About TechExperts

Tech Experts is southeast Michigan's leading small business computer support company. A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Tech Experts is your one-stop IT service company, offering "No Problem Support" to more than 200 businesses and individuals. Located at 1206 South Telegraph Road, Monroe, MI, 48161, Tech Experts can be reached at (734) 457-5001.

Month List

Six Ways To Ensure Your Email Gets Read

If you’re like a lot of us, you get so much email every day that you might spend as little as 15 seconds scanning a message to determine how it applies to you. 


Now, imagine that other people are reading your email the same way. If they can’t quickly identify the purpose of your message, they’ll probably delete it or leave it in the Inbox for “later” -  if later ever comes.

Here are some tips to ensure that your email messages are read and get the attention they deserve.

Have a clear purpose
When recipients receive your email message, they should be able to see at a quick glance how the message relates to them and why it’s important. 

They may be looking at a preview of your message in Microsoft Outlook or on a smart phone. Or they may see only subject lines in their inbox. If your subject line is confusing and irrelevant, your email will surely get deleted in a hurry. 

Here are some things you can include in subject lines to make sure the reader opens your mail:

A standard subject heading such as “Action Requested,” “Response Requested,” “FYI,” or “Read Only.”

The meaningful objective or supporting project that the message relates to, for example, “FY ‘05 budget forecasting.”

The required action if applicable, for example, “Consolidate departmental budget spreadsheets.” The due date if applicable, for example, “Due by July 7.”
An example of an effective Subject line is “Action Requested—Consolidate all department spreadsheets for FY ‘06 budget and return to me by June 15th.”

Tell them what to do
Be completely clear about the actions you want the recipients to take. 

Be specific and put all the material that is related to an action in one place. To get even faster responses, talk about how the action relates to the recipient’s objectives, and always give due dates. 

It’s also important to clarify what you want the recipient to do. There are basically four types of actions you could request:

Action: The recipient needs to perform an action. For example, “Provide a proposal for a 5% reduction in travel expenses.”

Respond: The recipient needs to respond to your message with specific information. For example, “Let me know if you can attend the staff meeting at 9am Friday.”

Read only: The recipient needs to read your message, and no response is necessary. For example, “Please read the attached sales plan before the staff meeting on August 12th.”

FYI only: The recipient should file your message for future reference. In fact, even reading the message is optional. For example, “Enclosed for your records are your completed expense reports.”

Give them all of the data
Make sure you give recipients all of the information they need to complete an action or respond successfully to your request. 

Your co-workers shouldn’t have to come back to you asking for information, whether it is a supporting document or a link to a file on a shared website. 

You can include supporting information in the body of the message, in an attached file, or in an attached email. 

Send only to necessary people
Target your message to the appropriate audience. Only people who have to complete an action on the Subject line should receive your message. Be thoughtful and respectful when you enter names on the To line. People observe your thoughtfulness and the results are more effective.

No forwards!
While everyone appreciates a little humor and a sanity break at the office, save the funny forwards, jokes, and cute pictures for personal email.
Posted: Mar 20 2012, 05:59 | Comments (0) RSS comment feed |
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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 prevent this costly and frustrating downtime from happening 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 into 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 four 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 optins. 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 set-up to block outside relays.

If you’ve got the wrong setting 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 ontinue to send messages to him, the chances of him reporting your company as a spammer is pretty high.

Avoid this by using in-house lists (instead of purchasing one) and contracting your list to verify the information.

We use and recommend iContact. They’re excellent commericial email service. To sign up for a free trial, or for more information, go to: http://icontact.extole.com/a/clk/37L8x

Posted: Dec 19 2011, 09:02 | Comments (0) RSS comment feed |
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Professional Email Addresses: How “Free” Email Could Cost You


Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

There are lots of ways you’ve worked to build positive brand and inspire trust with your clients. 

Pleasant phone greetings when client calls in, a professional sign over the office entrance, even stationary on a nice paper stock are important to let your clients know that you’re serious about your business. 

But what about having your own domain name for email? 

How does it look after a great conversation with a potential customer when you hand them your card and your email address you expect to have important business conversations with belongs to one of the big email providers offering free service? 

