Get Rid Of Spam

Every day, both dmoestic and corporate users of the internet receive considerable amounts of spam e-mail. They are not only annoying, but sometimes you can miss an important e-mail or newsletter simply because you lose it among the great number of e-mails that flood out your Inbox. Often you’ll find that important people neglect to read your e-mail, because busy people like them hardly have the time and patience to browse through the huge quantities of spam mail they receive.

One solution to this problem is a filter or a free spam blocker. Many companies have designed filters for their customers. Many e-mail servers, especially the renowned ones that have a reputation to protect, have their own free spam blocker. There are several types of programs that can help you stop spam, including:

- the ones that are offered when you create a new e-mail address. Every company that provides e-mail service has a spam filter, including those that offer free accounts like Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and so forth.

- there are also standalone programs that go through your mail folders regularly and do their best to separate valid e-mail from spam and unwanted mail. The main disadvantage with these free spam blockers is the fact that, when they do their checks, they use quite a large percentage of your computer’s resources and sometimes also of your bandwidth. Before installing this kind of free spam blocker, you’ll need to decide if this is okay with you.

- other types of free spam blockers are the ones that work as plug-ins to other programs like e-mail clients. The disadvantage with this kind of approach is that you need to download all your mail anyway, before the plug-in can do its stuff.

When you decide to use a filter, you must be sure that you update it or install new versions regularly, because marketing researchers working for spammres are continuously developing new ways of ‘fooling’ the filters. Filter makers must keep up by improving their software accordingly.

A free spam blocker works by looking for trigger words or phrases inside the text of the e-mails, and categorizing e-mails on that basis. Nowadays, there are special programs being created that are designed to pass spam through free spam blockers by re-arranging words or using a different language style in the e-mails. This is an unfair marketing strategy, of course, but if you want to be protected against it, you must always have an up-to-date version of your free spam blocker program.

Specialists recommend that you should review your needs and see what kind of filter suits you best. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages. You must make up your mind whether you want to use the default filter on the e-mail server, or if you want to download all your mail before scanning them, or if you are willing to share your bandwidth with a standalone application. The best way is of course, if you can blend all the programs in one, but that’s not always practicable. Still, it is advisable that you should not remain satisfied with the free spam blocker that your e-mail server provides, because you will probably continue to receive unwanted mail in spite of it. Using a plugin in addition to server-side filters is viewed by many experts as the most effective way of getting rid of spam, considering the trivial effort it takes to set up.

Security and Fiber Optics Certification

For those that are looking into information technology, they may also be noticing that there are several routes to take. You can get a security certification in fiber optics technology. There are several training programs that can allow you to get IT Certification in fiber optics, all which will increase your ability to work in a specified career field or understand the details of how fiber optics works.

Fiber optics is based around understanding the role that technology has when light has to move through the fibers. This allows the fibers to become transparent and allow for a display. If you are dealing with fiber optics, it will usually include understanding how to transmit this light through glass or plastic. Telecommunications, medicine, industrial areas and other types of areas will all use fiber optics in order to enable their technology to create the right display.

Abilities With a Fiber Optics Certification
After you know what fiber optics is, you can decide if it is a field that you would be interested in studying in. There are various types of fiber optics training that will allow someone to do a variety of things in order to get the displays right with technology. Usually, an IT program that teaches fiber optics for an IT Certification will include education about how fiber optics works, as well as details on how to use them for your benefit.

Technicians who are working towards the goal of getting IT Certification in fiber optics will first learn safety issues that are related to this specific field. They will then learn how to install and split fiber optics into certain technological devices. From here, they will learn how to link the different fibers and to test the links to make sure that they are working correctly. If there are problems, technicians will also need to help those dealing with fiber optics. There are specific courses in the IT Certification programs that allows for a fiber optic technician to learn the troubleshooting when dealing with this field.

