SMB Cloud Business Solutions Blog

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.

Subscribe to 3G for iPad? You May be Getting More Email Spam Soon!

If your business makes use of iPads with 3G, you may want to invest a better anti-spam solution. According to a letter issued from AT&T's Senior Vice President, "On June 7 we learned that unauthorized computer "hackers" maliciously exploited a function designed to make your iPad log-in process faster by pre-populating an AT&T authentication page with the email address you used to register your iPad for 3G service. The self-described hackers wrote software code to randomly generate numbers that mimicked serial numbers of the AT&T SIM card for iPad - called the integrated circuit card identification (ICC-ID) - and repeatedly queried an AT&T web address. When a number generated by the hackers matched and actual ICC-ID, the authentication page log-in screen was returned to the hackers with the email address associated with the ICC-ID already populated in the log-in screen." AT&T's Vice President then goes on to say that the hackers were able to capture email addresses and put together a list to use for their own publicity. The FBI is currently investigating this security breach and information exposure, and trying to figure out what may have been done with the data that was stolen.

If you have an iPad with 3G service, be sure to keep an eye out for suspicious emails. AT&T has stated that they expect this breach, if anything, to increase targeted spam to those whose information had been stolen. This spam will most likely include some sort of phishing attack to try to get additional personal information from the victim. Be careful when reading emails, don't click on suspicious links, and be hesitant about giving out any sort of personal information. Also, you may want to look into an anti-spam solution, such as Google's Postini, which we here at Mosaic are authorized to sell at discounted rates. If you're organization is getting too much spam, regardless of whether or not it is related to the AT&T debacle, Postini is the solution to your problem. Contact us today to find out more about Postini, or signup for a free trial of Postini!

Postini Error On Tuesday

On Tuesday, Postini, Google's premier email spam solution, was inaccessible to a certain users. The service disruptions, which Google first acknowledged around 3 o'clock pm, were affecting "a significant number of users" according to Google.

This error did not cause a disruption to mail flow through Postini, but rather the Administration Console and Message Center, making them inaccessible. Google's Postini notifications and alerts weren't going out either. The problem, as told by Google, was resolved around 5:30 PM. However, later that night between 8pm and 10 pm, Postini had a similar problem, but this was only due to routine maintenance.

Did anyone experience problems with their Postini service on Tuesday? Even so, you can't deny that Postini is the best email spam protection there is. Sign up for your free trial of Postini through Mosaic today!

The History of Postini!

Postini, as we all know it, is the Google owned and operated Email and Web Solution. Postini offers Email Security, Email Archving, and Web Security. However, Google only acquired this premier email spam solution just a few years ago, in 2007. Prior to that, here is Postini was thriving for many years.

Postini was founded in 1999 in Redwood City, California. A group of four people; Shinya Akamine, Gordon Irlam, Brian Maggi, and Scott Petry were the original founders and they were backed by August Capital. It's original product names were Perimeter Manager, Perimeter Manager for IM, Archive Manager, and Encryption Manager. According to Wikipedia, "By February 2005, it was operating ten U.S. data centers, processing 2.5 billion e-mail messages weekly, and providing anti-spam services for more than 4,200 companies and "6 million end users, including workers at Merrill Lynch, Circuit City, Rayovac, and Hormel Foods, the company that makes Spam, the canned meat product."

Today, Postini processes more than 1 billion emails each day, and is currently protecting more than 35,000 businesses. Here at Mosaic Technology, we're an authorized reseller of Postini. Our discounted rates and on-call support staff make it a no-brainer. Sign up for a Postini free trial today!

Email Spam: CAN-SPAM Canning Spam? Maybe Not.

The Can-Spam Act, which was signed into law by everyone's favorite President, George W. Bush, on December 16, 2003, and is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, established the first national standard in the United States for sending commercial marketing e-mails. The idea behind this Act is to protect us from e-mail spam and mass e-mail marketing messages that we don't want to receive. But is the CAN-SPAM Act canning spam? Although it's a great idea, I don't think so.

The Can-Spam Act calls for commercial emails to have an easy way for readers to opt out of continuing to receive these spam messages. I, for one, often times have a hard time finding the tiny opt out link conveniently placed in the bottom of some emails I receive. It's also a pain to go into your email box and unsubscribe to everything. Who has the time to do that? I'm on my second personal Gmail Account because I let one get filled with junky spam messages. So in my mind, the inconvenience of the opt-out link coupled with human laziness is causing the Can-Spam Act's goal to become obsolete.

The best way to stop spam is Google's Postini. Trust me, I'm not just pushing it because we're selling it. Postini keeps my inbox in perfect order, and puts a stop to spam, viruses, phishing attacks and other attacks. And you, the user, get control over your spam and manage it on your own. It works great. If you'd like a free trial of the best email spam solution available, contact us today at 484-323-5020!

People Still Interact with Email Spam

Give an A+ to the catchy copywriter that sends you your spam messages. It turns out he's actually a rather convincing wordsmith. A recent study has shown that people still open their email spam messages in order to take advantage of the great offer (that's not really inside). According to an article on allspammedup.com "nearly 50% of people who looked at spam did so intentionally, either out of curiosity, a misguided attempt to unsubscribe themselves, or unbelievably, because they were actually interested in buying the product or service being offered."

Businesses need to make use of a highly efficient spam solution. Spam messages that contain phishing attacks and malware can be very costly to an organization. They can eat up valuable time and resources and can cause an enormous amount of problems.

At Mosaic Technology, we help businesses control their spam and prevent it from causing problems to their organization. We are an authorized seller of Google's Postini Solutions, and offer them as well as support to organizations for a discounted price. If your organization is having trouble with email spam, let us help you! Contact us today at (484) 323-5020!