Safe Surfing and Email Use

Browsers and email programs offer different levels of protection. Depending on which one your business uses you may need additional protection or consider switching. MS Internet Explorer and Outlook (and Outlook Express) are targeted by virus writers and malicious software (Trojan horses, ad ware, etc) vendors and spammers. IE has so many holes to exploit Microsoft even recommends disabling Java Script. You can see for your self in this PC World article. This limits your ability to see certain pages on web sites. Simply switching to another browser and email program eliminates a lot of risk.

Clay can help you select the browser and email program that suits your business needs and one that is comfortable for you and your staff to use. I can move your email address information, existing emails and favorites to the new programs (not necessarily available for AOL users or online email ids, like gmail and yahoo). I can customize the programs so you and your staff can work more productively and safer.

The Browsers are free. Email programs usually come in a free version and a paid version. Free versions of email programs either have limited features or contain advertisements.

How can email be more productive?

• Reduce spam by protecting your email ids from being collected off postings on the net
• Create and maintain distribution lists. Use these lists to quickly send emails to a specific group of people and not have a list of emails ids at the top. I can show you how to quickly send emails to groups of people but each person cannot see who else was sent the same email (unless you want them to).
• Set up and update filters. Use filters to have the email program automatically do something with your email based on its content. For example, emails from your suppliers always go into a mailbox folder called "suppliers".
• Set up auto responders. Auto responders are used to notify someone sending you an email that you are not available now and when you will be available. Commonly used when individual employees are out of the office or when the entire business is closed for a holiday. This lets your customers know immediately why you are currently unavailable and when you can respond to them.
• Set up automatic backups or archiving of email. Are your emails taking up too much room on your computer? Do you have emails that date back to the beginning of time? Clay can help you decide which emails to delete, which to back up and which to archive.
• Search your email contents. Yes you can find that missing email. Let us show you how.

How can web surfing be made safer?

• Determine which web sites to stay away from
• Use a utility to monitor what is being automatically installed on your computer, alert you to it and give you the opportunity to accept or reject it
• Set up and run utilities that will look for and eliminate marketing software that tracks and reports back information such as the sites you visit and the product you buy. This allows for direct marketing campaigns to target your computer systems increasing the number of spam and pop-ups.
• Customize your anti virus software to ensure that is protecting all aspects of your computer use including email, storage media, instant messaging and Internet without slowing the computer down so much that you can't get your work done.
• Ensure that each of your computers only shares resources (data, printers, etc) that you want to share.
• Disable the unneeded options in the browser. This cuts down on the resources being used by the browser and removes a possible point of attack by hackers.
• Help you and your staff understand which files are safe to download or not. I can teach you how to determine if you really need to download that program to continue using the web site.
• How to perform simple maintenance on your firewall.