Are you a victim of E-mail bombing and Spamming?

While working in office you may find your system has suddenly become sluggish. E-Mail processing is slow, your mailer seems to process a large number of messages and there are lot of unwanted e-mails in your inbox. If that is the case then you are victim of e-ail spamming.

Work Around

-You need to use an anti-spam tool that can help you in recognizing and minimizing effect of such indecent activity.

With such tools you can maintain a list of legitimate and fraud e-mail Ids and also keep a check on suspicious mails such as
Setting alerts for messages that originate from the same user or same site in a very short span of time. You can try using Mail Washer. Mail washer is a reliable spam blocker that will effectively stop email spam. Just download 30 day trial version and check out its anti-spam features. Some of features of the software are:

1. Preview emails on the server to see who’s the sender and what he has to say before downloading.
2. Deleting un-wanted e-mails from server.
3. Maintaining Friends list for recognizing valid e-mail Ids.


4. Maintaining backlist for the e—mails which have automatically bounced.


5. Customizable Filters for effective filtering out spam mails from legitimate mails.

Just login to Mail Washer site for complete information.

• Using Anti-Phishing Software


• Fighting Spyware


• Using data security software
  
• Using Microsft outlook Anti-Phishing Features

Related Posts: Check out other post on fighting against Phishing andSpyware
http://officetipsntricks.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-to-safe-guard-your-personal.html

How Microsft Out look can help in fighting Phishing?

As discussed in previous post it is difficult to distinguish fraud e-mail from legitimate ones specially when you receive lots of e-mail in a day. Here is another work around:

-Use Microsft Outlook anti-phishing features simple!!!!!!!!!!

Outlook provides feature that verify each e-mail to check whether it is fraud or not. Some of the parameters used to verify the e-mail are:

Check content of the E-mail

E-Mail address from where E-mail has been sent. If it has been sent by a spoofed address filter will consider it suspicious.

Filter check the links if provided in the e-mail. If links found to me suspicious mail considered to be fraud.

Suspicious message detection is set on by default. Whenever any e-mail is considered suspicious it is sent to Junk E-Mail folder. The m essage format of the e-mail is changed to plain text and links in message are disabled.

Outlook 2003 contains phishing protectection features to fight phishing. Its features can be used by downloading both the latest Junk E-mail Filter update and Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 2 from Microsoft office online. Good information about its phishing features is also available in a post ondigital Inspiration.

Note: The phishing protection feature is not available for earlier versions of Outlook.

Are you being phished?

Are you being phished is a difficult statement to understand if one exactly does not know What is phishing?
So What is phishing?

Phishing is one of very popular internet scam in which the users are lured to disclose their personal information such as credit card number, account id, passwords etc.. which can then be easily misused. So phishing can be defined as activities causing identity theft of a person. Such kind of identity theft can be big loss to an individual or to an organisation. In office when one is too much indulged in work phishing goes unnoticed as a common phishing scam starts with an e-mail message that looks like an official notice from a trusted source through which recipients are directed to a fraudulent Web site where they are asked to provide personal information.

Costs of phishing

• Phishing results in loss in money as well as time of owner.


• Financial institutions also suffer from reduced employee and IT productivity, loss of network resources, legal liability and damage to their brand name and reputation.
• From Customer’s perspective, their trust in Online payment systems and the ability of financial institutions to mitigate fraud is diminished over successful phishing attacks.

Work Around

-Awareness is first step for prevention. Be aware of best online practices while working on web.

Some are listed below:

1. Be very careful while providing personal information in a reply to e-mail message. You need to verify the sender and purpose carefully before providing such
   information


2. Avoid clicking on Suspicious Links/Unknown llinks in a e-mail


3. Don't send personal information in regular e-mail messages Regular e-mail messages are not encrypted and are like sending a post card. You need to use Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) for sending digitally signed and encrypted message.


4. Make sure the Web site in which you are making a transaction uses encryption. The Web address should be preceded by https:// instead of the usual http:// in the browser's Address bar. There should be lock icon on browser's status bar doubleclicking on which will display to display the digital certificate for the site.
   
5. Use Anti-Virus/Firewall to protect your PC. It is important to use a firewall, keep your computer updated, and use antivirus software, especially if you connect to the Internet through a cable modem or a digital subscriber line (DSL) modem>/li>
   
6. Whenever you make a online transaction monitor the transaction carefully to make sure that the charges levied are correct

