Custom Email Address For Your Business

Are you looking for custom email address like your name @ your domain .com ? [name@domain.com] Something which works like gmail but has an email address with your domain name – that you can even distribute to your co-workers i.e., create custom email address for all your co-workers or employees. Also you wish to have a custom URL to log into emails, like – www.yourwebsite.com/email or www.yourwebsite.com/communication ?

Business Needs
If you’re running a business you must have your own website, and for all your business communication its preferred to have your own custom email address which looks and feels professional to your clients/customers instead of simply having a general @hotmail.com or @gmail.com emails.

Also having a business/custom email gives a sense of security to your clients/customers or potential clients/customers, that the mail they’re sending will indeed reach only the authorized person within the company. Mailing to a general email address doesn’t bring in such sense of safety.

What we Recommend and use ourselves?
We have been using Google Apps for all our email needs from past 8+ years and we proudly/confidently recommend it to all other budding businesses. You also get a lot of tools to run your business with ease – tools like Calendar, online Docs, unlimited file storage etc to a few. Also you get all the Google Services with your Google Apps account that you’ll get while using Gmail. With Google Apps, you’ll have your company branding and premium service and customer support.

With the calendar we schedule all our meetings in real-time, it merges with clients and employees calendar in real-time lets us know who is attending and who is not and lets us see their schedule as well – of course the schedules which they’ve made public. These tools are such a productive ones for our business so far.

How much time we need to get used to?
Zero. Yes, if you’re comfortable using Gmail, then you’ll get started with Google Apps instantly. Everything looks and feels the same but you’ll have your company logo and name inside.

20% discount Rest assured, it has reduced the cost of our business operations and we do not mind paying a small amount every year. If you wish to make use of Google Apps then you can use the coupons we have got and get 20% discount for the first year. Here are the Google Apps coupon codes / discount codes with their expiry dates!

69YFFGCCM6KRTM – Expires on 09/2016
4RRX7MCDVEMYJG – Expires on 09/2016

Free Google Apps Account

How to set up?
It’s very easy with Google Apps. Once you create Free account(No Credit Card required – you can try it for months, after that you can decide if you want to continue or not), you’ll get some settings which you need to configure at your domain registration account. Everything will be present in the document provided by Google and if you do things as shown in the document it’ll take less than 5 minutes to configure it. But if you think its out of your hand to do those small technical things – you can simply copy the settings provided by Google and mail it to your domain registrar. The technical support team will do it for you in less than 5 minutes and you’ll be up with your custom email address and custom email login URL.

GMail: “Priority Inbox” To Help You Focus On Important Emails

Often time we get a lot of email in the last minute before going to a meeting or exam! But we are unsure if its just another autoresponder mail or a genuinely urgent as well as important.

Check above video – its a very good animated video explaining Priority Inbox neatly.

To solve this problem, Google has introduced a new feature called Priority Inbox. This is a separate section in your email and will automatically separate your important mails, based on which email you read and reply to.

And ofcourse it has some filters to manually mark someone’s email as important or as unimportant.
And Like most things, Priority Inbox isn’t perfect, so it needs your help to get more experience in knowing what is important to you. So it has a + and – symbol to mark any email(either in ‘Priority Inbox’ or regular ‘Inbox’) important or unimportant.
Priority Inbox is in Beta, and will be enabled to all GMail and Google Apps users in 1 or 2 weeks time.

Source: Priority Inbox

The Pros and Cons of a Cloud Anti-Spam Service

This is a guest post by Jesmond Darmanin. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

In an era where even the most routine technology purchases are coming under heavy scrutiny, it’s no surprise that cost saving services like cloud computing are dominating the headlines.

The lure of the cloud is two-fold: software acquisition and system administration cost reduction. While some organizations are still hesitant to store sensitive data on the cloud, one area in which many have taken the plunge, is email services.

You have the option of outsourcing the entire service, or using the cloud for specific product type applications like inbound anti-virus and anti-spam filtering.

Recent estimates suggest that spam accounts for over 90% of all email. And the trend doesn’t seem to be reversing. Managing the required scanning, remediation and updating are resource intensive activities, often warranting dedicated servers and staff.

Transferring this activity to the cloud, frees enterprises to focus more on tasks that are critical to their business. But as with all solutions, there are advantages and disadvantages to this approach.

Pros

Cost Savings – Having your hosting provider do anti-spam service means one less piece of software that you’ll need to purchase, support and administer.
Network Traffic – Imagine a network free of millions of pieces of unwanted email. Increased bandwidth means your internal systems can more quickly respond to customer requests.
Increased Security – Off-site spam and virus filtering reduces the chance of virus tainted email reaching and infecting enterprise networks. The result? Minimized potential for data loss and downtime.

