SMB Alternative Business Solutions Blog

Google Priority Inbox Makes Email Almost Manageable.

The Google:

People tell us all the time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.

I don't know about you, but I hate getting email. Well, maybe just from certain people. This feature has finally rolled out to the masses, including that of Google Apps users. It's a dream to use.
If any conversation comes in that you'd prefer to be grouped into the Priority Inbox, you can just hit the yellow icon and then conversation will now be shown as such. If you get inundated with messages and you find it hard to sift through the not-so-important ones, this is completely idea.

Shh, Domino's Pizza deal just came into my Priority box, success!

Benefits of Using Postini for Protecting E-mail From Threats.

by Jon Pentecost

When properly configured, Postini is the best protection available for businesses from unwanted items introduced through E-mail.  Among many other benefits, the top two things that Postini can immediately protect business from are SPAM (unsolicited commercial E-mails) and viruses.

Postini has SPAM filtering that is second to none.  It is able to correctly filter many items that would make it through other filters and also has significantly less false-positives (incorrectly labeling a desired E-mail as SPAM) than other SPAM filters available.  Granted, no SPAM filter is perfect and some E-mails are marked as SPAM that are not and other SPAM E-mails do make it through the Postini system, but there are also ways to prevent these from happening with the same types of E-mails.  You are able to add an E-mail address as a “Safe Sender” in the Postini settings of your E-mail account so that it will never be blocked.  You can also submit the headers of an E-mail that is SPAM that makes it through to increase the filtering capabilities of Postini for prevention in the future of that type of SPAM of getting to your Inbox.

Viruses are also blocked with excellent success.  If an E-mail has a known virus in it, you may never even see it (depending on the settings your Administrator has set for Postini).  You still need to have anti-virus software installed on your computer because E-mail is not the only way that you can receive a virus, but with the Postini service, your chances of getting a virus through E-mail is drastically reduced.  Similar to SPAM, no filter is perfect and you could receive a virus in an E-mail sent to you but your chances of getting a virus without Postini is much higher than getting one that is not correctly filtered.

Besides your own personal settings for E-mail, there are also settings that your Administrator can configure for your entire E-mail domain.  You may not even realize how much SPAM and viruses are even blocked because your Administrator can place additional filters that will keep E-mails from even reaching your personal Postini account and are rejected immediately.  Along with setting additional filters, your Administrator has many other things that can be used for protecting your systems from unwanted E-mail.  In order to see additional information about Postini or to see about adding Postini for your E-mail system, please visit the Mosaic Technology website at http://www.mosaictechnology.com.  Better yet, Trigon Technology can complete the implementation for you with our trained Engineers that provide IT Support to the Greater Philadelphia Area.

Gmail Calls Hits 1,000,000 in 24 Hours.

The Google Twitter:

Over 1,000,000 calls placed from Gmail in just 24 hours! Thanks to everyone using this new feature.

Wow, that is a lot of calls to annoy your friends for 5 seconds. 

But seriously, folks. The fact that you can makes calls for free, for now, inside of your browser, and inside of Gmail has the potential to be pretty awesome. When this gets added to Google Apps for businesses, this could be HUGE. Imagine if you're a company that uses Google Apps, and everything you do is in the browser. You use Google Docs, Gmail, and now, you can even make and take calls inside of the browser of the internet. 

This could completely change the way you do things as a company. You could use an entire calling system for pennies on the dollar. Google made waves in the enterprise field with Google Apps, and it has the potential of making even bigger onces with Gmail Calling.

Find Docs & Sites Quickly w/ Apps Search

Google:

Where is that presentation? Was it attached to an email? Or in Google Docs? If you’re not sure, you may end up searching several places with the same query in order to find it. With the new “Apps Search” lab, we just made that all a bit simpler.

Once you enable it from the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, the “Search Mail” button in Gmail will say “Search Mail and Docs” instead, and your search results will include matching documents and sites in addition to email messages.

It’s like Google knows what I’m THINKING. Are you in my brain, the Google? ARE YOU!? It’s OK, I’m fine now. Phew

Next Version of Android to be called HoneyComb?

TechRadar:

Google is set to call the next iteration of its mobile OS Android Honeycomb, following on from the tablet-friendly Gingerbread platform. Multiple sources have confirmed to TechRadar that the next version will be called Honeycomb, although details of what this upgrade will bring are still sketchy.

It looks like this would be Android 3.1, not a jump to 4.0. At this point, who cares? Let’s concentrate on the NEXT version of Android, yeesh.

ChromeOS Tablet Hitting Verizon?

Download Squad:

As for the launch date of November 26th, well, that’s all kinds of brilliant. It’s Black Friday 2010 and the busiest shopping day of the year in the U.S. — so what better day to have a shiny new tablet in the cabinet at Verizon kiosks and stores all over the country? You can bet Google’s Chrome OS tablet will be heavily subsidized, and I’d go so far as to say it will be substantially cheaper than the iPad — if not totally free — with a Verizon data contract.