Put another way, imagine a lawyer with an email address of consultantpat@hotmail.com. Do you think Pat’s clients would be comfortable knowing that private correspondence with their consultant was being transmitted through a free email service? 

How would their perception change if Pat’s email were pat@robinson¬consulting.com? 

Professional branding aside, there are some great reasons to have your email at your own domain name for business email: 

Who’s going to help? Delete an important email? Can’t log in to your account? Have a question about the number of emails you can send from your account? 

The free email service providers have self-service tools to help you figure out your problem, but what can you do if you still have a problem? Who will you talk to and how long will you have to wait for help? 

Will your emails be delivered? “I didn’t receive your email.” Does this sound familiar? Free email accounts are very popular with spammers. Did you know that some mail services started blocking mass mail delivery from free email accounts with these domain names? 

The switching cost to a domain-based email address later is higher. There’s a strong benefit to having people know where to find you. Changing your email address can be a lot like a retailer relocating. All the business built over the years could disappear, as customers can no longer find you at the address. 

Unintended communica¬ion could be embarrassing, even damaging. Jon Smith is our hypothetical accountant with a free GMail account at jon.smith@gmail.com. Can you guess the number of times his clients have emailed their sensitive documents (even tax returns) to john.smith@gmail.com? 

Sure, it’s the client’s fault for the mistake, but could this have been prevented if he were Jon@ReliableAccountants.com? 

Free email accounts are very popular these days. But if you’re serious about your business and your brand, it might be time to consider how current and potential clients are judging you by a simple email address.

Posted: Aug 27 2011, 08:38 | Comments (0) RSS comment feed |
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Are You Suffering From Email Overload?

A cluttered and unorganized mailbox can make it difficult to find the email you need. This messy situation can be remedied. 

Microsoft Outlook offers great tools that help you sort your email and organize your messages in meaningful, easy-to-control ways. Outlook can even help increase your efficiency and productivity. 

Sort messages quickly

Outlook 2010 has a great new feature for organizing messages by date and arranging them by Conversation. 

Using this feature, messages that share the same subject appear as Conversations that can be viewed and expanded or collapsed by clicking the icon to the left of the Subject line. 

The messages within each Conversation are sorted with the newest message on top. When a new message is received, the entire Conversation moves to the top of your message list.

To turn on Conversations, on the View tab, in the Conversations group, select the Show as Conversations check box. 

In all versions of Outlook, you can find messages in mailbox folders more quickly by changing how they’re sorted in your email folders. For example, you can arrange your email by date, sender, or file size.

Email Overload

Group similar messages in folders

By creating new mail folders, you can group messages related to each other. For example, you can group messages by topic, project, contact, or other categories that make sense to you. You can even create a folder for all the messages from an important client or vendor.

In Outlook 2010, to create a new folder, on the Folder tab, in the New group, click New Folder. In Outlook 2007 or 2003, on the File menu, point to New and then Folder.

Create search folders to find messages fast

Search Folders are a quick way to look at predefined collections of email messages. 

They don’t actually store any messages themselves. They’re virtual folders that offer a view of all the messages in your Inbox that match your search criteria. 

You can use Search Folders to help you find all the information related to a particular project, an important client, or an upcoming conference.

To create a Search Folder in Outlook 2010, in Mail, on the Folder tab, in the New group, click New Search Folder. To create a Search Folder in Outlook 2007 or 2003, in Mail, on the File menu, point to New, and then click Search Folder.

Route mail efficiently using mailbox rules

By creating rules for Outlook, you can automatically perform actions on both incoming and outgoing messages based on criteria you establish. 

For instance, you can automatically forward all messages sent by your VIP clients to everyone on your sales team, assign the category Sales to all messages you send that have the word “sales” in the Subject line, and more. 

Routing mail efficiently not only organizes your mail for you - but also frees up your time from performing routing tasks.

Reduce unwanted email with junk filters

Keep distracting and unwanted messages out of your Inbox by using Outlook Junk Email filters. 

These filters send junk email to a separate mail folder in your Inbox. 

You can review these messages to ensure that no legitimate messages are there, and if they are, you can adjust the filter to avoid flagging such messages in the future. 