Cons

Performance – Some users might note a performance degradation when using cloud based solutions due to any internet connection slowdowns. This is a minor annoyance for some, but could be an issue.
Software Conflicts – As the anti-spam solution will just solve one area of your network security concerns, most companies will still need to run other software like firewalls that may conflict with the cloud service.

Conclusion

Even considering the challenges, for many organizations, outsourcing email anti-spam services warrants further investigation. However, enterprise level change should of course be undertaken with caution. Solid research, testing and trials go a long way toward ensuring a successful implementation.

There are hosted email security solutions like GFI MAX MailProtection that gives you a free 30-day trial so you can try the product completely risk free. Setting up is a breeze and with very low running costs. Click here for your free trial.

Feedburner – Tips to add latest post’s title as Subject of email

Most awaited feature of feedburner is now live(without any official word!).
How it feels to see 10 to 20 emails with the same subject line/title and from the same person? Even if the content of the mail is different we get irritated to open it and read. Many times, when we are busy and want to clean/process the inbox, we just delete such mails.
email-subject-line
Feedburner used to send a static subject line with all the email updates. But now they have added a feature, using which we can customize the email Subject line and make it more meaningful.

Use ${latestItemTitle} to insert your latest post’s title into the Subject/Title of email.

If we have multiple blog posts?
With two or more items in the update, ${n} shows the total number of items, and ${m} shows the number of items beyond the latest.

Examples
Technotip.org: ${latestItemTitle}
Technotip.org: “${latestItemTitle}” plus ${m} more
Technotip.org (in this message: ${n} new items)
feedburner-email-title

To activate this, log into your feedburner account. Click on “Publicize” tab. Next, look for “Email Subscriptions(Offer feed updates via email)” link at the left side side bar, click on it. A number of sub-menu items will be shown, among them, click on “Email Branding” link. Now you can follow the above tips to customize the email title/subject line. Actually those tips are given by feedburner on the customization page itself.
Thanks Feedburner..also fix the chicklet count fluctuation problem!

If you are a blogger, make sure you make use of this feature and stop annoying your email subscribers!

Google has now announced about the introduction of this feature on Adsense for Feed blog.

Read, Reply, offline using GMail

Yes the title is true. You can now read, reply, star, access your mail Contacts, search etc using GMail.
You probably sitting there wondering how is it possible to send an email without internet connection?
Yes its not possible!
But whatever you write and whatever changes you make to your GMail when you are offline will be updated once you are connected to the internet using the same computer. And all the emails that you typed while you were offline will be sent automatically once you are online.
Thanks to Google GMail team.
Here is what GMail team has to say about it:

Once you turn on this feature, Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail. As long as you’re connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail’s servers. When you lose your connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer’s hard drive instead of the information sent across the network. You can read messages, star and label them, and do all of the things you’re used to doing while reading your webmail online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection. And if you’re on an unreliable or slow connection (like when you’re “borrowing” your neighbor’s wireless), you can choose to use “flaky connection mode,” which is somewhere in between: it uses the local cache as if you were disconnected, but still synchronizes your mail with the server in the background. Our goal is to provide nearly the same browser-based Gmail experience whether you’re using the data cached on your computer or talking directly to the server.

This feature is going to save millions of time. We really love this feature.
Yahoo and MSN had provided this feature previously, but they need a client software to be installed. But Google doesn’t need one, except GoogleGears, and you need not even install that small software, if you are using Google Chrome.

To use this feature:-
Goto labs inside your GMail.
Gmail_Labs_offline_enable_disable

Enable Offline and save it.

To enable Offline Gmail, click the Offline link at the top(“Offline0.1” link in the upper right-hand side corner of your account, next to your username).

Now you will get a prompt to inform you to download Google Gears.
Gmail_Labs_Offline_gears

Now synchronization starts. All your email till date will be downloaded to your local hard disk. And if you are having a slow internet connection then you can click on the Flaky Connection mode to handle it.
Gmail_Labs_Offline_sync
Google Gmail team has been using this feature from many days, so we hope that the feature is almost ready to public use without any problem.
Offline Gmail will be available to everyone who uses Gmail in US or UK English over the next couple of days, so if you don’t see it under the Labs tab yet, it should be there soon.

Happy spammers-Orkut allows Export contacts in CSV format

Spammers job is to keep collecting email address of active internet users until they get a deal(spamming), so that they can mint some money from those spam mails.

I know a guy in India, who asked me 75$ and he could send my blog link to 5 lakh people in one day. And he was very good at convincing. He told that I would get back my money from the one day of campaign with him(spamming).
But guys, I don’t like spammers. And I hate when someone interferes in my privacy without my permission, so how could I interfere in someone else privacy!

