Red Earth Software announced the release of Policy Patrol Zip, email management software for Exchange Server and Lotus Domino that provides automatic compression of attachments at the server level. Policy Patrol Zip can compress and decompress attachments for outgoing and incoming email, and uniquely offers the ability to compress internally sent attachments as well as external attachments.

Network Associates has been granted a broad US patent for technology covering "various computer program products, systems and methods" for filtering unwanted email messages. The antivirus software company said the US patent encompasses use of multiple spam-filtering techniques such as compound filters, paragraph hashing, and Bayes rules.

Microsoft has been granted a patent on the double-click by the US Patents and Trademark Office. Microsoft said last year that it would be seeking to improve earnings from technology which it claims it invented and would be using its patent portfolio to do so.

Designed to take advantage of deeper Office integration, the feature pack will ship in August and be added to the 1.2 release of Microsoft CRM. The prebuilt Office integration will allow users to remain in Microsoft Office 2003 applications to create and track customer communications, escalate customer-service cases and look up customer data.

Amsterdam District Court denied Microsoft’s request for an injunction to keep Lindows from selling its products in the region. The Dutch court, which also ordered Microsoft to pay 944 euros to Lindows Inc. for its legal fees, agreed with Lindows Inc. that not every use of the trade name Lindows infringes on Microsoft’s "windows" trademark.

Microsoft is set to offer for download a "public preview" beta release of its Windows Media Player 10 technology. The biggest enhancement will be the new DRM (digital-rights-management) technology, code-named "Janus," that will be embedded inside.

Tired of switching windows between Exchange System Manager, Event Viewer, Active Directory Users and Computers and whatever else you use to manage your Exchange environment? The Microsoft Exchange Team shows how to put them all in one custom MMC window.

NewsLook add-in, pdated to version 1.53, allows you to read and write to Usenet newsgroups within Outlook.

It might be difficult to convict spammers under the Can Spam Act and other state and local antispam laws, because to hold someone criminally responsible for a crime, there needs to what is known as "minimum contacts." This means that the accused has to have some kind of presence in the state in which they are convicted, and mass emails to people in a particular state might not be enough to show minimum contacts.

More sites are built on ASP.NET than Microsoft, says Netcraft, but Mono may change that. The open source implementation of .NET will enable developers to use .NET on Linux and Apache. This commentary raises potential legal issues with Mono, in particular some ASP.NET features that were not given over to standards bodies like ECMA and ISO that could throw Mono’s legality into question.