Agility Loop

Earlier this week, Gmail quietly released a new add-on for Gmail called Priority Inbox.   The Gmail Blog post probably does a better job describing it then I can, but essentially it is a new way to view the messages in Gmail.  Gmail will prioritize messages in your inbox in three categories: Important and Unread, Starred, and Everything Else.  Gmail learns through your use of Gmail itself what messages are important and which ones are, well, less than important.  From their blog post:

As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the

or

buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)

You do have the ability to further tweak the Priority Inbox (as referenced in the quote above) by including certain labels or filters.  So far, I have not made any advanced tweaks.  I have however followed the advice given by MG Sielger over at Techcrunch:

My favorite aspect of Priority Inbox is the settings that allows you to create four different sections of your inbox. Yes, you could previously do this with the Multiple Inboxes feature, but these new settings make things much easier to understand and implement. The three default sections here are: “Important & unread,” “Starred,” and “Everything else” — but there’s an option to add a fourth, which you should. You should create a new label that you can quickly tag emails with. For example, I chose “A1″ since “A” shows up first in the Labels drop down menu. Set this section (which is actually the second section) to show emails with that label. Once you do that, your inbox will be transformed into four different boxes stacked on top of one another. At the top will be the “Important and unread” elements — this is your true Priority Inbox and ideally would be empty most of the time (indicating that you’ve read all these messages). Below that would be this new A1 section — these are your most important saved emails to come back to. Below that is your starred section — these are emails you quickly star that you might want to come back to. And below that is everything else — your general incoming email. Or as I like to call it, Hell.

So for the lack of being too creative, I actually did exactly as is recommended above...created a A1 category.  To be honest I am not sure that this method will work for me, but the nice thing about the new feature is I can tweak later as I use it. Reading around the web, it sounds like when you first turn it on, the results are mixed.  However, over a couple of days of email usage, I can say that it has improved (and this sentiment is echoed throughout the web). Keep in mind that you do need to turn on Priority Inbox.  Google is rolling this out to users throughout the week.  Once it is offered to you, you should see New! Priority Inbox upper right hand corner of Gmail.  You can always return to your regular inbox at any time (you will see both Priority Inbox and Inbox on the left hand side of Gmail). And a last note to Google.  Add this to the Gmail client on Android and you are invited to Sleekfest.

Saw this article over at NextGov this morning stating that the Army wants to outsource the creation of one email service for the Army.  BUT, once you read this article it becomes clear that they actually mean one Exchange based email system for the entire Army. The Army has wanted to do this for years, and in some ways had it with an antiquated email system in AKO.  I just wonder if other vendors out there will argue that there systems should be up to the task?  Seems like the Army has already made the decision on vendor without a fair competition...or at least that is an easy argument for  a vendor. What's also interesting is that the Army is "inviting companies to partner with the Defense Information Systems Agency" to house the email system.  Not sure how that contractual relationship would even work?  DISA's DECCs are not typically vendor facing, and unless something is changed, I am not sure they are designed to work directly with industry.  When working on other enterprise level acquisitions, this same kind of thing was encouraged, and the only offers that were really considered were those that housed the system at DISA "inside the firewall".

I do love it when wading through the Twitter chaff actually does yield something productive.  Thankfully, my saved search in TweetDeck led me to the Security Musings blog run by Gemini Security Solutions. Besides feeling a bit of kinship to a blog that seems to really get PKI and security, they had an interesting post a couple of days ago about S/MIME support in Gmail.   It is a Firefox plug-in called Gmail S/MIME.  From reading the blog entry and the plug-in home page, it sounds like it essentually wraps your message in an attachment (which is basically what an S/MIME message is anyhow) and uploads to Gmail. I gave it a test run by sending a message from Gmail to Outlook 2007 (only after an hour and a half of trying to fix Outlook...thx Gist plugin).  I get an underlying security message error in Outlook...odd.  That is usually related to trust or odd formatting of a message.  If I had some more time, I'd dig into the attachment.  Still a cool idea, and it has lots of promise.  One of the challenges of webmail (and mail on mobile devices) is signing and encrypting email. But it is 4/16 after all...time to watch the boys finish OGBC!

Today in GCN, there is an article entitled Industry group gives government a failing grade in e-mail authentication -- Government Computer News.  The main thrust of the article is detailing how most Government domains do not support any type of email domain authentication such as Sender ID or DomainKeys.

E-mail authentication technology, usually transparent to the end user, lets servers verify that e-mail traffic is indeed coming from the domain or sender that it purports to be from, and that the sender is authorized to use that domain. The OTA study showed that only 11 of 25 government domains examined use such authentication. A similar study of top commercial sites showed that the private sector is doing a little better, with 55 percent using some form of e-mail authentication.

To be fair, the private sector isn't doing so great either at 55%. What I find particularly ironic is that much of the government is ahead on PKI and other security technologies.  It seems like this would be a pretty easy solution to combat spam and phishing attacks.  I know in the past we have discuss using simple SMTP over SSL.  This would at least buy security of SMTP mail transfer, and authentication of domains (although it would be difficult to use with external email domains).  However, technology like DomainKeys (which Yahoo uses) is a more versatile solution than SMTP over SSL.  Hell it's even open source, so costs COULD be minimal.