Maxprog is proud to present a new release of MaxBulk Mailer, new version 5.2, available now in English, German, French, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese and Russian on Maxprog Web site with several interesting improvements, new features and bug fixes.

MaxBulk Mailer is an email-merge solution for Macintosh and Windows that supports plain text, HTML and rich text formats including optional plain text alternative and attachments. It includes document and contact management, support for multiple lists and multiple accounts with POP, APOP and ESMTP authentication, SSL, groups, mySQL and postgreSQL imports, unicode UTF-8 support, 40 encoding for virtually any language and hundreds of exclusive features.

Hewlett-Packard is ramping up its desktop line with additions to four models that will emphasize energy efficiency and long life cycles for business customers.

As it has with other models in its Compaq line, the company will offer Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors in two of these desktops. In addition, one model, the HP Compaq dc5750, will support Advanced Micro Devices’ Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor.

Adult material spam dropped to an all-time low in February, as spammers concentrated on health-related products and other general product pitches, according to a report from vendor Symantec.

And similar to software, spam is also increasingly being localized. The Symantec report on spam also said that there was a rise in gambling-related spam in German, Italian and French, while previously it was only mostly in English.

Almost every performance review includes some criticism. But what happens when you feel like your boss has almost nothing good to say in the review? Does it mean not just that your work could be improved, but that your boss wants you gone? Here are some tips to help you recover from that bad performance review.

HELIOS Software GmbH has released for free download a Mac Intel compatible version of its backup tool HELIOS Xtar.

As a developer of cross-platform networking, PDF, and image server solutions, HELIOS Software is able to ensure reliable transfers of Mac meta data (Finder and resource information) between different platforms. Now HELIOS passes on its accumulated development experience to the Open Source community in the form of the free Xtar tool, which is basically the UNIX "tar" program extended by HELIOS to include full Mac OS X (PPC/Intel) compatibility.

eBay has confirmed that, early on the morning of March 8 EST, an alleged Romanian hacker calling himself "Born_To_Scam_American_Guys" posted records for 15 eBay users on an eBay forum for between 40-60 minutes before the company removed them.

The posts were put up on the Trust & Safety board. According to other forum members who claimed to have taken part in the discussion and begged eBay to take down the information, the hacker signed in under a hijacked account and began taunting others, with the final result being the posting of the 15 accounts.

Offshore call centers are expected to continue growing, despite the fact that some companies are bringing their customer care services back home.

Last week, Lloyds TSB became the latest British company to decide to reduce its use of Indian call centers. But earlier this week, Barclaycard announced that it is moving more work to Mumbai, and Datamonitor contact center outsourcing analyst Peter Ryan said it is shortsighted to predict the end of customer service outsourcing.

The best ideas for your business might come from someone who doesn’t even work for you. That’s the contention made by author and consultant Don Tapscott in his newest book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

Tapscott, along with coauthor Anthony D. Williams (who teaches at the London School of Economics), believes that the pervasiveness of the Internet will usher in an era where companies will lower their proprietary barriers and collaborate to foster greater innovation.

Cisco Systems and IBM are expanding a cooperative support offering from the U.S. to 46 other markets.

Through the offering, called Managed Maintenance Solutions for Cisco Products, enterprises that use IBM as a systems integrator can get Cisco technical support by calling IBM. It is designed to simplify IT administrators’ jobs and prevent them from having to choose between turning to Cisco or IBM for help, said Cisco spokeswoman Mandy Knotts.

Cisco has a worldwide technical support organization but is not a systems integrator.

Business process improvements, customer relationship management and business analytics are high on CIOs’ to-do lists this year.

If there is any question that technology initiatives must respond to business needs, it is put to rest by what readers of eWeek say they’re focusing on in 2007.

More than a third of those who took eWeek’s top-projects survey say they are looking to do business process improvement. The next hottest areas, customer relationship management and business analytics, also require collaboration between information technologists and business people. Nowadays, businesses aren’t funding anything whose return on investment they can’t see.