Fiber optics will also go into more details that relate directly to how information technology works. When you are getting into this career field, or if you need to know it to relate to a different career that you are in, there will be several levels of understanding associated with it. One of the requirements for getting IT Certification in fiber optics is to know how to plan a route for the fiber optics to move into the technology area. You will also need to know how to install or take out the technology that is in a certain area. If you can’t simply trouble shoot to find a problem with the fiber optics, then you will also need to know how to test the technology, even if it is before it goes into the specified area. These several techniques will be important to learn when getting your IT Certification.

The Spamming Trap For Online Business Beginners

People who begin their online business ventures would naturally be unaware of many of the internet business rules, protocols and etiquettes. Yet, as in any law, the internet law does not forgive for ignorance. One of the most important issues that are governed by many controls over the internet is Spamming.

A beginner in online business can very easily fall unintentionally into the spamming trap while conducting internet marketing activity to promote his/her business.

Spamming has many faces and forms depending on the marketing activity performed. We will list the marketing activity, the possible spamming forms within each marketing activity, possible consequences and how to avoid unintentional spamming in each spamming form.

1- E-mail Campaigns: The most common spamming method is conducted through e-mail campaigns. E-mail spamming is when you send an e-mail promoting your product or service to someone who did not request any information from you. In many cases beginners fall into the trap of buying lists of e-mails from questionable sources and when sending the e-mail campaign they would realize that one of the following occurred:

a. Received direct complaints.
b. The e-mail account gets shut from the ISP or the hosting provider.
c. Contacted by internet police.

How to avoid e-mail spamming:

a. Make sure that the person who you are sending your campaign to has requested information from you or allowed you to send him e-mails.

b. When buying e-mail lists make sure that the list is safe and has allowed e-mails to be sent to them.

c. Ensure to have a statement at the end of your e-mail that would allow the recipient of your e-mail campaign to opt out if they do not wish to receive any communication from you.

2- Link Submission: Spamming in Link submission could be done in different forms but to cut the story short, you should follow the rules of each directory carefully. Among the very famous rules that are common across many link submission directories:

a. Do not submit your website link in more than one category.
b. Do not submit different pages of your website; submit only your top level link.
c. Do not submit your link more than once. Search the directory to check if your link already exists.

Failing to follow the rules of each directory would delete your link immediately at this particular directory.

3- Article Submission: Just like link directories, article directories have their own rules as well. Not complying with these rules will make those directories decline your articles. Among the most famous rules are the following:

a. Submit your own work and not somebody else’s.
b. Submit a topic that is acceptable by the directory.
c. Do not make your title all in Capital letters. Use Title Caps form.
d. Do not Bold your key words within your article.

4- Posting in Forum: Again you have to read the rules of each forum you intend to be part of before you make any posts. Among the most famous rules are the following:

a. Do not advertise your business in your posts.
b. Do not include affiliate links in your posts.
c. Follow the exact rules of the forum for your sig. file.

Failing to comply will make the forum moderators cancel your account permanently.

5- Blogging: Filling your Blog by copying other people’s articles could eliminate your account permanently with your Blog host.

6- Search Engine Related Spamming Activity:

a. Filling your site content with your keywords will be considered spamming by search engines.
b. Submitting your website to link farms will be considered spamming by search engines.
c. Adding huge amounts of content to your website while your site niche does not usually require such additions will be considered spamming by search engines.
d. Submitting your website to FFA’s could be considered as spamming by search engines.
e. Including Keywords in your Keyword tag on your website while they are not related to your website could be considered as spamming by search engines.

I hope this will help all online business beginners to avoid the spamming trap and have a smooth and successful internet marketing activity.

How to Reduce Spam in Your Inbox and Enhance Your Email Security

Spam is the internet’s equivalent of junk mail. Spam is defined as an e-mail message sent to people without their consent or permission. Addresses of recipients are often harvested from Usenet postings or web pages, obtained from databases, or simply guessed by using common names and domains.

Spam is sent to promote practically any product or service ranging from “Adult” products to logo design for websites. It is also used by hackers to spread viruses or links to dangerous websites used to gather your personal information like credit card details or passwords for sites like Ebay or PayPal. To the average user these messages appear genuine. Even the link has a genuine looking domain name. This technique is known as “Phishing.”

