[edit 2010-05-10]
I posted this on my facebook account and received a well-deserved lambasting for up-voting the article.  I hadn’t thought hard enough on the problem of domain trusting with such a distributed, flexible, and multi-point service such as email.  Mat Whitney gave me a lesson on the difficulties of domain reputations when the domain is something like gmail.com or live.com — they’re publicly available and that’s where the majority of spam comes from, so how can you trust any sender from that domain without specifically white-listing the address?  That means there are only baby-steps in security available through a huge effort on the part of IT administrators with the technologies described in The Register’s article.  I take back my promotion of this article until I am able to speak more intelligently on the matter.   Whoops!
[end edit]

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www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/09/email_and_trust/

An article on The Register writes about finally adopting existing technology (software, not hardware) to allow people to trust their inboxes again.  With all the worms, identity theft attempts, scams, and general nogoodnickism that happens via email today, users are hesitant to open emails even from addresses they recognize.  It’s like getting a package delivered by USPS and wondering if you’ll find a pipe bomb or anthrax in each one.  Well, in the digital word, electronic messages can be signed in such a way that trust can be (largely) restored and, as with the Web, “feature rich” email is the way of the future.

The article describes that, as everyone should realize, social hubs like Facebook and [the defunct] Google Wave will grow in popularity and virtual size and will begin to experience the same problems that email users have to deal with daily.  Identity theft, worms (www.google.com/search?q=koobface), and hijacked accounts occur in Facebook already and there will be no long-term decrease in these activities because they are making money with them.

My words of advice: read the article; expect trust-restoring technologies in the near future that may look a little different from the email you’re familiar with, but will be fundementally the same; be wary of what you put on social media sites (Facebook, Google profiles, MySpace, etc.); be wary of who you friend and who you show your information to.  I absolutely DO NOT advise to stop using social media websites because they carry value (that’s for a different article), but realize that it’s just a picture and text — the person you think is behind that profile may not be who you expect.

As always, your thoughts/opinions/comments/defamations/flattery/proposals are welcome.  I have to refuse some of those on principle but send them anyway.

We use Outlook 2007 at work to manage all our emails, calendars, and contacts.