Posts Tagged ‘spam’

27th
Aug

SPAM: How much is it costing you in lost time and productivity?

spam1.jpg

Exchange My Mail has processed 12,310,644 email messages between July 15th 2009, and August 15th 2009. ( 31 Days )

Of those 12,310,644 messages, 4,495,043 were classified as blatant spam and deleted. Another 2,358,516 messages were flagged as spam, and sent to customers quarantine. Our customers received a total of 5,430,881 messages in their inbox, thus preventing hours upon hours of wasted time sorting though over 6.8 million spam messages. This translated into millions of dollars saved by our customers in lost time and productivity.

One domain received a total of 248,062 messages for the same 31 day period. Of those messages, 130,319 messages were flagged as blatant spam and deleted or quarantined. The remaining 117,743 messages were delivered to the mailboxes on the domain.

How much is spam costing your company? Google unveiled a nifty little calculator to help you add it up.

Once you quantify how much spam is costing your company, it makes sense to re-evaluate the IT options for managing spam. The first, and perhaps biggest, decision is whether to keep spam filtering in-house or use a hosted service. It can be difficult to add up the true expenses of each solution. On the surface, the cost of an appliance may seem reasonable, but the up-front costs are just the beginning in a complete cost-of-ownership calculation.

Exchange My Mail has always provided enterprise grade spam and virus protection to all customers at no additional cost. We partnered with Postini to offer their advanced spam and virus protection because we understand how important it truly is.

All of our Hosted Exchange plans come complete with Postini spam and virus protection, ActiveSync, and a free copy of Outlook 2007 or entourage 2008 for each user. Unlike our some of our competition we don’t nickle and dime our customers for every little thing.

Our Unmatched support is the reason for the amount of customer referrals we receive each day. Our customers are confident in our service and support that they are happy to refer friends and colleagues to us day after day.

Review our Ratepoint rating, and see for yourself.



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Posted in General, Hosted Exchange, Hosted Exchange 2007, Software, Technology, Tips & Tricks

2nd
Jul

How Bloggers Can Fight Spam -

How Bloggers Can Fight Spam:

no-spam

Bloggers all over the world have learned an unfortunate reality: spammers love to hit any Web site that lets them leave comments. Many spammers are not human – they’re programmed bots that hit numerous sites every hour, posting links in comments sections. Others are human – these spammers are also able to hit plenty of blogs each hour.

No blogger wants a cluttered, spam-infested comments section, but most don’t necessarily have much free time to deal with spam. If you have a blog, and you’re trying to fight junk messages, these tips will help you control the garbage without devoting a few hours a day to deleting unwanted comments.

* Require a login to post comments. Spammers might log in and comment anyway, but many will pass over your site in favor of a “friendlier” one. Making users login before they comment also discourages the anonymous Internet trolls, as they prefer to remain unknown.

* Enable the CAPTCHA feature. Anybody who wants to leave a comment on your blog must type the series of characters on the screen. This is fairly effective, as most spambots aren’t capable of reading the characters. Many human spammers can’t be bothered.

* Moderate comments. This feature lets you approve each comment before it appears on your blog. The disadvantage is that you do have to wade through comment spam. However, this is also an easy way to filter out comments from Internet trolls and just-plain-annoying visitors.

Those solutions, however, do not encourage visitors to interact with you, or return in the future. Many Internet users want things to be as simple as possible: they aren’t really interested in going through an extra step or two simply to comment on your blog.

One of the keys to fighting spam without discouraging your visitors is to keep things as simple as possible. There are, fortunately, several ways to accomplish this. These methods are not necessarily universal: some blog sites support them, and others don’t.  Wordpress is the most popular Blogging software available, and has many spam fighting capabilities built in. There are also tons of plugins available to add additional functionality to your beloved blog.

If your not already using Wordpress as your blogging software, you might have to switch your blog over to another site to take advantage of these features. However, that might be worth your time if it means that you’ll have a sizable advantage over the spammers.