Here are some smart strategies and tips you can employ now to start reducing Spam and boost your email security.

- Configure your anti virus software to automatically scan your incoming email for viruses. Email is still widely used to distribute malicious software. Make sure you keep your anti virus software definitions up to date.
- If you are someone that frequently signs up for “freebies” or other stuff on the internet start using a separate e-mail account just for this purpose. Accounts from providers like Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Google’s Gmail all come with generous storage as standard.
- If sites don’t accept free e-mail address from the services listed above then use a free disposable email service like Sneakemail – http://www.sneakemail.com.
- If you are posting your email to a blog or your website then submit it in a way that is only recognizable to a human. For example if your email is johndoe@hotmail.com then post it as “johndoe at hotmail.com”.
- Never open a message from an address you do not recognize – always delete it straight away. This is especially so if there is an attachment. Never reply to a message as this only confirms the email address is “live” to the spammers.
- If you get an official looking message from your bank or Ebay or another site you are not sure is genuine here is what you do. Instead of clicking on the link embedded in the mail log on to the site normally via your browser. If there are any genuine serious problems you should get a message when you log on. Alternatively contact the site’s customer service via the phone if possible.
- Consider using standalone spam filtering software. This software analyses your email for common characteristics of spam email including words like “click” or “teens.” It also compares senders’ emails against a “Friends List.” Try Mailwasher for free here – http://www.mailwasher.net.

Physical Security of Your Computer System

You’ve paid a lot of money for your computer system and the majority of your business documents and information is kept on your computer. Wouldn’t it be wise to take physical security measures to protect your system and the data that is on it?

If you are a SOHO business owner that has a system in the home with critical information on it, care should be taken to make sure that the system is password protected. If the computer is used for other than business, then you may want to consider getting a separate system so that you’ll have a system for business and a system for the family so data won’t be destroyed.

However, if you cannot afford a new system at this time then make sure that files are password protected for certain documents so that information cannot be changed or compromised. It’s good to constantly back up your system weekly based on the volume of business that you conduct.

Laptops have become the rage of all computer users. They are small, portable and convenient to use. You can take laptops anywhere (coffee shop, library, and restaurant) and do business while accessing the local Wi-Fi spot to get on the Internet.

Extra care should be taken when you are carrying your laptop. Before you leave home, put your laptop in the trunk, away from the trunk latch so that it isn’t visible. That way, if you have your window down, no one can reach in and steal it when you make a stop.

When you are in a public place, you should always be in close proximity of your laptop. Not unless you really know people in the place that you are in, take your laptop to the restroom with you. It’s better to be safe than sorry and have all of your hard work and information disappear!

If you make a stop to the grocery store, DON’T leave your laptop on the front seat! People have been known to smash windows and steal laptops. Put your laptop in the trunk! Most cars come with alarm systems so if someone tries to break in, the alarm will alert the owner.

Use common sense in physically protecting your computer systems.

Strategies To Fight Email Spam

If you are a business owner and you rely on email, spam is going to be a major concern. How you address it can make a big difference in employee efficiency. Email spam has been a nuisance and has gotten even worse over the last several years. Email spam slows down server performance and can eat away at storage. Cleaning all those bad messages out of your inbox is time consuming. The easiest way for viruses to spread is via email.

Having a strategy to deal with email spam and viruses threats is essential for any business to survive and be productive. You can limit the negative impact to your business by having policies and guidelines in place.

Tips to avoid getting email spam:

• If you have a company web site, use a contact form that the web site visitor
  can fill out. Some spam mers use robots that crawl web pages looking for
  email addresses. Your web site designer should be able to help you with this.
• When signing up for forums, products and services use a free email or throwaway
  account like hotmail or Yahoo mail.
• When signing up for offers be careful what boxes you check although technically
  not spam you may get a lot of email offers you do not want.
• Never reply to an email spam message, this just lets them know that your
  account is active.
• You may want to use a throwaway email address if you post on newsgroups
  or forums.

