Arbutus Ridge
Arbutus Ridge
works with you to find IT-driven ways of making your business run better. Our clients are small business owners who know that growth and value are held back if you depend on one or two key people being there all the time. Everything we do is about helping you improve the systems and processes on which you rely.
Testimonial
"The advice we received from Arbutus Ridge was invaluable and we are very pleased with their Jumpstart package.”
The owner of an Edinburgh glazing company
Want a copy of the case study? Email case-studies@arbutusridge.co.uk
The Doctor's In ?
Would you like to meet up for a chat over coffee about your business IT systems?
Perhaps you are struggling to get yours to work properly and could do with an IT advisor to help sort out some problems. Or are you thinking of upgrading your system, but would appreciate some advice on how to go about it and the pitfalls to avoid? We would be delighted to discuss these and other issues in an informal no-sales-pitch environment.
We are resident most Mondays between 5 and 6 pm at Starbucks - 30 George ST Edinburgh (Corner of Hanover ST). Look out for the Arbutus Ridge sign. Please call 0845 094 8487 if you would like to confirm an appointment, or to make a different, more convenient arrangement.
Looking forward to meeting you soon.
Reducing junk email / spam
Here are some simple and free steps that you as a user can take to help reduce the amount of spam or junk email you receive. In particular, these techniques restrict the availability of your e-mail address, thus reducing or preventing its attractiveness to spam. For purposes of this article, spam is considered distinctly different from email marketing and online marketing messages that you may received from trusted third parties.
Do not respond to spam
In many cases, spammers are only trying to validate an email address is valid. This is a precursor to some other course of action they intend to take. Equally, many spam messages contain links or addresses that the user is asked to click on in order to be removed from the spammer's mailing list. Unfortunately, rather than actually removing the person’s email address from the list, the spamming increases because they have confirmed someone has actually read the email.
One way the spammers try to get recipients to response it to trick them into believing the email is from someone else (i.e. your bank or someone from your contact database). As a result, ensure you know both from the labelled information and the email messages context that the sender is who you think there are before you respond.
Munging
This term simply means to disguise or to prevent your email address from automatically being collected by a third party. In practical terms, it means your postings onto blogs are done anonymously or with a fake name and address. Prior to using a phantom email address, it would be wise to double check that it really is not being used by someone else.
In the event you want to receive feedback from your online postings, it is wise to use an email address that makes sense to humans, but would be less likely for a computer programme to automatically generate. Here are a couple of examples peter33@edinburgh.com or b0bb7@yahoo.com. Another interesting approach is to display your email address as an image, versus plain text. Of course, there is a risk with munging that legitimate emails do not get through to you, but this is something you need to weigh against the burden of unwanted emails.
Disable HTML in e-mail
Several of the latest email packages like Outlook now allow you to display your messages using the html format. In addition to having unwanted images included in your email messages, html can contain web bugs that allow spammers to see that the e-mail address is valid and that the message has not been caught in spam filters. For all but a few messages, plain or rich text is more than adequate
Online Forms
Online forms allow users to send a message by completing a form in a web browser. The web server can take the form data and forward it to an email address. In such cases, the user never sees the email address. Contact also forms have the drawback that because the message sender cannot use their preferred email software, which can in itself have a spam filter built into it. Moreover, if the software used to run the contact forms is badly designed they can become spam tools in their own right. Many spammers are now using contact forms to send spam to the intended recipient. Unless the form belongs to a trusted source, you are better off not using a contact form.
Disposable e-mail addresses
Many email users sometimes need to give an address to a site without complete assurance that the site will not send out spam. One way to mitigate the risk is to provide a disposable email address—a temporary address which forwards email to a real account, which the user can disable or abandon. A number of services provide disposable address forwarding. Addresses can be manually disabled, can expire after a given time interval, or can expire after a certain number of messages have been forwarded.
Sadly, once your work email address is in the hands of the spammers, there is no getting it back. In addition, as a business it is difficult to change your web-site address without affecting your customers and your business. However, there are many technologies available to help reduce the number of email messages arriving in your Inbox. A simple and now very affordable business tip is to buy a server and host your email/web-site yourself. This gives you much more control over how various email streams can be handled. The good news is it that managing your server is not as difficult as you may think. Arbutus Ridge offers a service to teach you how. If that is not something you want to, we can manage it for you.
Email us for more information at info@arbutusridge.co.uk
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