* Look for spam-fighting scripts. These bits of programming are often easy to install and don’t typically require much maintenance on your part. Try different scripts to see which one works best with your blog.

* Create a “keyword blacklist.” You create a list of keywords that will trigger the blog site’s filtering system. If a comment includes one or more of the words on your blacklist, then the comment is not posted. This can be great for fighting spam, but difficult on your “real” readers. The blacklist looks for keywords, not overall content, so one “bad” word in a legitimate comment causes the site to scrap the whole comment.

These are just a few of the ways that you can fight comment spam. In most cases, these will drastically reduce the number of spam comments you see on your blog. However, you should check the blog site that you use to see what unique or site-specific measures it offers. Each blog site is a bit different from the others, so learn about what your site can do.

When deciding where to host your blog, remember that uptime is key. You don’t want your blog site down when your readers are trying to visit your site. Shared Hosting companies are offering some great deals now for Wordpress blogs, however remember that these are shared servers. So uptime is not going to be that great. Even the best hsoting companies cannot completely control the environment. The databases are shared as well, and so one busy site, or a web developer who is doing sloppy work can easily cause problems for the whole server.

In order to ensure the best uptime, a Windows VPS Server may be your best option.  Because a VPS server is isolated, you are the only one using those resources, and you will not be effected by others like on a shard environment.

Related Articles:
Windows VPS Hosting - Bridging the Gap

Eight Reasons to Choose Windows VPS Hosting

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Posted in Gadgets, General, Software, Technology, Tips & Tricks, Windows VPS Hosting

15th
Jan

How to: Create spam folder that opens the Postini Message Center.

postini_spam_folder

Many of our users check their Postini quarantine often. Sometimes several times a day, or maybe just once a day. In either case, this shortcut below will help make life just a little bit easier. We will show you how to check your Postini Quarantine while still in Outlook. No need to go to Postini’s site and login.

Follow these directions:

1) Open MS Outlook

2) Select View -> Folder List.

3) Right-click on “Outlook Today” and select “New Folder”.

4) Call the folder “Spam” or Postini-Spam ( or whatever you shose to name it ) and when prompted add an Outlook shortcut to the shortcut list. The shortcut will be placed on “My Shortcuts” but can be moved to the other Shortcut lists as necessary.

5) Right click the “Spam” folder, select “Properties”.

6) Select the “Home Page” tab in the Properties window.

7) In the address window type the following URL and select the checkbox labeled “Show home page by default for this folder”:
http://login.postini.com

8 ) Click “Apply” and “OK”.

9) Click on the Spam folder, login to your Message Center and if desired, select “Remember my Address and Password”

10) Close Outlook

[ The next time Outlook is opened and the Spam folder is selected, the Message Center should appear within Outlook.]

We hope that makes checking your Postini spam quarantine a bit easier.

Have you previously implemented this technique?  Is this the first your hearing about it? Comment below.

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Posted in General, Tips & Tricks

13th
Jan

Receiving invalid NDR bounces?

Receiving invalid NDR bounces?
You’re not the only one.

April 16, 2008 - Postini publishes a Technical Bulletin on the increase in invalid NDR’s.

April 7, 2008 - Spammers have increased their utilization of “spoofing” or “joe-jobbing” (falsifying the from address of an email) in the last few weeks, resulting in some email addresses receiving an increased amount of bounce messages for mail they did not send. Postini is currently capturing the majority of these messages when the bouncing server preserves the original spam content, but if the bouncing server has significantly changed the message then Postini may have allowed this message through as we do do not stop NDR bounces.

Exchange My Mail, Inc offers all of it’s customers Postini Spam and Anti-Virus protection with every mailbox. They do a fantastic job of capturing spam and viruses while letting all the good mail through. Each user has their own login to adjust the filtering settings, as well as add senders or domains to the white or black list.

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Posted in General, Hosted Exchange, Tips & Tricks