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I found this while surfing this morning, it reminds me of an email I received from the IT department at my last job. Something to do with “violating the computer user policy” by downloading web-based e-mail. I had set up Outlook to pull in my e-mail from Gmail. I used Gmail for all of my personal correspondence for 11 months before they caught on and edited my user account to remove the Gmail access.

So I loaded Thunderbird onto a USB flash drive and used that. I suppose that we both had too much time on our hands.

Up to no good at work? Software can analyze your e-mails

BEWARE, very soon big brother will be able to follow you to work. Software is being designed to allow companies to flag up employees who are potential saboteurs, industrial spies or data thieves. It might also flag up whistle-blowers.

US companies surveyed earlier this year said at least one-third of damage to business due to cybercrime was committed by insiders. “Many of the biggest financial losses tend to be due to trusted insiders, individuals who steal or who disable computer systems,” says Gilbert Peterson at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) in Ohio.

Writing in a forthcoming edition of Digital Investigation, Peterson and colleagues say their software is based on an open-source algorithm called Author-Topic. Developed by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, it gauges which topics authors commonly write about. Fed a series of documents, such as academic journal articles, Author-Topic examines the frequency with which words appear in each and uses that to infer which topic that document is about. It then identifies topics that each person writes on most.

[Link to original article]
Contact: Claire Bowles
claire.bowles@rbi.co.uk
44-207-611-1210
New Scientist

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If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6xv87m. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

I have started carrying a USB flash drive with me, back and forth to work, that has a TiddlyWiki loaded on it for tracking @Projects and my archives. I also loaded portable versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, to make life a little easier.

I was going to write a post about how excellent Thunderbird is for managing my Gmail accounts (since Gmail has no folders, blegh), but Katy at Flipping Heck beat me to it.

Check out what she has done with her Labels function:

Labels

Thunderbird allows you to apply labels (similar to Outlook flags as mentioned in Using Flags and Rules in Outlook) to emails. Unfortunately only one flag can be assigned to a message at a time (is that a problem or am I trying to be overly complicated?) but the labelled messages are easy to see if you have a full inbox (which you don’t of course, do you?)

To access the labels go to Tools > Options > Display > Labels (tab)

I have the following labels set up:

• Action
• Waiting For (more on @Waiting for)
• Defer
• Archive
• Delete

Unfortunately it would appear that 5 labels are the maximum you can have at the moment, but in terms of GTD this is enough. The only reason I could see you needing more is if you wanted specific project labels or one for personal messages, but then you could always get rid of the “Archive” and “Delete” options.

I’m not proud, I just set mine up in a similar way, and now I’m crankin’ out the widgets. Great post Katy!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5wd3ps. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen