Walgreens pharmacy chain alerted customers today that their email addresses may have been stolen by spanners.

“We recently became aware of unauthorized access to an email list of customers who receive special offers and newsletters from us,” the company said in the email. “As a result, it is possible you may have received some spam email messages asking you to go to another site and enter personal data. We are sorry this has taken place and for any inconvenience to you.”

The company did not say how many addresses may have been stolen.

According to the statement, only the customers’s email addresses were taken. No prescription information, credit card numbers or addresses were stolen.

“Online security experts have reported an increase in attacks on email systems, and therefore we have voluntarily contacted the appropriate authorities and are working with them regarding this incident,” Walgreens said.

Concerned customers can call Walgreens at 888-980-0963.

The Boston e-mail scandal shook city hall during this pivotal election season. Here at Blast, we’re pretty tech-minded. So we went to some e-mail experts for some technical analysis on this story.

We talked to Barracuda Networks, a California-based company best known for its spam and virus firewalls. The company also offers storage, backup and e-mail archiving solutions.

The controversy originated from a Boston Globe request to review e-mails from advisers to Mayor Thomas M. Menino. But city hall could only account for 18 e-mails sent or received in a six month period from Michael J. Kineavy, Menino’s Cabinet chief of policy and planning and one of his closest advisers. City hall acknowledged that Kineavy deletes his e-mails on a daily basis, which circumvents the city’s nightly backup process. The city has said Kineavy’s actions exploited a glitch in the backup process because he both deleted his messages from his inbox and cleared his deleted items folder.

Government officials’ e-mails are a matter of public record.

Kineavy has since taken an unpaid leave of absence. But could this all have been prevented?

After talking with Barracuda and doing some of our own research, it is clear that City Hall addressed the issue of preserving its e-mail messages incorrectly. Boston’s backup process is a poor solution for archiving e-mails, and it runs contrary to accepted best practices.

“Relying on users to save e-mails (i.e. ‘do the right thing’) and not delete e-mails is prone to failure as people can mistakes,” said Barracuda spokeswoman Kylie Heintz.

Having faith in traditional backup systems is not the right answer. Even without the “glitch” that allowed e-mails to be permanently deleted, the City of Boston’s approach to ensuring all e-mails are saved by backing up the e-mail system was not ideal.

–

There is a functional difference between “archiving” and “backing up.”

Archiving is like storing e-mails in a filing cabinet in your office or an alphabetized library card catalog. Backup is like locking them all in a safe deposit box in the bank, behind a time-lock and a password that only the bank manager knows.

Backup systems typically compress all the files and messages into a single file — similar to “zipping” your photos so they take up less room on your hard drive. This creates another problem, because it’s more difficult to search inside these compressed files.

Even if Kineavy hadn’t deleted his e-mails, it still may have been difficult for the city to find, isolate and release his messages.

A backup process is routine, predictable and easy for an end-user to avoid. These processes rely on the end-user’s system. Products like the Barracuda Message Archiver and many of its competitors completely take the end-user out of the equation. An archiver is ideal in these situations, because these products save messages at the server level. Whenever an e-mail is sent or received by the server, the archiver takes it, copies it, saves it and makes a search-able index so that messages can be found later on.

Since public officials’ e-mails need to be saved, it is expected that they will need to be searched through at some point in time — like if a journalist requests copies of them. Backup systems are not designed with archiving in mind. The only way to access e-mails from backup systems is to restore the backup file and then manually search through the results. This is very time consuming, error prone and expensive.

Several cities in Massachusetts use hardware archiving solutions, and Heintz confirmed that some used Barracuda’s Message Archiver. None of the cities would go on the record for Blast, however, given the controversy surrounding e-mail

Boston’s backup script was a good solution for a disaster or system failure, but not necessarily the best solution for a public records request. Archiving is a superior method for public records requests.

“Organizations have needs for both” according to Aseem Asthana, Message Archiver Product Manager at Barracuda Networks. Backup is vital to organizations. If something happens to an e-mail server, or a natural disaster wipes the server out, a backup can be used to restore all the data present at the time of the backup. But pulling individual files is more difficult. Often, an information technology professional is required to restore individual files from a backup.

An archiver, as opposed to a backup, allows e-mails to be accessed readily and seamlessly.

Menino’s office did not respond to a request to comment on this story.

We acknowledge that Barracuda is a for-profit company. Its Message Archiver starts at $1,999, but it would cost about 10 times that for a model amped up to serve a major city like Boston.

But it would also have saved a few headaches and maybe prevented Boston’s E-mailgate scandal.

John M. Guilfoil of the Blast staff contributed to this report.

Clarification: We changed the sentence “A backup process is routine, predictable and avoidable.” to “A backup process is routine, predictable and easy for an end-user to avoid.”

