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Is Hosted Exchange A Good Idea For Your Business?

by Jeremy Miller, Technician
Email has become as important as any other utility to most businesses. So obviously, company owners will want to avoid interruptions at the lowest price possible.

For small to medium sized businesses, our Hosted Exchange service is the best option.

You only have to pay a flat per-user fee. This takes the hassle away from having a server on-site that has to be maintained and updated.

With Hosted Exchange, you don’t have to worry about your email data.

The facilities that house the Exchange server clusters are managed by Microsoft – the company that invented Exchange!

This can benefit you by having a very high uptime percentage, secure email backups, and synced data on all of your devices.

The cost of using Hosted Exchange compares favorably to having an onsite email server.

If your company has a relatively small number of email users, the savings can be as much as 90 percent.

However, even at 100 or more users, Hosted Exchange can reduce your costs by as much as 50 percent.

Hosted Exchange facilities always use third party backup support, which protects your email data from any foreseeable disaster.

This is great because, even if the facility was completely destroyed you will not experience a service interruption. This is possible because you will be able to use your email from the off-site backup location.

If your business begins to grow, your email will be able to expand to meet your needs. Using Hosted Exchange will minimize the impact on your internal network.

This will free up local bandwidth for server/client transactions. If you want to upgrade to a newer version or migrate to a new computer, the process will be easy and painless.

Exchange does more than just email. It is also a calendar and a contact list.

With Hosted Exchange all of your meetings can be shared with other members of your company. You’re also able to create contact lists that you can share with others.

Users will be able to access Exchange from almost any device, such as: Computers, smart phones, and tablets. Even though Exchange is a Microsoft product, users will be able to access it on a Mac.

The default Mail, iCal, and Address Book have had Exchange support since 2009.

However Microsoft developed Entourage to be very similar to Outlook.

This has a lot more functionality than the default mail apps, and was designed to interface with Exchange.

Also users can access their email from any machine that can use a web browser thanks to Outlook Web Access which is included with all Exchange mailboxes.With Outlook Web Access, you log into the Exchange system, and then use an interface that looks just like Outlook to manage your email.

If your company is email dependent, we’d love to talk to you about Hosted Exchange and the benefits to your business. Give the office a call at (734) 457-5001, or email us at info@MyTechExperts.com. And yes, that goes to our Exchange system!

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.

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

Phishing Schemes Are On The Rise

A phishing e-mail is an e-mail sent by a hacker designed to fool the recipient into downloading a virus, giving up their credit card number, personal information (like a social security number), or account or login information to a particular website.

Often these e-mails are well designed to look exactly like an official notification from the site they are trying to emulate.

For example, a recent phishing e-mail was circulated that appeared to come from Facebook stating that videos or photos of Osama Bin Laden’s death were posted online. These e-mails looked exactly like a legitimate Facebook e-mail and even appeared to come from “Facebookmail.com.”

Once you clicked on the e-mail the phishing site would attempt to install a virus on your machine.

And now due to recent security breaches with Sony and e-mail marketer Epsilion, phishing attacks are going to increase – and they are going to get more sophisticated and harder to distinguish from legitimate e-mails.

That’s because the hackers that were able to access the private databases of the above mentioned companies now have the name, e-mail and interests of the subscribers, and in some cases birthdays, addresses and more. That means a phishing e-mail can be personalized with relevant information that the user provided to Sony, making the e-mail appear to be more legitimate and the user more likely to click on the links provided and take the actions requested. Now more than ever it’s critical that you are wary of e-mail notifications and the actions they request you take. Even having good anti-virus software installed won’t protect you if you give your account information away freely.

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Avoiding Common Email Security Threats

Most companies today rely heavily on the use of email. Emailing is a very fast and cost effective form of communication for many different types of businesses.

Most companies use it as their main source of communication between employees. In fact, most employers do not realize the risk of using email.

Some risks range from viruses, hackers, to someone else just trying to gain a little information.

Here’s an overview of the most common email security threats in today’s Internet world.

Viruses
Viruses cause billions of dollars in damage to businesses every year.

Many corporate email systems are still quite vulnerable to viruses. In fact, in last year alone, an estimated 63 distinct email virus attacks hit the United States. These attacks come quickly and can spread quickly.

They mainly cause slowdowns across the internet. However some have been known to take down major corporation’s entire email systems.

Today’s viruses are very complex and often appear to be harmless such as personal notes, jokes, or promotions. While most viruses require recipients to download attachments in order to initiate infection and spread, some are designed to launch automatically with absolutely no user action required.

Spam
Studies have shown that 20 percent of corporate email is spam. A company that has a thousand employees could receive over two billion spam emails in a full year.

Most do not realize it until a lack of productivity ends up costing the companies billions of dollars each year.

While most spam is just annoying, some of it can be very dangerous. Most trick employees into opening malicious emails to spread faster. Also, many hackers have begun disguising viruses as spam.

Phishing
Phishing is used to trick a person into thinking the email is legit and came from a real website, usually asking the person to verify their password or to change some sort of account information.

Then, taking them to a fake website and stealing what you have typed in. This is the number one way people get their identity and personal information stolen.

Spyware
The main purpose of spyware is to install itself on the victim’s computer. It monitors all key strokes and mouse clicks so that they can later go back and collect usernames, passwords, credit card numbers and bank account numbers.

These infections can stay installed on computers for many months without an antivirus picking them up.  Most are detected and removed instantly if the user keeps their antivirus up to date.

Having a great antivirus that scans files as well as emails can help prevent virus attacks, phishing and spyware.

Users should also have an up to date spam filter that prevents the infection from getting to your inbox to begin with. And most importantly never open an email attachment you didn’t specifically request.

Also, pay attention to links inside emails that appear legitimate. Many times, phishers will send you an email that looks like it came from an official source. After clicking the links, you’re redirected to a site on the hacker’s network. This is often used to collect personal information and passwords.

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 the next few months how it goes.

Choosing An Email Marketing Service Provider

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.