The business stories that matter, by Fortune's Colin Barr
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February 12, 2008, 3:03 pm

Dell jumps on the e-mail bandwagon

Tech hard-chargers want in on the e-mail business. Dell (DELL) agreed Tuesday to spend $155 million to buy MessageOne, a small-business e-mail software company that competes with Google’s (GOOG) Postini and Yahoo’s (YHOO) Zimbra. “MessageOne brings to Dell world-class technology and talent that will broaden Dell’s configurable services offerings,” Dell said Tuesday morning. As it happens, MessageOne is run by Michael Dell’s brother Adam - an apparent conflict of interest Dell dealt with in part by hiring Morgan Stanley to offer up a so-called fairness opinion and by having Michael Dell and his wife agree to donate their proceeds to charity.

Elsewhere, there is talk of a Google play for Plaxo, the former LinkedIn rival backed by Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz. The Plaxo deal chatter taps into a Silicon Valley debate that Fortune’s Josh Quittner takes note of: “Who really owns your address book?” Many companies believe you do - but Microsoft (MSFT), surprise surprise, isn’t among them. It has been trying to sell third parties access to Hotmail users’ contact lists, Quittner reports. The company insists that it’s doing so not for selfish reasons but to protect users’ security. Maybe it’s time for a fairness opinion on that practice.

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Colin Barr covers business and finance for Fortune.com. Previously he was an editor at TheStreet.com and author of the weekly Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street column, and an editor at Dow Jones Newswires.
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