Enron blindsided a whole country with its multi-billion dollar collapse in December 2001. People who watched their retirement funds dry up overnight wondered, “Could we have seen this coming?”.

While Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling’s circle of fools shouldered most of the blame, there were many employees in the company aware of shady dealings. Now, scientists studying the emails released after the company’s collapse have found interesting patterns that could have been used to indicate a forthcoming problem in a company. The cool part? The scientist studied only who e-mailed who, and never once looked at the content of the emails.

Mapping a social network.

Using social networks”"not to be confused with social networking itself”" to reach interesting conclusions is nothing new. Researchers have found that you can reliably determine a person’s sexual orientation just by looking at his network of friends on Facebook, even if he has chosen not to respond to the “Interested In” field. Similar techniques have been used to show that everyone in the world really is connected to Kevin Bacon through six degrees.

Using this same concept, Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne studied the frequency of emails as well as the connections between those sending them. Instead of finding a drastic change in at the brink of crisis, the scientists found that the biggest changes actually took place a month before.

As workers began to sense danger, they began to turn their social networks inward, communicating more frequently with a smaller group of people whom they presumably trusted more. Instead of the 100 groups of people who were typically in direct contact with each other before, there suddenly became 800.

Of course, further evidence is always needed in science, and this case is no different. The problem is that privacy issues abound; no one likes an email snoop. Should these issues ever be overcome, the tools used to detect these patterns could prove very useful for HR departments in any company in the future as an early warning sign to problems.

Up until the last century or so, if you needed to talk to someone, you wrote a letter, signed it, and someone or something carried it to where it needed to go. Then came telephones, and with those, the advent of real-time communications. Then came email, and with it instantaneous conversation and information sharing. Now, Google thinks it has the next step in the evolution of how we’ll communicate and collaborate online.

First, the problems with what we have now. Instant messaging works well for very small groups of people, but becomes cumbersome in larger groups. Emails allow for dialectical conversation, but don’t occur in real time, and can become fragmented with side emails that spin off into their own conversations. Newer people are brought into the fray, and often don’t have the complete conversation before them.

Google Wave is sort of like a chat-room on steroids. Equal parts group-instant messaging, document collaboration, and wiki, Wave allows users to edit the rich media that makes up our Internet today. Users start a wave by adding text, dragging and dropping photos, documents, videos, and any other embeddable media into the wave. All edits are visible in real time; you’ll watch as your threaded conversations expand word by word, letter by letter. Once the wave is complete, it’s stored for future reading or even playback, so you can watch as the wave develops and unfolds.

The technology even comes with an open API, so other programmers can embed Google Wave into their own sites and projects or build their own extensions to add functionality to Google Wave itself. Possible extensions suggested by Google include robot-style automated participants. (Maybe this is just our hope, but could this be the best customer support tool ever devised?)

Currently in a developer-only release, Google is eyeing a public beta in the near future.

As the search continues for an iPhone killer, the ball is in Blackberry’s court. The Storm has made a valiant effort, and once again, it’s a solution that’s just not as good as the iPhone.

The Blackberry Storm has implemented a new type of touchscreen. To beat the problems of a lack of accuracy that have faced other touchscreen phones, the Storm touchscreen is a two-step process. First, an item can be selected on the screen by placing a finger over it. The item will be highlighted to ensure that it is in fact the user meant to select. Then, the user presses down on the screen over the selected area and voila, item selected. While it works the majority of the time, but is a real pain and takes too much time and effort.

Blackberry phones are above all work phones, so the cross over to a fun, application based toy like the iPhone felt a bit awkward. Instead of being all work or all play, the Storm lost itself somewhere in the middle, making it a bit of a pain to access e-mails and the business functions, but equally as uninteresting to play games and use the other fun-based apps.

Typing on the Storm’s touch keypad is fairly simple, the implemented touch-and-tap system making accuracy all the easier. However, there are three types of messaging styles: the vertical QWERTY keyboard similar to the one used for the Blackberry Pearl can either be set to auto-text or normal and a horizontal full QWERTY keyboard. The problem with the three types of keypads is they are not universally implemented on the phone, and it is hard to be sure which type is being used.

The Storm is heavier than the other touchscreen phones out there, weighing in at 5.5 ounces. For someone used to the tiny Krazor, its 4.43″ by 2.45″ body was too awkward to hold comfortably.

The Storm’s 3.25 in. screen plays video and displays pictures beautifully, it’s auto-focus feature on its 3.2 mega pixel camera makes taking photos far easier than your standard camera phone fare and its music player booms sound out sufficiently. Verizon’s great VZ Navigator GPS feature tends to be a little laggy on the Storm, stating after a street is passed that it was the proper one to turn down. Blackberry’s venture into the touch screen is valiant and solid, it just doesn’t have anything unique to set it apart from the competition.