These measures may help to reduce spam, but if you have an old email address you may want to change your email address or deploy a spam filter system. There are several choices for anti spam systems you could buy software that runs locally on your PC to filter the spam, but this can be expensive, does not prevent virus infection, and is not a good choice in a networked environment. Managing individual machine spam software is inefficient.

If you have limited technical resources you can outsource you email spam filtering to a hosted anti spam and virus solution provider. Spam filter service providers colocate their spam and virus filters in data centers with redundant power and network connections. You will need to change your mail exchanger on your dns servers to point to the service providers spam filters. Your service provider will then scrub your email for spam and viruses. They then forward your email to your mail server minus the spam and viruses. This gives you a few extra layers of protection. In the event of a network outage or server downtime your email is held and is delivered when the network or your server is available minus the virus and spam. Spam filter services also scan for viruses; this adds another layer of defense to the virus software already running on your network.

If you have an organization with more than one hundred email boxes investing in your own spam filter appliance is the most cost effective solution if you have the technical expertise to manage the system. A spam appliance sits in front of your email server and blocks spam and viruses. The price of the spam appliance will depend upon your number of users, amount of mail and storage requirements.

Fighting spam is no longer be a losing battle if you have a good strategy to deal with the threat.

Auditing Your Computer Systems

The Computer Systems Auditing field has really exploded in the last 15 years and this is due to the rise in systems being used at the small business level, handling three times as much data as before. If you are a small business with a network, you should have some type of computer audit program in place.

A computer security audit is a systematic, measurable technical assessment of how the organization’s security policy is employed at a specific site. Computer security auditors work with the full knowledge of the organization, at times with considerable inside information, in order to understand the resources to be audited.

Security audits do not take place in a vacuum; they are part of the on-going process of defining and maintaining effective security policies. This is not just a conference room activity. It involves everyone who uses any computer resources throughout the organization.

Computer security auditors perform their work though personal interviews, vulnerability scans, examination of operating system settings, analyses of network shares, and historical data. They are concerned primarily with how security policies – the foundation of any effective organizational security strategy – are actually used. There are a number of key questions that security audits should attempt to answer:

Are passwords difficult to crack?
Are there access control lists (ACLs) in place on network devices to control who has access to shared data?
Are there audit logs to record who accesses data?
Are the audit logs reviewed?
Are the security settings for operating systems in accordance with accepted industry security practices?
Have all unnecessary applications and computer services been eliminated for each system?
Are these operating systems and commercial applications patched to current levels?
How is backup media stored? Who has access to it? Is it up-to-date?
Is there a disaster recovery plan? Have the participants and stakeholders ever rehearsed the disaster recovery plan?
Are there adequate cryptographic tools in place to govern data encryption, and have these tools been properly configured?
Have custom-built applications been written with security in mind?
How have these custom applications been tested for security flaws?
How are configuration and code changes documented at every level? How are these records reviewed and who conducts the review?
These are just a few of the kind of questions that can and should be assessed in a security audit. In answering these questions honestly and rigorously, an organization can realistically assess how secure its vital information is.

As a small business, your audit checklist might not be that detailed but these are some of the questions that you want an outside auditor to ask just in case you decide to have your system audited.

Fighting Spam!

It’s been nearly a decade since spammers and their enemies begun evolving competitively. As with the classic cheetah/gazelle model originally formulated by Darwin, each time one group becomes a little faster or more agile, its adversaries develop traits for outwitting and outrunning it.

In addition to wasting people’s time with unwanted e-mail, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. Consequently, there are many organizations, as well as individuals, who have taken it upon themselves to fight spam with a variety of techniques. But because the Internet is public, there is really little that can be done to prevent spam, just as it is impossible to prevent junk mail.

Nobody wants it or ever asks for it. No one ever eats it; it is the first item to be pushed to the side when eating the entree. Sometimes it is actually tasty, like 1% of junk mail that is really useful to some people.

