So I'm back in the office after a week's "vacation." Of course vacation doesn't really mean no work these days, at least not for me. I carry a Blackberry which means that I'm never really away from work. While on vacation I must have dealt with at least 30 emails that came across. Of course I could have ignored them but then this morning would have been that much harder. As it is I have to review around 550 messages to make sure I didn't skip one that really needed a response.

I thank my lucky stars that our MailSweeper service does a great job filtering out the SPAM.

I remember though when email was useful. But today it seems to really be a time hog, stealing moments away from productivity in order to get another useless tidbit of information that someone decided was important for me to see. Now don't get me wrong, I know I created my own monster here, and email is incredibly useful, but it's still refreshing to run into someone that isn't running to their email all the time.

Maybe I should write someone a letter, or even better, make a phone call...

-- Mike

So what's your take on email today? In business? At home? Let me know.

In case you hadn't been paying attention we are in the midst of another round in the Browser War. The Mozilla Foundation just released their latest and greatest version of FireFox yesterday with version 3.0, Opera released version 9.5 last week and Microsoft is in throngs of beta testing IE 8.0, and then there's Apple who has released versions of Safari for both Mac and Windows now.

Once again as developers we are being challenged with browser inconsistencies and ever-evolving standards that make our jobs harder and projects more expensive for you. And, does it really matter what browser you use anyway? The answer is a 100% unqualified "Maybe!" As developers have to make choices it is very probable that something you do doesn't work in FireFox that looks fine in IE, or vice versa.

Our own decidedly unscientific survey shows that FireFox's market penetration is still hovering at around the 15% mark. Is it necessary to put additional resources at 15% of the market? That's a question that's important for you to consider when working on a website redesign. If it is then you need to be sure that you're budgeting time and dollars into that effort. If not, then just remember that when a FireFox fan reaches out to say hello.

-- Mike

All outbound mail queues have been cleared and mail delivery is back to normal for all users.

Thank you for your patience and understanding while we fixed this issue.