This Small Business Intruder Is Stealing Your Money And Ruining The Environment!

Spam. Everyone knows what a pain it is but few truly understand the costly impact it has on their business and the environment. The average employee spends up to15 minutes per day cleaning out the e-mails on Viagra; if you have 25 employees earning an average of $45K per year, that means you are paying them approximately $2,200 per month to press the delete key. 

     According to Ferris Research, spam cost businesses more than $30 billion dollars last year in lost productivity, IT costs, and spam control software—that’s more than $4.48 for every man, woman, and child on the planet!

     To top it off, spam also has an environmental impact. The “Yale Environment 360” report cited that transmitting, deleting, and reading spam wasted enough electricity to power 2.4 million American homes and created greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 3.1 million cars. The majority of the electricity used (80%) was from sifting through and deleting junk mail.

3 Ways To Stop The Spam Invasion!

     Check out these 3 ways you can reduce this costly and time-sucking e-mail pest from hindering your company’s productivity.

1) Don’t Respond To Or Opt Out Of Spam E-mails

Don’t assume these are legitimate communications! If you try and opt out of these lists, you are basically verifying your e-mail address to the spammers, ensuring even MORE junk e-mail than before. And you certainly don’t want to respond; that will make you an even bigger target!

2) Use Your Junk Mail Folder

 Microsoft Outlook  will automatically separate spam into your junk mail folder so you can spend less time sorting through your inbox. It also reduces your chances of opening a malicious junk message which may contain a virus or worm.  The downside of this folder: you might have to periodically check it to make sure no “good” messages are sitting in there.

3) Get A Spam Filter – Whether the spam filter you choose is a hardware appliance, software you install locally on your network, or a third-party spam filter that cleans and captures messages before they arrive on your network, having one is important. Over time, you can “train” these filters to know which messages to block and which to keep.

The Absolutely Best Spam Filter We’ve Found

     After looking at dozens of spam filters, we’ve discovered a solution that is by far the best there is. Not only will it rid your inbox of those annoying, time-consuming, and unsolicited junk messages finally and forever, but it also will scan your e-mail for viruses and hold onto all of your e-mail in case your e-mail server goes down.

     For as little as $3.95 per user, our spam filter is easy to use, simple to set up and is guaranteed to reduce your spam by 98% - or your money back.

     And, during the month of January, we’ll sweeten the pot even more by waiving our set-up fee ($99) AND giving you our 27-Point Problem Prevention Audit ($540 Value) FREE. Call us now to get started:

Call: 508-992-2541

  

How To Keep Your E-mail Off The “Naughty” List

Someone’s making a list and checking it twice; but it isn’t Santa. Due to rising e-mail abuse and spam, hundreds of servers at various companies now monitor e-mail accounts to make sure those accounts are not sending out mass e-mails. If that e-mail account is assumed to be sending spam it is put on the “blacklist”. Once on the blacklist, your e-mail account is virtually SHUT DOWN because your e-mail is blocked by hundreds or thousands of servers and your message can’t be delivered. Big companies who give out e-mail addresses like AOL, Google, and Comcast, for example, will cut off e-mail service to anyone who sends an e-mail to a large number of people at once. Because of this, even if you or your employees innocently send a message to 100 of your clients, you could be without e-mail for days or weeks. So, how do you avoid this costly & frustrating downtime to happen to you? Read these tips to find out:

Protect Your Server. Spammers LOVE to find e-mail servers that don’t have a proper firewall , anti-virus, and intrusion protection. They get a high from hacking in to these servers and then using them to send out thousands of e-mails. Plus, with no protection in place, tracking and catching these spammers is nearly impossible. The right protection will also prevent malware from being installed on your server, which can automatically send spam without human interaction.

Don’t Allow Employees To Forward Messages. Unless it is for work-only related purposes, make a policy that no one is to forward messages like jokes, photos or videos outside the company. If just 4 of your employees send out this kind of an e-mail to 30 of their contacts, that’s well over 100 people receiving junk mail on the same day from the same e-mail server. This puts you at high risk of being blacklisted.

Have Your Clients and Prospects “Opt-In”. Sometimes companies end up on the blacklist because someone on your list complained and reported your message as spam. If you have your clients and prospects agree via an opt-in form that they want to receive communication from you and confirm their permission, then you’ll have better protection against that. Also make sure you keep good records of these opt-ins. That way, even if you do get blacklisted, you should be back up and running fairly quickly.

Make Sure Your E-mail Is Set-Up Properly. In addition to protecting yourself from hackers and invasions with software and firewalls, you also need to be sure that your e-mail is configured correctly and is set-up to block outside relays. If you’ve got the wrong settings in your e-mail account, you could wind up blacklisted, without any e-mail for days or weeks,

Keep Your E-mail List Up-To-Date. If someone asks to be removed from your list and you continue to send messages to him, the changes of him reporting your company as a spammer is pretty high. Avoid this by using in-house lists (instead of purchasing one) and contacting your list to verify the information.

For Help With Keeping Your E-mail Up & Running And Off The Blacklist, Contact Us By December 31st For A FREE Blacklist Avoidance Assessment (A $295 Value!)

(508) 992-2541

FREE E-Mail Accounts: You Get What You Pay For...

We’ve all been told there is no such thing as a free lunch; yet it’s hard to resist the siren’s call of “FREE.” That’s one of the reasons why so many people have free e-mail accounts through Hotmail, MSN, and Gmail.

And while you might not be paying out of pocket for these services, there IS a cost. Here’s the price you pay when you use a free e-mail account:

An Extra Helping Of Spam: And loads of it. Are these free services selling your e-mail account? Do spammers have ways of gleaning your e-mail account? No one seems to know for sure (or at least they’re not talking). But the bottom line is you’ll end up with a lot more ads for Viagra than you bargained for.

Your E-mails Aren’t Guaranteed Delivery: The majority of spam messages come from free e-mail accounts. Even though you aren’t sending them, spam filters look at the server sending the message and, if it’s a known source for spam, will block the e-mail from going through. That means your e-mails might be getting blocked before they even reach the sender.

Customer Service? Non-existent! See you DO get what you pay for! If you have a problem, you’re on your own to figure it out.

Difficulty In Moving, Forwarding, or Downloading: Free e-mail services require that you read your e-mail through their web interface. If you want to move, forward or download your e-mail, contacts or other information, the process is cumbersome and sometimes impossible.

No Archiving: E-mail archiving, or storing old e-mails in a searchable, retrievable format has become very important (even a legal requirement) in some industries like medical and financial. E-mail is considered a form of communication and if you use it to support customers, order products, or to negotiate any type of deals, you want to keep a record.

So while these free services are okay for chatting casually with your friends, they are NOT recommended for business purposes or for sending anything you consider important.

Here's a question to ask yourself: if your e-mail account was erased tomorrow and all of the messages, contact information, and history went bye-bye, would it be a slight inconvenience or a catastrophe? If it’s the latter, then you need to bite the bullet and get a "real" e-mail account. And, while you’re at it, you should also get an account that reflects your own URL.

The only reason for keeping a free e-mail account is to provide certain web sites with an e-mail address when you don’t care about getting communications from them, or that may spam you later on.

Want to learn more about setting up a proper business e-mail system? Give us a call at 508-992-2541 or e-mail us at support@thinktechonline.com.