BlueTie Blog

15 Steps to Spam Free Email

Spam email. Who of us has not opened our inbox to find unwanted (and sometimes offensive) emails from sources we’ve never heard of? They are distracting and annoying. Did you know that recent studies have shown that 90 percent of all emails are considered spam? It’s true. And not only are spam emails annoying, but they can be a huge drain on productivity. Spam emails are estimated to cost between $10 billion and $90 billion per year in direct costs and productivity loss! And it is said that 90 percent of all computer viruses originate through email attachments. So not only do they drain productivity, but they have the potential to cause damage to your files and your computer.

There are steps you can take to put a stop to spam emails. In many cases, stopping most spam is as easy as properly setting up your spam filters. But spammers are becoming very sophisticated at figuring out how to trick these filters and get emails past them. We wanted to make you aware of a number of other steps you can use to defend yourself against spam.

1. Keep your email address hidden
One of the most common ways that spammers collect email addresses is through special bots that scour the web for email addresses. They can pickup your email address from contact pages, message boards, social networks and anywhere else they might be found. To control this, you need to be very careful about where you post your email address and how. To avoid being picked up by one of these bots, you should consider posting your email address as an image or writing the whole thing out like this: email at gmail dot com. If you list your email address on your own website or blog, consider setting up a contact form instead of listing your email address.

2. Think twice before providing your email address
Before you signup for that newsletter you just stumbled across, take a moment to do some research to make sure the company is legitimate. A lot of these newsletters are setup for the purpose of adding more emails to spam lists. There are also a number of people that will sell their email lists to spammers. Next time you are tempted to signup for that new beta account or newsletter, take a minute to make sure you’re not handing your email address over to a spammer.

3. Register a throwaway email address
Sometimes it is very hard to determine if someone is a spammer before handing over your email address. So what I like to do is register an email address that is used only for newsletters and beta signups. Keep this separate from your personal email address, that way the spam doesn’t become as much of an annoyance.

If your mail service allows you to create ‘Alias’ email addresses this is a perfect way to set up a secondary address. If your address is address at email dot com then create an Alias of junkaddress at email dot com and set a filter to send all email from that address to your junk folder.

4. Don’t reply to spam
One way that spammers verify active email accounts is from those that reply to their emails. If they tell you to reply to be removed from the list don’t fall for it, chances are they will just send you more spam in the future.

5. Don’t open spam
Try to avoid opening spam emails. Sometimes you can’t avoid it but when possible you definitely should. Spam email will often include a snippet of code that once opened will ping their server to tell them it’s an active email address. Try to delete as much spam as possible without opening it.

6. Register a fresh email address (or create a new Alias)
The longer you have your email address the more likely it is that spam has been accumulating in it. At this point it’s a good idea to just register a fresh email address because the problem will just keep getting worse, not better. This isn’t always easy with personal email accounts so consider using both email addresses while all your old contacts migrate over. Don’t forget to backup any important emails and update any other websites where you have an account.

7. Don’t participate in chain emails
Taking part in email chains is a great way to forward jokes and other interesting information to all your contacts. But recipients of the email are listed in the body of the email for as long as the email remains active. If a spammer gets a hold of this email every one of those addresses will be added to their spam list. It’s not hard for spammers to end up with these emails either. All it takes is one person to forward to all their contacts and accidentally include a spammer.

8. Don’t open phishing emails
Although it is a nice thought, you haven’t won the lottery, Microsoft isn’t going to pay you $1000 dollars for every person you email, and that nice guy in Africa really isn’t going to give you $50 million. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Don’t open these emails and don’t respond to them if you do.

9. Properly use spam filters
As mentioned earlier, one of the best ways to eliminate spam is to properly use your spam filter. Most email accounts will let you simply mark spam email as such. Make sure you use this feature. By doing so, it will make sure that any spam emails gets added to your blacklist. The problem with this is that sometimes spammers will just use a unique email address for every blast. One defense against this is to look at the domain the email is being sent from. If it is a spam domain or one that you don’t recognize you can just block the whole domain.

In addition to blocking email addresses and domains you can also set most spam filters to block emails based on keywords appearing in the title or body of the email. Watch for keywords that are common with spam but aren’t likely to be used by a friend. When you spot those add them to your spam filter.