Note: Just visit Microsoft support site for complete information


- Use Anti-Phishing Software

Using Anti-Phishing Software can help in detecting phishing scam. Anti-phishing software can be described as computer programs that are capable of identifying phishing content contained in a websites or e-mail. This tool gets integrated with web browsers and e-mail clients as tool bar so that whenever viewer visits a website or opens an e-mail actual domain name is displayed. This will help the user in distinguishing legitimate website from fraud ones that vicariously act as legitimate. One such tool is Phishing Detector Publisher's Description. It’s a premier free Fair Trade Authority Phishing Detector plug-in for Outlook Express and Outlook used for spotting phishing and email frauds. This Anti-phishing tool helps in detecting Phishings/Email Frauds/Spoofed emails. Phishing Detector v.1.0 is able to recognize phishing emails pretending to come from eBay, PayPal, Amazon, eGold and hundreds of other financial institutions. Its free version can be downloaded from various websites such as soft32

Related Posts:
Related Post:

• Using Data Security Software


• Fighting Spyware


• Fighting against e-mail spam
  
• Using Microsft outlook Anti-Phishing Features

Using Anti-Phishing feature of
Microsoft Outlook

Join Anti-Phishing Work Group

Need to copy data from Web?

While surfing the Web or while reviewing any document you may need to save some information for future reference. Generally either we save the webpage or need to copy paste in another document. This can be some times time consuming and we need to remember the folder where we have saved relevant information. Can you think of a better trick to do this job?

Work Around

-Use Microsoft Outlook Notes Simple!!!!!!!!!!

Click Notes to view all of your Outlook Notes. Now back to clipping. Open a Microsoft Office Word document or a Web page and size the window so that it does not overlap with your Outlook Note. See something that you would like to save for future reference? Select the text, and then drag it to your Outlook Note. When you see the mouse pointer change to a plus symbol (+), you can release the mouse button. Your text is now saved in an Outlook Note

Source: Micrsoft office Online

How MVP’s can help in solving MS Word related problems?

It may happen you are stuck with MS Word problem at your workplace and are not able to solve it using MS Word tutorials/Newsgroups.

Work Around
You can go for a professional help by a MVP.

MVP stands for Most Valuable Professional. This is a award provided my Microsoft to outstanding members of online community. These candidates are generally proposed by existing MVps as they regularly participate in conversations of newsgroup and are familiar with members of the community. These MVPs are available for commercial hire. They show their a "Business Contact" link on their bio page. In case you have an extensive problem which you are not able to solve via newsgroup advice alone you may email to a MVp for consultation. Note you need to post your problem in the newsgroup before contacting any MVP. Complete details of MVPs can be downloaded from The Word MVP Website. It is one of the best help website that provide quality tutorials on MS Word.

Getting help for Microsoft Word

In our office Microsoft word is a most useful package we use for our daily documentation. Sometimes we get stuck with problems that really kills our time.

Work Around

The guru mantra for getting out of such problem is to use F1 Key help and Office Assistant. If this doesnot solve your problem you may visit Microsoft newsgroup. Microsoft have newsgroups that are completely dedicated to understanding MS word and using it in a better way. Any one can go and put up a question over there which are quickly answered by other people who visit the group. It has been analyzed visitors get their answers with in 24 hours. In case you have Microsoft Outlook Express on your system just visit news://msnews.microsoft.com

Google also keeps archives of the discussion on Micrsoft Newsgroup. You can search the google archivehosted on google groups beta center and search the archive same way you search on the Web.

There are also very good websites which provide quality tutorials on MS Word. Just check out the following Websites

The Word MVP Website
Shaunakelly’s Website
MSDN Blogs
Bay City Public School help tutorial
Online Free tutorials
Internet4classrooms
MS Word Tutorial
About:WordProcessing

Note: Such help is also available for other MS office programs.

Spyware…Is it troubling you?

Many time while working in office you may find unwanted popup appearing on your PC screen from nowhere. You may feel there is some kind of virus that is creating trouble and anti-virus is not working properly It’s time that you realize that this can not be due to a virus but can be the work of Spyware program.

According toMicrosoft – “Spyware and other unwanted software refers to software that performs certain tasks on your computer, typically without your consent. This may include giving you advertising or collecting personal information about you”. Spyware cannot be removed by Antivirus as Antivirus program is not supposed to do so.

Spyware can create following problems:

• Browser search settings have changed without your knowledge. You may notice a new toolbar in your browser that you didn’t want, and find it difficult to get rid of.
• Computer is more prone to crashes.
• Unwanted pop-up advertisements even when you’re not on Web
• Computer takes longer than usual to complete certain tasks.

Work Around

Spyware Removal Tool

• According to Microsoft best way to get rid of spyware is to download a Spyware removal tool and run the same on your computer.
• Other way can be to find programs in Add/Remove Program that you do not recognize or are named similarly to the program that is causing the unwanted behavior and remove it.

Microsoft has provided few other resolution methods which are available on Microsoft support site. For complete information regarding Spyware you just need to visit may refer Microsoft support site.

Related Post:

• Using Anti-Phishing Software


• Using Data Security Software


• Fighting against e-mail spam
  
• Using Microsft outlook Anti-Phishing Features