The number of unsolicted commercial electronic messages received by the average American in 2001 was 571, according to Jupiter Media Metrix. By 2006, Jupiter says, that number will increase to 1,400, with more than 206 billion spam messages going out over the course of the year. While these numbers are notoriously difficult to calculate, every survey and ISP record points to dramatic increases in spam, sometimes as much as 300 percent year over year. One reliable indicator of the problem’s magnitude is the size of the anti-spam effort. The range of tools available to ISPs, enterprises and consumers in the fight against spam grew considerably during the Web bubble. Simultaneously, heavyweight Web marketers and interactive ad players have been scrambling to distinguish their services from the bad guys, as well as to counteract growing calls for government controls on digital marketing.

In one of the biggest such moves, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), through its subsidiary, the Association of Interactive Marketing (AIM), has released online commercial solicitation guidelines in an effort to promote high ethical standards among marketers. The rules require that members let e-mail recipients know how they can refuse future mailings and allow consumers to prevent the sale or rental of their addresses

What Is Spam?

You have probably seen an increase in the amount of junk mail which shows up in your email box, or on your favorite newsgroup. The activities of a small number of people are becoming a bigger problem for the Internet.

Chain letters that ask for money, whether for reports or just straight up, are illegal in the US whether they are in postal mail or e-mail. Report these frauds to your local US Postmaster. You may see e-mail coming from Nigeria or another African country, sent by someone who wants to use your bank account to transfer 20 million dollars. This is called a ’419′ scam and people have been killed over it.

Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send — most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender. To the recipient, spam is easily recognizable. If you hired someone to read your mail and discard the spam, they would have little trouble doing it. How much do we have to do, short of AI, to automate this process? I think we will be able to solve the problem with fairly simple algorithms. In fact, I’ve found that you can filter present-day spam acceptably well using nothing more than a Bayesian combination of the spam probabilities of individual words. Using a slightly tweaked (as described below) Bayesian filter, we now miss less than 5 per 1000 spams, with 0 false positives.

One particularly nasty variant of email spam is sending spam to mailing lists (public or private email discussion forums.) Because many mailing lists limit activity to their subscribers, spammers will use automated tools to subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible, so that they can grab the lists of addresses, or use the mailing list as a direct target for their attacks.

Networking for an IT Certification

Whether you want to know technology for home or for work, you will need to know what the options are as well as the best route to take. One of the options that are available is learning how to network through technology. This can help you in several areas as well as allow you to gain credentials that can be used for work. By learning how to use technology to network, you will be able to advance easily with both your business and your work area.

Networking through technology is defined as anything that will help people to communicate through technology. This can then be used as a skill in a company to allow for better and easier communication. There are several reasons to use networking as a technical skill. First, it will allow for the infrastructure of the company to be maintained. By doing this, you will know that the working of the company has constant communication with other workers as well as the supervisors. The second reason to use networking is to make sure that the administration is able to check in on what needs to be done. These are both especially important if there are people that are not working at a certain location. You will also be able to use networking as an easier way for speaking with clients as well as gaining new sales. Networking certification can also give you skills to implement new technology programs that will benefit the company. From here, you will also find ways to offer support for technology programs in the business.

One of the major programs that will be used for networking IT Certification is a program known as CISCO. This particular program will give you options for learning how to network and manage different areas through technology. It will also teach you how to route information through different areas in order to be more efficient with communication. In relation to this, CISCO will use several software programs that are specialized for networking needs.

The next type of networking certification that can be obtained is the CompTIA network and server. The first level of this is in relation to learning how to network through this specific program. From here, you can learn the networking and how the server works in relation to this. The CompTIA is specified to help those that already have some training with technology, either through education or through their work area. Through this program, you will gain the ability to use media, standard software and hardware programs, support areas and implement networks through technology in whichever area you are working in. The Comp server will focus on more advanced networking technology areas. If you move into the server, you will need to get the networking certification first, and then learn how to use the server for networking in addition to the skills that you have already learned.

Another type of networking certification program you can look into is known as server administration. This is an especially effective program for those who are business managers. Part of this program will focus on how to use the Internet effectively when conducting business with others. This will not only include having the right infrastructure up, but also maintaining business areas for clients