10. Frequently scan your spam folder
Spam filters are not perfect and many times perfectly legitimate emails will often end up there. Make it a habit to regularly scan your spam folder and make sure any real emails that you find in there are marked as “not spam”.

11. Uncheck offer boxes
When you signup for any account online or make purchases there are usually little boxes that ask if you want to receive additional offers. Usually these are checked by default. Make sure when you signup for new accounts that these boxes are not checked otherwise you may start receiving offers from their partners.

12. Eliminate catchall accounts
If you own your own domain name, you probably have email included in part of your hosting service. Many hosting accounts offer catchall accounts which means any email address at your domain dot com will be forwarded to you. Spammers will often crawl the web and add domain name they come across. Instead of looking for specific emails they will automatically address them to something like; info at your domain dot com. If you have catchall setup, it doesn’t matter what exact email address they use, you’ll get spam.

13. Ignore return to sender emails
Another trick that spammers will use to get you to open their emails is to send fake delivery failure emails. If you see one of these it’s best just to ignore it, otherwise you’re asking for more spam or even worse, a worm.

14. Avoid emails not addressed to you
There’s a great chance that if you receive an email that is not addressed to you then it is spam. It’s best to avoid opening these altogether and instead just adding them to your spam filter.

15. Report spam
In North America there is a CAN-SPAM act that is designed to help with spam violations. Although reporting spam usually doesn’t do much to stop the spammers it does help. Here are some places that you can report spam to: ISPs, email hosts, domain registrars, blacklists, SpamCop, FTC or the National Fraud Information Center.

Here at BlueTie, we use industry-leading anti-spam and anti-phishing techniques to protect every account. Users are also allowed to generate their own “safe” and “block” lists. Even so, this doesn’t always prevent spammers from emailing you, so it’s best to take the necessary steps to avoid it altogether.  If you're a BlueTie user, you can find out more about BlueTie’s Junk Mail Controls in Help . BlueTie also offers a Catch-All Email Address feature and unlimited aliases. Finally, BlueTie has several Rules & Restrictions governing email that thwart spammers and can save you time and help protect you from spam by decreasing the amount of spam coming into the system.

What Small Businesses Want From Email

Today's small and medium sized business are looking for a high quality, full-featured email suite that meets the needs of their growing business without having to spend a lot of money. How do we know? We asked them.

The combination of cost and feature set is a critical balance for growing companies. They want to "...decrease costs without sacrificing functionality." And they need an "...inexpensive way to get all the functionality that larger businesses rely on for email and collaboration...". They need a way for their staff to work more efficiently together to service a growing base of customers and transactions. They need tools that let them service more customers without hiring more staff.

So as businesses grow, the ability for staff to coordinate work becomes more important. Many "...have grown as a company  and realize [they] need advanced email and collaboration tools." Increased coordination/collaboration can allow for specialization, each person is a specialist at specific functions and thus information can be passed from person to person for action efficiently, or it can be used to 'load balance' the workload by letting multiple people perform the same tasks and thus share the workload. Businesses are looking for email with integrated and shared, calendars, tasks, files and contacts.

This might all seem obvious to some but for many business owners answering the question of how to increase productivity can be complex. And if you're running a very small business, hard to recognize. Communications and coordination amongst staff is just one area of opportunity to do so and may not be so obvious depending on the type of business.

We also heard consistently that a professional appearance is also important to a growing business. Just because it's a small business doesn't mean they want their email screaming it when communicating via email with distributors, vendors or customers. This is why every small business needs an email service that provides domain support. An email service that lets them send and receive email from their own web domain. The number of small business that are still using 'free-mail' consumer email accounts without their own companies domain is still very large. If you own a small business, you can have your own email address domain even if you don't have an extensive web site.  Additionally, if you have your own web site, you can point your email to any good email provider, with the collaboration tools you need to increase productivity,  you don't have to use the email tools provided by your web host - which likely are not specifically designed for businesses.

What do you think small businesses need from their email service? If you're not already using BlueTie what are you using and how's it working for you? If you are already using BlueTie how are you using it to improve productivity at your business?