One sad part is, these spammers are very intelligent. They know all sorts of things from where they can get the email ID’s of active internet users.

Now anyone can get large number of active email ID’s from Orkut!
Log in to orkut, then click ‘Friends’ along the top navigation. Next, click ‘Download your contacts’ on the bottom of the page to save your contacts as a CSV file.

In Orkut, its not so difficult to add 1000 friends(which is the limitation presently, but we hope Orkut will soon remove this limitation too) by creating a fake account(in the name of a girl and with a sexi pic in the profile). After creating some 10 accounts you can keep checking these accounts and just accept the friend request you get. There are applications which will help you to accept all the friend requests in one click. So by a month are so, you will be acquiring 1000 contacts in each of the profiles i.e., 10 x 1000 = 10000 / month. Now just goto ‘Friends’ link in the top navigation. Next, click ‘Download your contacts’ on the bottom of the page to save your contacts as a CSV file. SO you will have 10000 active email contacts per month.

Now the “Big G’s” “Orkut” is a hot place for spammers to get the email ID’s of the most active internet users. Because, people who are using social networking sites are mostly addicted to that social networking site and they check it almost every day like a daily ritual.

To prevent spammers from getting your email ID for some extent:
Don’t accept/send friend request of/to those who put fake sexi pics in their profiles(to attract others).
And observe their activities before sending/accepting request.

I have been getting lot of spams to one of my ID and the others had just 2 or 4 spams. So I wondered why only one ID is getting full of spam mails?
So we did a bit of research and found that, the same spam messages where present in many peoples orkut scrap books, and finally we could get to know the source of spam and discovered that the guy who spammed us, got our ID from Orkut.

And I am sure, Orkut is one of the main place where these spammers collected huge number of active email ID’s.
So be careful the next time you send/receive a friend request in Orkut or any other social networking sites.

PayPal Teaching Security Measures to Its Customers

Many days ago we had received an email from paypal@something.com, which said to click on a link and enter my credit card information by loging into PayPal account. We knew that the email was not from PayPal(by looking at the from address of the email), but still we clicked it to test(not recommended), and the link took us to a fake website resembling PayPal. And to our astonishment, the fake website was almost an exact clone of PayPal website. Newbies and ignorant people would just do everything the email had stated them to do and you know what will happen next!

What I did was, just entered some wrong username and password(to loginto that fake PayPal like website), guess what? Any random, wrong username and password will longinto such websites. The next thing was, it prompted us to enter our Credit Card number. There also I entered some nonsense numbers. And finally it poped up a hearty message saying “Thank you”.

We do not recommend anybody to try what we did with the phishing email link. We did all those things at our own risk.

And as this was our first experience with such phishing email, we just informed about the email and the fake website to PayPal team. And got this reply email from PayPal:

Dear Satish,

Thanks for taking an active role by reporting suspicious-looking
emails.
The email you forwarded to us is a phishing email, and our security
team is working to disable it.

————————-
What is a phishing email?
————————-
Phishing emails attempt to steal your identity and will often ask you to
reveal your password or other personal or financial information. PayPal
will never ask for your password over the phone or in an email and will
always address you by your first and last name.

Take our Fight Phishing Challenge at https://www.paypal.com/fightphishing to learn 5 things you should know about phishing. You’ll also see what we’re doing to help fight fraud
every day.

————————-
You’ve made a difference.
————————-
Every email counts. By forwarding a suspicious-looking email to
spoof@paypal.com, you’ve helped keep yourself and others safe from
identity theft.

Thanks,

The PayPal Team

——————————————————————————–

That email really made me think PayPal as more secure. As the secure feeling was still in my mind, another email was spotted in my email. Now I forwarded it to spoof@paypal.com. Now, this time I got still better reply from PayPal, which was more informative:-

Dear Satish,

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

At PayPal, we care about the security of your account. Therefore, we
would like to offer you a number of Security Tips.

The tips will help you protect yourself against various types of
Internet fraud, such as ‘spoofing’ and ‘phishing’: the act of collecting
personal and financial information through fake emails, websites and
phone calls.

Using this sensitive information, the perpetrators will try to commit
identity theft, credit card fraud and various other illegal activities.

So please read the tips below, for your own sake, and in the interest
of all PayPal users.

Emails – Make sure they are sent from PayPal

1. Always check the greeting. We will never address you with Dear
PayPal User or Dear PayPal Member. Instead, we will address you by your
first and last name, or the business name associated with your PayPal
account – except in some automatic responses.

2. Look for strange links. When you’re asked to click on a link in
an e-mail that looks like it’s from PayPal, be extremely cautious.

