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The State of Hawaii has an official policy regarding email messages: delete them after 60 days. 

It’s hard to believe, especially when the Honolulu Star-Bulletin discovered that “State Archivist Susan Shaner claims there is simply too much e-mail to save it all.”

I doubt that. Corporations are saving terabytes of email, text messages and instant messages every year.

The state’s policy seems rooted in convenience. Herman Frazier’s email messages about the Sugar Bowl and June Jones have already been deleted - he was fired as the University of Hawaii’s athletic director in January 2008.

See the newspaper’s editorial, Treat state e-mail the same as other public documents, for more.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• University of Hawaii
• 4 January 2008: Copper thieves kill Sugar Bowl cablecast

I’ve claimed for several years now that email is broken. At best, email is the lowest common denominator (LCD) for sending messages to a specific Internet user. Every ISP subscription comes with some kind of email account. Free webmail addresses are easy to get. Many mobile phone accounts come with an email address. Alex Iskold’s post from ReadWriteWeb called Is Email in Danger? discusses how microblogging services like Twitter can overcome the inherent problems of heavyweight email clients like Microsoft Outlook.

Broadcasting with a microblog

Microblogging services are best suited for broadcasting messages to lots of users. FriendFeed, Twitter and similar services are widely used by popular bloggers to publicize their latest posts and mention their daily activities. Most of these services accept text messages and offer mobile versions of their web sites, so they are easier to use than email from an ordinary mobile phone. iPhone and BlackBerry users have better email clients on their devices, but microblogging from these devices seems to work well. 

As I mentioned yesterday in my article called The battle against Twitter spam, microblogging services like Twitter have their own problems. Because email is a mission critical service, it’s almost always available and working. Collecting comments and posts from microblogs can be accomplished with RSS - I use this to repost my FriendFeed activity to billso.com, but it would take a bit more effort to do this as part of an archiving and compliance effort. 

I’ve never been a fan of Outlook. In its easly versions (Outlook 97 and 98), the application would crash at least once a day. Microsoft developed  ActiveSync software to support PDAs, but 10 years later it is still a maddening piece of cruft.  

Look out for Outlook and iTunes

My university uses Microsoft Exchange as its faculty/staff email server, so I occasionally get meeting invitations and Outlook forms in my Gmail my box. All of my university email is auto-forwarded into my Gmail account. Microsoft meeting invitations are useless in Gmail - I have to tap out a reply to accept or decline the meeting.  

To be honest, Apple’s iTunes is following a similar evolution. It start as a music player, but has become a media storefront, disc burner and iPhone application installer. I’d think that several specific lightweight apps would work better than a huge, monolithic instance of iTunes. On a Mac, iTunes performance is barely tolerable. iTunes on a Windows box is a lumbering behemoth. 

Gmail, on the other hand, was designed as a lightweight solution that would work in a standard web browser. I love Gmail because I can search for messages quickly, and I know I won’t run out of storage room for old messages. There’s no reason for me to delete an old message in Gmail. 

Attacking the inbox

One approach to managing a bulging email inbox is to sit down and clear the queue. The Inbox Victory web page tries to make this process fun by letting users post pictures of themselves with their empty inboxes. I clear out my Gmali inboxes a few times a year. 

Luis Suarez of IBM claims that he reduced his incoming email by 80%, thanks to his usage of social networking tools like RSS feeds, Twitter and IBM’s internal clone of Facebook, Beehive. Suarez discussed his  article in the New York Times called I Freed Myself from E-Mail’s Grip.

Suarez admits that his job as a social computing evangelist helped him cut his email volume. He’s supposed to encourage his fellow IBM employees and managers to use Beehive, which is as much a knowledge management (KM) tool as it is a social intranet application. IBMers are supposed to use Beehive to share events, lists, pictures, tips, and ideas across the enterprise, as part of formal and ad hoc workgroups and project teams. 

Image courtesy of gwENvision through a Creative Commons license. 

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• Email and spam
• iPhone
• 7 July 2008: The battle against Twitter spam
• 22 April 2008: Email is still broken
• 10 June 2007: Just say “no” to HTML in email
• 19 April 2007: The great Blackberry blackout
• 22 August 2006: 95 percent of email is UCE
• 4 August 2004: E-mail is broken

CIOs and IT managers tend to focus on preserving data. But what happens when companies need to destroy data?

It’s easy to shred paper data, but destroying digital files may require more tools than a sledge hammer and a blowtorch.

For many companies, data removal or sanitizing is a bigger concern. Hard drives are expensive, and sometimes removing the data from a drive is a better choice.

Many people have asked me how they can erase data from their hard drive or USB device, so that they can sell or give the device to someone else.

Formatting the device won’t do the job, at least with the default settings. Erasing the file using the standard tools in the Windows and Mac operating systems usually leaves behind some or all of the files.

Mac OS has a “secure empty trash” command that will overwrite files, as described in these articles from MacGeekery and MacObserver.

Many companies sell data erasure software, including Active @ Killdisk and OnTrack.

Blancco provides enterprise tools to help companies destroy and remove digital data. This chart from DataErasure.com, a Blannco marketing web site, lists some Federal fines and penalties that are related to data privacy and disclosure.

This video from DataCenter.tv is a bit long, but it’s got some good information about Blancco’s business model.

Image provided by JcMaco under a Creative Commons license.

First, the good news: crazy rasberry ants are smaller than fleas, but they will eat fire ants. I hate fire ants, and I don’t miss them at all.

Now here’s the bad news: these ants also eat plants, and they like to get into electronic equipment, including network cable and hard drives, according to CRN. That’s a recipe for failure.

Pray that paratrenicha species near pubens don’t come to your neighborhood.

See the Associated Press, Texas A&M’s web page and BoingBoing for more information and links.

Updated 16 May 2008: here’s the New York times article about the crazy running ants.

Update 16 June 2008: I added this YouTube video from Houston’s FOX news report.

Photo courtesy of Texas A&M University.

Related posts on billso.com

• 26 August 2004: Killer bees reach Oklahoma
• 13 August 2004: Giant mutant ants in Australia

Here’s a video and some information about recovering data from hard drives, courtesy of the Data Recovery Group.