on these algorithms to score email messages in the user's inbox based on the user's participation and ratings in a trust network.

Reducing TCB complexity for security-sensitive applications

The large size and high complexity of security-sensitive applications and systems software is a primary cause for their poor testability and high vulnerability. One approach to alleviate this problem is to extract the security-sensitive parts of application and systems software, thereby reducing the size and complexity of software that needs to be trusted. At the system software level, we use the Nizza architecture which relies on a kernelized trusted computing base (TCB) and on the reuse of legacy code using trusted wrappers to minimize the size of the TCB. At the application level, we extract the security-sensitive portions of an already existing application into an AppCore. The AppCore is executed as a trusted process in the Nizza architecture while the rest of the application executes on a virtualized, untrusted legacy operating system. In three case studies of real-world applications (e-commerce transaction client, VPN gateway and digital signatures in an e-mail client), we achieved a considerable reduction in code size and complexity. In contrast to the few hundred thousand lines of current application software code running on millions of lines of systems software code, we have AppCores with tens of thousands of lines of code running on a hundred thousand lines of systems software code. We also show the performance penalty of AppCores to be modest (a few percent) compared to current software.

Consistency Assurance in Flattening Hierarchical Architectural Models

Composite components are components that have internal structures. Supported by almost all architecture description languages, composite components can organize architectural models in a hierarchical structure. However, most analysis and verification tools for SA model do not support composite components, neither do most component frameworks. Therefore, it is necessary to flatten the hierarchical SA model so that SA can play a more important role in practice. The most challenging issue in the flattening is how to assure the consistency between architectural models with and without composite components. In this paper, a formal definition of the consistency of an SA model is presented. Based on that, principles and guidelines for consistency assurance in flattening a hierarchical SA model are provided. Their feasibility is exemplified by a componentized email client.

Mobile research strategies for a global market

The user-centered design focus at Microsoft has evolved in parallel with emerging mobile technologies. We started with a Contextual Inquiry (CI) initiative in 1997 to gather mobile communication and information requirements in the Northwest U.S. Later, as users adopted wireless data services---Short Message Service (SMS), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), mobile instant messenger, and email clients---the focus turned to more specific usage issues in key international markets. This article presents an overview of the evolution of the qualitative field research methods that have been used to respond to increasingly global research requirements. 1

Integrating device independence and user profiles on the Web

This paper describes research to enable appropriate knowledge to be automatically delivered to the right people at the right time at the right level of detail via a range of user devices (laptop PC, mobile telephone, wireless e-mail client, hand-held PC, etc). We describe a framework that integrates device profiles with user preference profiles and accessibility requirements to provide effective knowledge delivery to a range of end-user devices. The framework has two components — an ontology of device and user profiles, and a content adaptation engine for presenting information to the user in a suitable format.

Composing security policies with polymer

We introduce a language and system that supports definition and composition of complex run-time security policies for Java applications. Our policies are comprised of two sorts of methods. The first is query methods that are called whenever an untrusted application tries to execute a security-sensitive action. A query method returns a suggestion indicating how the security-sensitive action should be handled. The second sort of methods are those that perform state updates as the policy's suggestions are followed.The structure of our policies facilitates composition, as policies can query other policies for suggestions. In order to give programmers control over policy composition, we have designed the system so that policies, suggestions, and application events are all first-class objects that a higher-order policy may manipulate. We show how to use these programming features by developing a library of policy combinators.Our system is fully implemented, and we have defined a formal semantics for an idealized subset of the language containing all of the key features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system by implementing a large-scale security policy for an email client.

Quality Versus Quantity: E-Mail-Centric Task Management and Its Relation With Overload

It is widely acknowledged that many professionals suffer from "e-mail overload." This article presents findings from in-depth fieldwork that examined this phenomenon, uncovering six key challenges of task management in e-mail. Analysis of qualitative and quantitative data suggests that it is not simply the quantity but also the collaborative quality of e-mail task and project management that causes this overload. We describe how e-mail becomes especially overwhelming when people use it for tasks that involve participation of others; tasks cannot be completed until a response is obtained and so they are interleaved. Interleaving means that the e-mail user must somehow simultaneously keep track of multiple incomplete tasks, often with the only reminder for each one being an e-mail message somewhere in the inbox or a folder. This and other insights from our fieldwork led us to a new design philosophy for e-mail in which resources for task and project management are embedded directly within an e-mail client as opposed to being added on as separate components of the application. A client, TaskMaster, embodying these ideas, was developed and tested by users in managing their real e-mail over an extended period. The design of the client and results of its evaluation are also reported.