Creating Links in Email: Don't load your email messages up with attachments and images

When you use email to send a customer newsletter, follow-up after a sales call or respond to a request for information, it's important to be considerate of the recipient when composing the message. I frequently receive emails with multiple attachments and I seldom open them. Although BlueTie supports an industry leading attachment size of 25MB, many recipient's email systems can't handle really big attachments. Also, opening an attachment adds another step to the process a customer or prospect has to go through to get your message, decreasing the likelihood they will actually see it.

Fortunately there's a simple fix. Put your messages on your web site as web pages or PDF documents and link to them in your email. This keeps the email simple and gives your recipients a one click way to access the info. There are two ways you can embed web links into your email:

• Simply copy and paste the URL from the target page into the email
• Even better (and more professional), use our Link tool. Choose the word or phrase in your email message that you want to link to the web page, highlight it and click the Link tool- it looks like a little chain. Paste the web page URL into the dialog box that appears. You can also add a Tooltip. This is a description of the link that appears when the user mouses over the link. So you might link to a sales doc and your tooltip might say: AntiSpam Information. Click OK in the dialog box and you're done.

Anyone who has received an email with tons of pictures and attachments will really appreciate this approach. Instead of loading the email itself with large images and attachments, link to them on the web. You'll save your customers time, your message is less likely to get blocked as spam (multiple attachments are a red flag) and you'll drive traffic to your web site.

Work Anywhere

It's that time of year when all the bloggers post their prediction lists on everything from global warming to the latest tech gadget. We think this is going to be the year of Work Anywhere, a trend that gets predicted every year but has not turned into something that affects small businesses as a whole. Until now.

To have a Work Anywhere business you need to be providing some kind of expert services rather than physical services. If you sell things you can also have a Work Anywhere biz. So why do we think this business model will hit its stride in '07?

Here's a few reasons:

• Bandwidth, wi-fi and EVDO. Its getting harder and harder to be somewhere where you can't connect and connect fast. This is critical to the Work Anywhere model.
• SaaS. Software as a Service is what BlueTie does- we provide you with a communication, collaboration and organization suite you can access anywhere from any computer. In the past year I've logged into my BlueTie account in an Internet cafe in Paris, a hotel room in NYC, in a conference in SF, at my friend's camp in the Adirondacks...and, regardless of where I log in or what machine I'm using, there's all my stuff: email, calendar, people, files. I don't need to be in my office or my home office at all. And I can see my co-workers presence online, IM (with BlueTie Pro), email, etc. I might as well be across the hall.
• A big change in understanding how to motivate people. Best Buy's corporate offices now run on a radical new model: no set hours, no schedules, no required attendance. You have your work goals, your deadlines and your resources; you do the work any way that works for you. Productivity is up 30%. This was not a great leap of faith for their upper management. It started as a grassroots effort. Small workgroups heard about the model and surreptitiously started adopting it. By the time execs realized what was going on, the proponents had data and it was impossible to ignore.
• Timeshifting and placeshifting. This is an extension of the previous bullet. If you're a knowledge worker and you have the resources you need, why should you be constrained to work within a nine to five system that evolved from the need to take advantage of daylight? We've got lightbulbs!

Years ago there was a big buzz about 'virtual businesses'. The problem was that the tools to make these businesses work were in their infancy. Now with ubiquitous access, online resources and mobile communication you can run a business from anywhere, on your own terms.

Liberation 2007: Work Anywhere!

CRN Review: BlueTie Takes On Exchange

Today we received a very favorable review in CRN that focuses on the fact that, unlike many of our competitors, we are a business application, designed to be straightforward to use, easily managed and reliable. One of the great aspects of the review, from our POV, is the positioning of BlueTie as an alternative to Microsoft Exhange, the costly middle market messaging solution from the 10,000 lb gorilla. We set out eight years ago to provide small and medium size businesses with a real alternative to paying for racks of servers, licenses and ongoing service fees to keep those overly complex systems running. Reviews like this validate our vision!

The Small Business Computing 2007 Excellence in Technology Awards: We'd appreciate your vote!

Are you a happy BlueTie business user? We hope so because we know we offer the best collaboration solution on the market for small and mid-sized businesses. The most storage space, best anti-spam, widest feature set and it's a crazy good deal- after all who can beat Free with no ads? Not to mention that BlueTie Pro is a great product at $4.99 per user per month.