It’s a good practice to monitor the Junk Email folder to make sure you don’t miss any important messages.

Posted: Jul 29 2011, 09:22 | Comments (0) RSS comment feed |
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Staying Safe: How To Back Up Your Outlook Email Data

Your Outlook data file, also called a PST file, contains all of the data that is created and received in Outlook such as emails, contacts, notes, your to-do list, calendars and other Outlook data.

If you rely on email for your day to day work, keeping your Outlook data backed up frequently could save you hours of frustration and potentially lost data. 

Over time, your email data file grows and shrinks as you receive and delete email. While not extremely common, the data file is prone to corruption - which is the most common way Outlook users can lose data. 

To prevent corruption and possible data loss, always keep in mind:

Close Outlook properly – shutting down your email without going through the “File, exit” dialogue can cause file corruption. 

Watch your file size - A PST file that exceeds 3gb can be problematic. Although Microsoft says newer versions of Outlook (2003 and newer) will support PST files up to 20gb, in our experience, Outlook operates best if you keep the file below 3gb. 

To manually back up your Outlook data file in Windows Vista and Windows 7, follow the steps below.

1. Open “My Computer” and browse to your C:/drive. 

2. Click on tools. Once the drop down menu is displayed, choose Folder Options. If the tools menu is hidden press alt on your keyboard to display it. 

3. In Folder Options, click on the view tab.

4. In the middle of the window there will be a list. Under Hidden Files and Folders, check show hidden files and click ok.

5. On your C:/drive browse to the users folder, and select the user account you are using.

6. Select App Data, then Local.

7. Scroll down to the Microsoft Folder and open.

8. Select your Outlook data file. It is usually named Outlook.pst. Right click the file and select copy.

9. Open the destination of your choice, such a flash drive, or a different folder on your hard drive.

10. Right click and select paste. 

11. You have successfully created a backup of your Outlook Data File.

 To manually back up your Outlook data file in Windows 2000/Windows XP follow the directions listed below. 

1. Open Computer and browse to your C:/drive.

2. Click on tools once the drop down menu is displayed click Folder Options.

3. In Folder Options click on the view tab.

4. In the middle of the window there will be a list. 

5. Under Hidden Files and Folders check show hidden files, click ok.

6. On your C:/drive browse to Documents and Settings and select the user account that you use.

7. Select Local Settings then Application Data, and then scroll down to the Microsoft folder and open it.

8. Select your Outlook data file. It is usually named Outlook.pst. Right click the file and select copy.

9. Open the destination of your choice, such a flash drive, or a different folder on your hard drive. Then, right click and paste.

We recommend backing up your Outlook PST file at least once a week for normal users, and if you’re an email power user, daily backups make sense.
Posted: Jun 27 2011, 06:42 | Comments (0) RSS comment feed |
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Three Things You Need To Know Before You Hit “Send”

It’s everyone’s favorite application. Since its introduction, it has revolutionized the way we communicate, both personally and professionally. 

It has had a major impact on how companies market themselves, communicate with vendors, and send out press releases, rally employees and alert clients to their latest and greatest promotion.

The ease, low-cost and speed of e-mail in marketing are the biggest reason why our inboxes are overflowing with spam. 

In response to the ubiquitous outcry, “I hate spam,” governments have crafted new regulations surrounding the use of e-mail; and if you are one of the millions of companies using it for marketing, then it’s important that you familiarize yourself with these laws, but the danger doesn’t stop there. 

Even if you don’t get caught by the feds for violating the rules of e-mail usage, you can still end up blacklisted with the major ISPs such as Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN. 

Once you get blacklisted, you are considered guilty until proven innocent, and ALL the e-mail you send won’t go through, even to people who want to receive it – a consequence that could end up hurting your business more than a fine. 

So what are the basic guidelines of e-mail marketing?

First and foremost, make sure you are only sending e-mail campaigns to people who have solicited (requested) to be on your distribution list.

This is called “opting-in” or subscribing, and e-mails sent to this folks are considered “solicited e-mail.”

You are perfectly within your rights to send them messages; but if you got their e-mail address by any other means and they did NOT specifially request to be on your list, that’s considered “unsolicited e-mail” or spam.

