E-mail encryption certainly isn’t new, but as more companies come under fire for leaking customer identities or privileged information, encryption is increasingly essential for doing business—and possibly for staying in business. The business case for encryption is even more compelling because the latest products are easier to manage, implement and use in daily e-mail activities.

In my article in Baseline magazine this month, I talk about four issues involved in getting encryption deployed across the enterprise.

Previous encryption products required a lot of effort towards key management and usually required a matched pair of programs to communicate between sender and receiver. That is thankfully a thing of the past, and there are several different products on the market today that make encryption easier, almost effortless

You can read the full article posted today in ITWorld here.

Have we reached the point where email’s influence over our electronic lives is waning? It is hard to imagine, especially for those of us who grew up in the minicomputer/PC era. For two generations,  email was the killer application. It delivered information reliably and within a few minutes.

But today the properties that made email so attractive for so long are now a liabiliity. “A few minutes” for a response is so last year, driven in no small part by texting and cell phone ubiquity. At the same time this was happening, wikis, blogs and social networks have begun to erode email’s document exchange role. The notion of sharing photos or a slide presentation using email attachments is becoming quaint.

Now, the Internets have gotten faster, and seconds matter. Amazon offers same-day deliveries in a few cities. Motorola’s new Cliq Android phone aggregates all your messages together. And email just can’t keep up.

Jessica Vascellaro’s WSJ article about “Why Email No Longer Rules” cites that more people are on Facebook and other social networking sites than use email (it is a questionable statistic, to be sure). She claims that email is losing out to the immediacy of the real-time nature of social networks feeds and presence-aware apps like Twitter. Even Instant Messaging isn’t instant or capable enough, since it was designed for one-to-one chats. Today, the real-time Internet means that conversations need to happen with multiple people and happen quickly. The fact that this constant stream of presence information is being collected and sold, eroding one of the few aspects of privacy we control is lost on this generation, apparently.

I asked my friend Dave Piscitello to help collaborate on this article, and we agreed to share our thoughts and come up with the overall piece.

We have begun to notice in the past month or so more of our network is responding to our respective publications – weekly email Web Informants and the SecuritySkeptic.com blog – via Facebook and not via email. Adapting to the needs of our audience, we have both begun “pushing” our publications using email, Friendfeed, Facebook, and occasionally Twitter. We’ve experimented with podcasting, webcasting, and video too.

This is admittedly a shotgun approach to publishing, and begs the question of which of these communications tools, if any, are the right one for publishing? It also begs whether any of these alone are sufficient, and if not, what combinations can be used effectively? More importantly, how do we measure influence and reach, given that people can reach our blogs, Tweetstreams and FaceLinkedNingSpace networks, text or IM us, or heaven forbid, actually speak to us using a phone!

We honestly don’t know for sure, but we asked ourselves some questions and share them here for you to consider for your situation:

If you send out a weekly email newsletter, is it better to have the CEO as a subscriber or have four or five direct reports on a subscriber list who will send the same email to the CEO to act on when we touch a topic near and dear? The former puts your name on the CEO’s radar *if* he makes time to read enough of your messages, while the latter puts the decision of what is near and dear in the hands of a (presumably trusted) underling.

Is it better to post something to our FaceLinkedNingSpace pages, because that post provides personal context, starts conversation that the rest of our friends can follow along and helps you steadily build an audience over time; to blog amid a topic-based community, where a your post may “go viral” on the blogosphere and get thousands of “one time” hits and trackbacks; or is it worth the effort to use blogging and social networks in combination by drawing the attention of your friends and followers to your blog via a post and URL from your social network pages?

Is the link you embed in a Tweet going to pull audiences to your content? If you get 10% clickthrough when the industry average is a couple of percent, what can you learn and leverage from that Tweet or all Tweeted content? Is the viral effect of reTweeting or Tweetstreaming useful in growing your audience or will you disenfranchise long time followers who have become accustomed to receiving email responses “in a few minutes”?