So, enough pitching. The voting for the Small Business Computing's 2007 Excellence in Technology Awards is open to business owners like you and we'd appreciate your support. You can vote here (you'll find BlueTie listed under Collaboration). It's easy, requires no personal info and only takes a minute.

Voting is open until January 7, 2007, so vote early and vote often (;-)...and a big thanks in advance!

Your New Business: Start-up Basics, Part One

A lot of BlueTie Free companies are start-ups. That's not surprising given that setting up email, contacts and files are all important 'day one' activities for a new business. Here's a start-up checklist to help you get your business up and running ASAP:

• Web Site URL. This is the website address for your new company. Choosing the right one is critical as you'll want to use it for the life of the company. In fact, you really can't settle on a name for your business without making sure you can get a related URL. You don't need a website to get a URL- you can register as many as you want and then build your website when you're ready. You will want a URL on day one because you're going to want a business-specific email address for you and your employees. BlueTie offers this (known as domain support) but you need a registered domain URL (name.com). Go for a .com address. It's still the gold standard for business because most searchers will automatically look for .com rather than .net or .us or .biz. If you can afford it, register all four for your name. You register by going to a domain registrar and doing searches for your preferred URL. Your best bet is a word combination of 8-12 letters and/or numbers. Virtually every address with less is taken. Avoid dashes and underscores. It will take a few tries. Be patient as this decision will be critical to the success of your business going forward.
• Organize Your Contacts. Your Contact list is the lifeblood of your business. Set up Groups in your Contacts for Customers, Sales, Vendors, Friends and Family, Investors, Mentors, etc. Get some names in there and keep adding as you meet new ones. You've got a business card right? (Another day one activity- of course you need your email address and website for your card, so get BlueTie set up and get that domain.) Always trade cards with new people you meet and get them entered into your Contacts and matched to the appropriate Groups. A little time spent each morning maintaining your Contacts means that you can quickly and easily communicate with everyone interested in your business with a single click.
• Do you have sales literature, contracts, forms, presentations and other docs that you may need access to wherever you are? Upload them to Files so you can access them from any location. Here's a valuable tip: When you name these files use this format: year-month-filename.type. An example is 2006-12-sellsheet.doc. If you do this you can easily sort by name and see the most recent versions of your files.

We'll be continuing this series to help your start-up get organized and to help you and your people communicate effectively. Being consistent, easy to reach and organized can make a huge difference as you embark on the often chaotic process of starting a business. Good luck!

Your John Hancock

Do you use a signature on your emails in a consistent manner? Are you taking full advantage of this opportunity from a marketing point of view?

If you're not, go to your Preferences, choose Name and Signature and set one up. A signature shouldn't be an ad; it should be a concise set of information so your customers, partners and vendors can easily respond the way they choose: your direct phone, IM, website, etc. They all should be there so the recipient doesn't have to track down your info elsewhere.

If you have a very concise marketing message, i.e. Get Your Free BlueTie Now!, you can include it (from the 'Another Shameless Plug Department'!).

I have friends who include their quote of the day, a link to a cool site, etc. Just remember, in most email clients these longer signatures end up 'below the fold', i.e. out of view in a standard email viewing pane- so they probably won't get seen. Keep it brief and the territory can be valuable.

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Email Etiquette

As you're undoubtedly aware, there is an inunudation of email going on to the point where it is becoming very difficult to respond or even react to every legit mail you receive. One thing that can go a long way towards helping this situation is to follow the basic rules for business email use. This article covers those basics and more- recommended reading. If we all followed these guidelines there would be a lot less useless email and it would be a lot easier to deal with what's in your inbox everyday.

Thanks to 43 Folders for this link.

Receiving your Gmail™ in your BlueTie account

Do you have Gmail you'd like to have forwarded into your BlueTie account? It's easy- simply go into your Gmail account and click 'Settings' in the upper right hand corner. Then Click 'Forwarding and POP' in the top menu of the setting box. Check 'Forward a Copy To...' and enter your BlueTie email address.

That's it- now you can read and reply to your Gmail from within BlueTie- no more multiple logins.

(Gmail is a registered trademark of Google Inc.)