Sending promotional e-mails to people who have not requested it is not only illegal, but annoying..so don’t do it!

Next, make sure you provide directions on how a person can remove themselves from your distribution list in EVERY e-mail.

The best place to put this information is at the very bottom of your message. You should also include your full company name and contact information at the bottom so no one can blame you for cloaking your identity –another legal “no-no” of e-mail marketing.

Finally, when sending an e-mail, we recommend using a service such as iContact. Check it out at http://www.icontact.com/?cobrand=310189

These web based applications will help you manage your e-mail distribution list with automatic opt-out and opt-in tools and will keep your e-mail server off ISPs blacklist. 

Naturally, you want to make sure the information you are sending is interesting and relevant. 

No one wants more junk fi lling up their inbox so the better you are at marketing, the better your results will be.

E-mail is not a magic marketing bullet that will solve your marketing problems, but used correctly, it can certainly help you reach more customers and build stronger relationships with the people you already do business with.

Posted: Feb 02 2011, 04:59 | Comments (0) RSS comment feed |
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SPAM Prevention FAQ: Tips To Reduce Junkmail

How can you reduce the amount of junk email you receive? Here are our best tips!

Never Allow Your Email To Be Posted Or Listed

“Spiders” and web “crawlers” routinely “harvest” email addresses from web pages in an effort to build a collection of email addresses to send junk email to.

 
 

Never Unsubscribe Or Ask To Be Removed

The only exception to this rule is if you originally signed up for that particular list or asked to receive updates.

If you never asked to be part of a participating mailing list, why would you ask to be removed? Doesn’t make sense does it.

This is a common ploy spammers use to validate email addresses. If you respond, that proves to them that your email address is alive and active, and that you are receiving their emails.

Responding only encourages them to sell your email address to other spammers, and will ultimately increase the amount of junk email that you will receive.

Never Open Or Read Junk Email

Believe it or not, even if you never respond, but merely open a junk email, there could be special HTML code contained in that email message that will report back that you opened or read the message.

This provides validation to the spammer that your email address is alive and active, and you can bet you will start receiving more spam!

Be sure to turn off your email program’s Preview Pane feature, as this is essentially the same thing as “reading” a message.

Avoid Contests, Special Offers, And Chances To Win

These are gimmicks to get you to reveal your email address so they can send you special offers. Many free ecards (electronic greeting cards) are also ways companies collect email addresses.

Never Post To An Email List Using Your Private Email Address

Many spammers watch these posts in order to harvest new email addresses.So be very cautious when posting to these websites.

If you are a contact for a registered domain, do not list you private email address.

Instead of using your personal email address use a generic common mailbox for this purpose, or ask for domain registration privacy.

Create a public email address such as DNS@yourdomain.com or help@yourdomain.com.

Guard Your Computer Against Trojan Spyware And Software

Never open any attachments you don’t explicitly trust.

Some “fun” emails are often a ruse to steal email addresses or track your behavior on the Internet.

The use of both anti-virus, personal firewall, and or antispyware software is strongly recommended.

Use A Free Account As Your Public Email Address

Reserve your private email address for friends and select associates.

Never sign up for special offers using your private email address. Use your generic common email address for those.

Trick The Spammers

If you post an email address online, disguise its set-up, spelling out ‘dot com’ in place of .com.

Junk Mail Out Of Hand

If your junk mail has reached a level that it is just out of hand and you cannot handle it anymore, consider changing your email address.

If you don’t want to change your email address consider us to take advantage of our advanced SPAM filtering services.

We can make all necessary changes on your computer and with your email service to help prevent those spam messages.

Posted: Jan 20 2011, 04:29 | Comments (0) RSS comment feed |
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Email Is Making You Stupid


Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.
“The research is overwhelming. Constant email interruptions make you less productive, less creative, and, if you’re emailing while you’re also doing something else, just plain dumb.”

That quote - and the headline - comes from an article by Joe Robinson in Information Week magazine. When it arrived in my inbox, I was compelled to read it.

The fact is, as business owners, our lives have gotten incredibly more complex as we become more and more connected. Smart phones keep our email in front of us 24 hours a day, seven days a week - which compels us to be available on the same schedule.