Could be huge. Especially if this hits Target and/or Wal-Mart for Black Friday. People’s eyes will light up if they see an iPad like tablet for next to nothing w/ a small data contract.

 

This post was written with loving care by Matt Kolowski, who enjoys the Google as well as long walks on the beach.

Email Protection | Are You Vulnerable?

40 years ago, did you ever consider the fact that you’d be using email each and every day?  At that point in time, could you even comprehend the idea or concept of an email?  The question is beyond me, literally.  Partly because that was approximately 16 years before the “idea or concept of me” was in people’s heads, and because I’ve grown up with email.  It’s second nature to me, and it is a major part of my career, let alone my life in general.

Anyway, unless you worked in IT Support at that point in time, you most likely never even thought of such a thing.  Today, what it comes down to is that email is so deeply interwoven with our lives, the way we communicate, and the way we do business.  Think of the change the people of the world have witnessed.  Complete convenience at our fingertips.  That is, of course, if you don’t let your email become a problem. 

As awesomely convenient and powerful as email can be, it can also become a burden if you don’t take the proper measures to keep your email safe and secure.  Email spam (we all know it too well) can harbor phishing attacks, malware, spyware, and many other types of viruses.  With improper use of email, you can put your entire organization and business at risk of infections, data and information theft, and identity theft.

At Mosaic Technology, we are authorized resellers of the best email protection on the market; Google’s Postini. Postini is a hosted spam filtering system that will keep you virtually worry-free when it comes to email.  Postini is a hosted filtering service that is your biggest line of defense against junk mail. It stops email spam well before it reaches your mail server. Not only is Postini extremely efficient, but it is also very affordable, and it is a managed service, so there is no hardware, software, licensing, maintenance or administration that needs to performed on a daily basis.

Sign up for a free trial today!

Email Spam is 95 Percent of all Email...

According to a European security group, email service providers catch about 95% of all email sent to their customers.  The reason being, 100% of that 95%, is email spam.  Talk about a ton of junk mail...

That says a lot about today's anti-spam tools.  Think about it... anti-spam tools are so effective that they dump 95% of the messages that were sent to you before they reach your account.  And on top of that, you still end up getting too much spam!  If you'd like to ensure that your inbox doesn't receive any spam, start a free trial of Postini today! 

   

Email Spam: HP to Make Lives Easier & Possibly Make Spamming Worse

It sounds like a great idea at first - HP coming out with a line of printers that have their own email addresses so that you can instantly send documents/photos from your smartphone directly to your printer, and have them printed, ready, and waiting for you when you reach your final destination; your printer. Convenient, right? On second thought, maybe not so much.

As painfully simple as this will make getting documents off of your miniscule phone screen and into your hands, it may also be introducing us to a whole new breed of email spam! Imagine sitting at your desk, taking your first sip of coffee, biting into your delicious pastry, and then opening up and deleting all of your email spam as you typically do each morning. Now, imagine sitting at your desk, taking your first sip of coffee, biting into your delicious pastry, and then opening up and deleting all of your email spam as you typically do each morning, and then turning around to your "handy-dandy-convenient" new email equipped HP Printer and having a heaping pile of junk email spam printouts to sort out. Not so fun anymore, is it? And on top of that, think of all the innocent trees that died just so you could throw out your numerous Viagra savings offers. And don't forget all the cash that will be blown on ink and paper. What was once convenient is now disturbing, right? I can't speak for you, but it doesn't sound too pleasant to me.

According to numerous reports, HP is apparently planning
to open an app store for the printers, as well. Interesting. Let's see where this takes us, I guess. But in the meantime, if you're looking for an email spam solution, look no further than Postini, an email spam solution offered by Mosaic Technology.  

Sign up for a free trial of Postini today!

 

Promoting A Service Through Twitter- Is This Spam?

If it's not obvious already, we here at Mosaic Technology don't like email spam very much. If we did, we wouldn't be offering Google Postini Services to clients at discounted rates. With today's trend of internet marketing and the massive explosion of Social Media, companies both large and small have been pushing their products through sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many more. In fact, we've been riding the wave and have been posting on Twitter as well (@StopEmailSpam). This brings me to my question - are we spamming you when we promote our services on Twitter? My answer to this question is simply, "no".

Unlike email, Twitter is an open forum. Unless your profile is private, you're pushing information out to the world. Twitter is meant to be open, shared, and free. We often post notices of Free Trials on our page, as well as "RT" funny posts we read about email spam on Twitter. Other than that, we specifically look for users that are having problems with email spam, and reach out to them offering them help and free Postini Trials. While this could be considered "spammy" it's not truly spam. Users are posting information on to this open forum, which they fully know is visible to the whole Twitter community. It can often be information that the user did not originally ask for, however, by posting on an open forum, they leave themselves open for other posts on the open forum. It's interesting, and I can see how some can consider it as spam. However, in no way is it dumping unwanted information into something that is meant to be private, like an email address. Really interested in hearing your thoughts on this... Please, leave comments and let us know what you think.