Tag Archives: Spam

Start 2014 With a Clean Slate!

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Start 2014 With a Clean Slate!
Or rather a clean in-box!!

Is your business drowning in spam?  For years we have helped many of our clients take back their in-box and their email.  No longer are they wasting hours of time a week  trudging through hundreds of spam messages.

Using a service called Postini (owned by Google), I myself have personally seen results go from dozens of spam messages an hour, to less than one a day!  How can I say this?  Because not only am I an advocate, I’m a user; I’ve been using Postini now for my own accounts for over 5 years and can’t believe the results.  At one point I was receiving hundreds of spam emails a day (not to mention viruses attached to some of those messages), now its a rare occasion to get one piece of spam.  AND at the end of each day I receive a single list of all messages filtered out by Postini.  In less than a minute I can scan through the summary list to see if there are any valid emails that were mistakenly filtered.  If I find one, I simply click on a button and that email is delivered instantly.

We all use email, we all depend on email.  If your business is suffering from spam, let us know – we can help! At less than a few dollars a month, Postini is a steal when you consider how valuable your time is and how much of it is wasted because of spam.

Let this be Number 1 on your New Year’s Business Resolution list; Take back your in-box!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Emaxed

Its a quick one!

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Two Tips for Today:

1) If you have a password that is an actual word (or is all letters), CHANGE IT NOW.  Using what are called brute force (dictionary) attacks, a hacker can “guess” your password in seconds!

A client of ours this week had their password “guessed”, and in just a few hours the hackers/spammers sent out over 20,000 emails using our client’s email account! The result? Our client, along with the entire email server, was labeled by Verizon, Comcast, AOL, (and other services) as a spammer. It not only caused problems for that client, it effected hundreds of other clients as well.

Change your password!  Use odd characters, capital letters and numbers.  And don’t use the same password for multiple websites. A password takes about a minute to change, but could save you HOURS of frustration.

2) If you get strange emails from your friend who has an AOL email address (or yahoo or another free email service), with weird web links in that email, your friend’s AOL account was broken into and hackers/spammers are using that account to send spam.  Contact your friend immediately and tell them to change their AOL password ASAP.

OH and if you are using AOL for business email, call us today and we will get you setup with your own company email and help bring your business in to the 21st Century!  If you use AOL, you have no idea how many emails you might not be getting from your customers, clients, prospects and/or leads… In this economy, its not worth the risk to use AOL for business.

 

Holiday eShopping is here: Don’t get scammed!

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Follow these 3 Steps to protect yourself!

Today I almost clicked on an email that was most definitely a spam/scam message. The email looked that legit to me (and I definitely should know better). Only after taking a few seconds and remembering these three easy steps did I catch myself before it was too late.

First some vital information: Many of the spam emails you receive are sent for one reason, to get you to click on any of the links contained in the email. Once you click on a link, your web browser will open and there is a good chance your browser/computer could be infected with a virus or some sort of malware.  But there is more… You could be sent to a website that looks JUST like a real company’s site, and once there, you may innocently proceed to type in your user-name and password to login to your account.

But Guess what?
You just gave your real account information directly to a hacker. 

The site you were sent to was in fact a bogus website, and when you logged into your account, you sent your information off to the hacker.  What is even more frightening is that some hackers are so skilled, they can grab your real user-name and password you just typed, save that information to their own computers, then incredibly, log you into the legitimate company’s website! (all within a second or two)

Now you are truly logged into www.Amazon.com, BUT you gave away your user-name and password information to the hacker, and you don’t even know you did so!

So before we even get to these 3 quick steps, know that the goal of most spam email is to get you to “click”. That means whatever you do, do NOT click unless you are VERY sure about the email message; even if the email appears to come from someone you know (or a company you trust, like Amazon, the example shown below).

Now without further delay, here are your three quick steps:


Step 1:
Roll your mouse over any link in the suspected email message.

Step 2:
At the bottom of your email window, you “should” see the URL address (the website) that link represents.  If the URL does NOT contain the main company web address that seems to have sent this email, do NOT click on any of the links in the email. For instance, the example here appears to have been sent by Amazon, stating that I placed an order – which of course I did not place. The plan is to get me excited and worried enough to want to immediately find out if someone broke into my account, by clicking on a link. **

Step 3:
If you are still worried that someone has broken into your account. Simply open up your browser, type in the company (www.amazon.com) and login to your account like you always do. Then look up your orders.

In fire rescue they say; Stop, Drop and Roll…

With email rescue let’s say; Stop, Think, and DON’T CLICK

** If your email reader does not display the URL at the bottom of your screen, then you can try right-clicking the link (which will NOT open your browser but will open a small pop-up menu). From that menu choose “copy link location” and then right-click into a word processing program and choose to “paste”.  That will show you the link’s URL without it opening up your browser.