The study Robinson sites was conducted by the University of Minnesota. It found that managing “peripheral tasks” - those things we do while we’re also doing something else - triggered twice the number of errors, and increased levels of annoyance by anywhere from 31 to 106 percent.

Time Is Money

Given our constant state of “connectedness” to clients, employees and prospects, it’s easy to think that we have to respond instantly to a request. I get caught in that trap: Thinking I’m being efficient when I handle something immediately.

Interestingly, Intel conducted a study of employee productivity, and found that email overload cost the company almost $1 billion a year in lost productivity. Each day, a typical office employee checks email 50 times, and uses an instant messaging application 77 times. 

Interruptions like this not only sidetrack employees from their jobs, but also lower overall attention spans and increase stress by measurable levels. Job satisfaction and creativity also suffer.

Myth Of Multitasking

Again, from Robinson’s article: “Human brains come equipped with two kinds of attention: Involuntary and voluntary. Involuntary attention, designed to be on the watch for threats to survival, is triggered by outside stimuli - what grabs you.
 
It’s automatically rattled by the workday cacophony of rings, pings and buzzes that are turning jobs into an electronic game of Whac-a-Mole. Voluntary attention is the ability to concentrate on a chosen task.” 

As your attention span is bounced around by constant interruptions, your brain changes: Interruptions erode an area called effortful control, and with it the ability to regulate attention. 

In other words, the more you check your messages, the more you feel the need to check them - an urge familiar to BlackBerry or iPhone users.

The cult of multitasking would have us believe that compulsive message-checking is the behavior of an always-on, hyper-productive worker. But it’s not. It’s the sign of a distracted employee who misguidedly believes he can do multiple tasks at one time. Science disagrees.

People may be able to chew gum and walk at the same time, but they can’t do two or more thinking tasks simultaneously.

So, how do we crawl out of the attention void? Interruption management. Here’s some things I’m trying: 

Turn off all of the alerts that let you know you’ve got mail. 

Pick a few times per day - four maximum - to check your email. Outside of those designated times, keep Outlook closed.

Don’t let email be the default communication device. Communicating by phone or face-to-face saves time and builds relationships.

Respond immediately only to urgent issues. Just because a message can be delivered instantly does not mean you must reply instantly.

Severely restrict use of the reply-all function.

Put “no reply necessary” in the subject line when you can. No one knows when an e-conversation is over without an explicit signal.

Resist your reply reflex. Don’t send emails that say “Got it” or “Thanks.”

Use automatic out-of-office messages to carve out focused work time, such as: “I’m on deadline with a project and will be back online after 4 p.m.”

Please email me at tfox@expertsmi.com and tell me about your interruption management methods. I’ll let you know in a the next few months how it goes.
Posted: Aug 30 2010, 09:36 | Comments (0) RSS comment feed |
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Choosing An Email Marketing Service Provider


Corey Bogedain is a network technician and web developer with Tech Experts.


Once your business has decided to invest in online marketing, the first service you’ll be considering is probably an email marketing service provider (ESP).

Basically, an ESP is a hosting company that runs email marketing services on their servers for you to use. The servers and Internet connections are optimized to send email. You use a web interface to compile and send your email to the ESP.

Then, the ESP’s servers and Internet connections do the hard work. If you tried to send bulk emails through your regular Internet provider, your campaign could be blocked, as most regular Internet providers prohibit bulk mailings.

Good reporting helps you measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, and your ESP should also provide very detailed reports. You should even be able  to see which of your subscribersopened your email and clicked on your links.

 

An ESP will also automatically  include an unsubscribe link in every email sent through their service - and automatically remove these addresses from your lists - to  make sure you comply with federal SPAM laws.

What should you look for in an ESP to make sure you choose the right one? Here are some criteria to consider:

IP Addressing

The IP address from which an email is sent is like a phone number - it tells the world where the email came from.

Just like you’d not want to share a phone number with a large group of strangers, you do not want to share an IP address with other customers at your ESP.

If your ESP uses shared IP addresses, too many spam complaints against another customer could get your shared IP address blacklisted by a major ISP. This would prevent your emails from being delivered, and it can take time for your ESP to get the IP off the blacklist.