We have a lot more questions than these, and are still searching for ways to meet our individual needs and aspirations. We both agree on how to answer the question at the top of this post: we don’t think email is dying, it’s merely settling into the roles it was always best suited to play. Email is not being replaced entirely for notification, messaging, and collaboration by these other technologies, nor will any of the newcomer applications succeed email as the single killer application. For the moment, there *is* no killer application. We need to experiment more with the existing and emergent set of applications going forward to get a better handle how we all interact online.

In the meantime, please share your thoughts with us both, using whatever technology is appropriate.

If you are about to be unemployed, take a moment to follow Strom’s rules for appropriate email names:

1. Avoid use of Hotmail, MSN, AOL, and Yahoo. Get a Gmail address, or better yet, pony up the cash to get your own domain and let Google host your email for you. We are talking about $10 a year to do this properly.

2. If you must use a free account, try to not use names that aren’t professional, such as ones that include cartoon characters, sexual or religious references, or other things that are best left to your personal side. This isn’t a matter of free expression or taste. Ideally, it should be some combination of your first and last name.

3. Pick something that is easy to hear and understand. If you have to spell it out when you are on the phone, use something else.

4. Don’t use punctuation marks or numbers in your name. Why? See point #3.

5. Make sure you use one address for all of your job-related activities: resume, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Monster, Craigslist, etc. Set up these services to send you notifications when people post messages on them, so you can stay up to date. Remember, it is your brand, or it will be soon enough. You don’t want to have to check lots of different email addresses during your search.

6. Speaking of checking email, please remember to do so at least twice a day. Respond to any inquiries quickly. You want to show that you are on top of things.

7. Start putting your connections (what some of us used to call our Rolodex) in your email address book. You just need first and last name, a title or some other thing to remember the contact by, a phone number and an email address. Gmail can auto-populate your address book to help things.

8. Remember that email addresses aren’t case-sensitive, so David@strom.com and david@strom.com and dAvId@Strom.com are all the same mailbox.

 You probably know by now that any e-mail that isn’t encrypted traverses the Internet in clear text that can easily be viewed with little skill and just some patience. So what are you doing to protect your company’s sensitive e-mail?

The right way is to encrypt e-mail messages in their entire path from sender to receiver. You also need to digitally sign them, to ensure that no one else has tampered with them in transit.

In today’s Computerworld, I review three solutions: Hush Communications’ Hushmail for Business, Voltage Security Inc.’s Voltage Secure Network and Connected Gateway and PGP Corp.’s Universal Server.

This week I want to talk about the “softer” side of things: how to run your lists and choose what you write about, what you send out, how you send it out, and why you bother doing it.

E-mail is the basic lifeblood of any small business communications. It is how you get and retain customers, how you find new prospects, and how you keep and motivate your staff. Even if you have a fairly non-Internet company, such as a hardware store, you can use e-mail to bring in new business and inform and amuse your customers. You can read my ten lessons in my column this week.

While all this Twittering and Facebooking has gotten plenty of attention, the basic bread and butter of any small business is the care and feeding of its e-mail lists to connect its customers, suppliers and partners. The better you are at doing e-mail lists and sending out regular and informative communications, the more business you will have.

You can read the first of a two-part series in my column this week in PC World here.

As more small businesses rely on email and Instant Messaging for their communications, there are a number of inexpensive methods that they can use to keep their conversations private and ensure that only the intended recipients read them. And these days even the smallest business can make use of security products that are easier to use and don’t require a computer guru to setup. 

You can read more in my story in today’s New York Times about simple tools and techniques that businesses can employ here.

The talk about Sarah Palin’s Yahoo emails being made public (you can easily find them, but believe me, they aren’t worth the time to read) bring up yet another reason to not post your birh date on various social networks. Granted, a public official is probably an easier target, but apparently access to her Yahoo account was made easier by the fact that she chose information that just about anyone could easily figure out to recover her password.

Of course, why she was using a Yahoo email account for government business is an entirely separate issue. Our governor here in Missouri (who is not running for higher office, let alone re-election) can tell you why that is a bad idea. Perhaps this will motivate a few more people to use encrypted email, or at least pick up the telephone, when they want to keep something private.