3. Does the e-mail ask you to enter sensitive information? If it
does, it’s not from us. PayPal will never ask to you enter:
o Bank account numbers
o Credit and debit card numbers
o Drivers license number
o Email addresses
o Your full name

4. Check for attachments. PayPal will never send an attachment or
software update to install on your computer.

5. Take your time, don’t be rushed. Spoof emails can contain a
threat: You must take action, and do it now. If you feel undue
pressure, don’t respond. Simply log in to your account, and check your Resolution Center.

Website pages – make sure that they are hosted by PayPal

1. Check the URL when you log in. When you use the PayPal service,
make sure that the URL at the top of the browser is
https://www.paypal.com/. This means the website is secure. If you see a different URL, close your browser – even if it contains the word
PayPal.

2. Look for the lock. The lock symbol that appears in the bottom
right hand corner of your browser means it is a secure site.

Passwords – keep it on PayPal

1. Last but not least, create a unique password for your
PayPal-account. Don’t use this password on any other site and don’t
share it with anyone else.

2. Change your password every month.

If you think you have received a fraudulent email, forward the entire
email, including the header information to spoof@paypal.com and then
delete the email from your mailbox.

Click the “Security Center” link on any PayPal webpage for additional
tips and tools for staying safe online.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us
again.

Sincerely,
Jeffrey
PayPal, an eBay Company
————————————————————————————————–

I was very much happy that PayPal is concerned about its customers.
Now PayPal has taken yet another step to teach its customers, to make them authority of online fraud detection and prevention techniques.

Now you can see an ad on the HomePage of PayPal and which will take you to https://www.paypal-promo.com/safety/ when clicked.

paypal-security-measure
This site is made of flash and its visually appealing and gives full information about online fraud detection and prevention techniques.
It involves “Training Center”, where it tells about online theft and protection measures etc. And next is, it has an “Safety Exam” section where you will be presented with some questions and answers(in the form of options) to test your levels of understanding about online fraud detection and prevention techniques. Next is the “Safely Calculator”, calculates “How safe your PayPal account Is?”, by determining your answers to some of the questions.
And there is also a section called “Safety Products”, which lists some of the safety products developed at PayPal Lab — Take a look at it, they may be for you.

One thing which we never knew and came to know from this website are:
PAYPAL SECURITY KEY
All agents need gadgets. Customers in the US, Germany and Australia can use the PayPal Security Key, a small electronic device that generates a unique security code every 30 seconds.
You use this security code when you log in to your PayPal account, giving you an extra layer of protection against identity theft and account takeover. Hope this feature will be available soon in all countries where PayPal transactions are allowed. And for those who are deprived of this feature presently can make use of one of their Plug-In which offers an array of security features by generating a single-use MasterCard credit card numbers to help keep your financial information’s secure.

In India RelianceMoney demat account holders have been using such Security Key to generate new password for their account every 30 seconds. PayPal taking such measures creates an healthy, secure feeling in its customers.

Update:-
Please do not even click on the suspicious links found in your phishing emails. Because now a days the scripting(script programming) has become so powerful that, if you click on such links, a worm can be placed inside your computer(which may track your activities later). Clicking on such links is just like permitting the script to access your information.

Are you earning from your twitter profile ?

I can’t believe this, but its true. As I was going through my emails, I saw a mail from twittad.

Email from Twittad:-

Dear technotip ,

Congratulations! Your Twitter profile technotip has been sold at Twittad.com.

Your profile has been purchased by Twittad for 1 month at $ 5.00 .

Please login to your Twittad account in the next few hours. After login follow the instructions to download the advertisement.

Upload the advertisement onto your Twitter profile by selecting -> Settings -> Design -> Use Custom Style Below -> Browse file for the downloaded ad -> Click Save

Thanks!

Twittad Team

Follow us @Twittad

Here is the details(screen shot) that I got in my Twittad account after activating the advertisement.

To kick start their business, they have started self promotion(they have started advertising about Twittad itself). I think all the twitter users who have signedup for Twittad and have set the price tag 5$ and below, have got this email from Twittad. This campaign is better than providing 5$ bonus for signingup as Twittad publisher 🙂 . And there is nothing to worry for Twittad, because they promise to pay only when your account reaches 20$ ! Hope no one will reach it(atleast not in the near future).

And I don’t think this concept is going to work. Because I myself rarely visit anybodies profile while I am chatting to them on Twitter. So where is the value for advertisers?
I had just signed up for Twittad out of curiosity. And I even fear that, my twitter account may get banned for using it for making some bugs!
Anyway, I don’t use Twitter quite often, so thought of giving it a try. And I am not actually interested in making any money from my twitter account using TwittAd, but I wanted to write an article about it, so just signedup and used it, to know something about it, before writing.

Here is the link to my twitter profile . Visit my profile to see TwittAd advertisement concept live(Only till 17/10/2008 ) 🙂