Heavy Duty Systems

Make sure your ESP has multiple, high-speed connections to the Internet through more than one source, and that they have redundant hardware and servers.

This ensures reliability if one ofthe Internet connections fails or there is a hardware failure. This  is important because the ESP’s click-tracking tools require that the links go to the ESP first, and then it is redirected to your website (that’s how it can track the click).

There would be nothing worse than sending an email to your prospects and customers and having the ESPs  servers go down. The people reading your emails won’t be able to click through!

Support and Training

Your ESP should offer both online and phone customer support and training.

Good reporting

The ESP should offer a variety of user-friendly reports: deliverability success, open-rates, and click-through rates.

CAN SPAM compliance

Your ESP should require  customers to comply with the CAN SPAM Act and make it very easy to do so. The last thing you want isa fine from the federal government for not complying with the law.

Free trial

Most ESPs offer a free trial. Do a test drive to see if the service meets your needs.

Tech Experts uses iContact for all of our outbound email marketing. The company is reliable, and the services are priced very
inexpensively. For a free trial, browse to http://www.icontact.com/?cobrand=310189.

Posted: Jun 23 2010, 08:48 | Comments (0) RSS comment feed |
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Do You Know What Junk Email Costs Your Business?


Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

I used to think of junk email (spam) as just minor nuisance. Not so anymore. Today, spam is a major problem that costs businesses more than $100 billion a year in lost productivity and mitigation and prevention measures.

Spam used to be sent primarily by small time hackers trying to sell hair restoration, fake university degrees, and of course, anatomy enhancement pills.

The junk mail to real mail ratio was small, and spam didn’t take up a lot of room in email boxes. Spam didn’t place a huge burden on email servers, and they were easy to block.

Today, small time scammers are still responsible for some of those spams. The majority, however, are the work of organized criminals who use spyware and botnets to flood inboxes with an unprecedented amount of junkmail.

Spam profits can be huge. Hot stock tip scams, where criminals use spam to artificially create interest in a stock and raise the share price, can net the spammers millions of dollars.

Phishing scams, designed to steal your identity, can provide criminals with access to a mass amount of credit card data and sensitive corporate information.

Estimates put the cost of phishing alone at more than $8 billion in 2009.

With so much money at stake, spammers are constantly looking for new ways to get their junk emails past spam filters and to make their scams appear more convincing.

It has also drove an increase in the volume of junk mail. More than 2.8 million emails are sent every second - over 247 billion per day. Over 90% of that is junk email.

The cost to business

So, how does spam cost your business money?

Lost productivity: Experts put the labor cost of deleting each junk email at around four cents. By itself, that’s not all that significant. Multiply that, though, by perhaps 20 employees, each deleting 50 junk emails per day, and you’ll be spending over $14,000 over the course of a year.

Computer and network costs: Spam sucks up Internet bandwidth, and server storage space, both of which are significant costs to your business. This is especially true since a lot of spammers are using attachments to get around spam filters.

Security breaches and infections: Most malware and spyware infections are distributed via hacked websites. Even so, email has become more and more popular for infecting innocent users.

If your network becomes infected as the result of spammed spyware or malware, you’ll be facing a potentially expensive clean-up operation.

Phishing emails can lead to the exposure of sensitive corporate or financial information.

What you can do

The most effective way to prevent spam is to block it before you see it. We have dozens of clients with several hundred e-mail accounts currently utilizing our e-mail filtering system. We eliminate over 98% of the junk mail you normally would receive before our clients ever see it.

Our Experts Total Defense spam filtering system lets only the relevant and important messages come through.

You’ll have a clean inbox every day, and your Blackberry won’t ring all day with junk emails. You and your staff will become much more efficient and e-mail will be more useful again.

Plus, Experts Total Defense offers email archiving and off-site storage, saving valuable drive space on your servers.

You can use our filtering system if you have email hosted with us, or if you have your own in-house e-mail server (like Microsoft Exchange and Small Business Server). Give me a call if you’d like more information.

Posted: Mar 23 2010, 08:41 | Comments (0) RSS comment feed |
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