Close but no iPhone

Technically speaking, the Storm is a great phone. It doesn’t have any major flaws, and is sufficient for any phone users daily needs. However, that is as far as it goes. It does not have any stand-out features to set it above the rest of the touch screen phones out there. It certainly is not the best, though it weighs in about second in the race for the best touch phone on the market.

For Verizon customers, the Storm is better than the LG Dare, but no one has yet to come close to topping Apple and its iPhone.

With help from Energized Solutions LLC

Spring is the time of year when the weather becomes nice enough that we can open the windows, air out the house, and clear out the clutter that has accumulated over the winter months. In an increasingly digital age, we must also consider cleaning out our email inboxes.

Email is a tool that allows people to expedite communication and share information at unprecedented speeds. The effectiveness of email, however, depends upon a user’s ability to efficiently use the technology. Email should be used to assist with work and not be the work.

The time we spend going through emails adds stress and extra work to our daily routines. Instead of playing catch-up with email all the time, there are several proactive practices that can be used to increase the email productivity.

Kathleen Alessandro is a productivity expert and president of Energized Solutions in Dearborn, Mich. She offers these suggestions to increase email productivity, allowing you to spend more time doing what you need to do instead of playing catch-up on emails.

1. Keep your inbox manageable. When you get new emails, reply or forward if necessary and then delete or archive the email. Only leave “active” emails in your inbox.

2. Set aside time everyday to remove items that are no longer active from your inbox.

3. Get to the point. Sending short, clear messages without the fluff means you can get through messages more quickly. Tell your colleagues to do the same.

4. Put the message in the subject line. This makes finding and acting upon messages faster.

5. Use a full signature with all of your current contact information. This reduces the time it takes following up on messages.

6. Use folders. Label folders so you can easily sort, find, and manage your projects.

7. Create a casual reading folder. Place all of your electronic newsletters or mass updates in this folder. If you know where they are, you can come back to them when you have time.

8. For email strings, use a concise and relevant subject line. This makes sorting and following-up easier for all parties involved.

9. Think before hitting “Reply All.” Most times, not everyone needs to know every little detail and it just adds to overall email clutter.

10. Do not send “inspirational” emails or other forwards to work accounts. Enough said.

BLAST has learned there was a complete outage of the popular Blackberry email-retrieving smart phone service Monday.

An AT&T spokesman told Fox News in Boston that the outage affects all phones and all carriers across the country.

Research in Motion said in a message to large corporate customers that a “critical severity outage” meant they would be unable to send or receive mail.

There is no word on the cause of the problem, which left users across North America without wireless email for about four hours.

It’s Friday afternoon. It’s been a long week. Here’s one of those email forwards that was too hilarious to ignore.

After going through a virus attack,

losing a hard drive,

fighting off hackers,

upgrading all my software,

installing fire-walls,

being threatened with being cut-off by my email provider,

and a host of other problems…

I have fixed my computer…

and NOW it works exactly the way I want it to!

On Thursday, some good news hit the battered lungs of a billion junk email filters like pure oxygen: Eleven of the world’s most prolific spammers — nine of whom live in the U.S. — were indicted by the Department of Justice.

According to papers unsealed in Detroit, the electronic highwaymen, facing a 41-count indictment, are a geographical grab bag, ranging from Queen Creek, Calif. to Hong Kong to Russia.

One of the alleged scams includes cooked up pump and dump stock schemes for Chinese corporations hungry to score First World dough. In these cases, Americans are told stocks are going to go up, people buy up the stock, and in the end only the company makes money.

According to U.S. Attorney Stephen J. Murphy, it was, “one of the largest illegal spamming and fraud operations in the country.”

The indictment is the culmination of the three-year investigation, in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, and even the Postal Service, all assisted. Not a bad coup for old snail mail.

In 2005 alone, federal investigators estimate that the ring generated $3 million with their scams.

Though it’s unclear how many of the spammers are in custody, and the indictment isn’t likely freeze the torrents of junk hitting your inbox every day, it is a refreshing bit of action from the Justice Department.

It’d be nice to see more of these shots across the bow in the future, and if the Postal Service has anything to say about it, a few more direct hits.

Charged:

• Alan M. Ralsky, 52, of West Bloomfield, Mich.
• Scott K. Bradley, 46, of West Bloomfield, Mich.
• Judy M. Devenow, 55, of Lansing, Mich.
• John S. Bown, 47, of Poway, Calif.
• William C. Neil, 45, of Fresno, Calif.
• Anki K. Neil, 36, of Fresno, Calif
• James E. Bragg, 39, of Queen Creek, Ariz.
• James E. Fite, 34, of Whittier, Calif.
• Peter Severa, age unknown, of Russia
• How Wai John Hui, 49, of Vancouver, Canada and Hong Kong
• Francis A. Tribble, of Los Angeles, Calif.