Have you been getting a bit more spam lately?  Yeah, we all have. 

There’s a new kind of unwanted email that we’re all seeing a bit more of lately, called an NDR.  NDR stands for Non-Delivery Receipt.  It’s that error message you get telling you that a previous message you sent was unable to deliver.  Only lately, many people been getting NDRs for messages they never actually sent. 

So the email says something like “The message you sent to Steve could not be delivered because….”  But you don’t know any Steve, and you never sent a message to Steve.  So why are you getting this error?

Easy.  It’s spoofing.  We covered spoofing back in January, letting you know that messages you may receive that appear to come from yourself are just some hacker’s attempt to “spoof” your email address.  Apparently, with a little ingenuity, you can make an email appear to come from whichever email address you wish. 

It’s become a favorite tactic of spammers, because most Average Joe’s are more inclined to click on something or reply to an email if it’s coming from a sender they trust.  So spammers started spoofing real emails to try and entice you to let your guard down.  Having your email spoofed doesn’t in any way mean your computer or your server has been invaded or compromised by hackers.  It just means someone (or some automated program) either guessed at your email address or scraped it off a website someplace where it was published.

So the new issue is that some of these messages the spammers are sending are going to email accounts that don’t exist–or at least don’t exist any longer.  And that causes the email server to spit out an NDR back to the sender.  And since the sender spoofed your email, you’re the one getting the NDR. 

Postini–our preferred email filtering service–is actively pursuing a fix to this problem so that your inbox isn’t overflowing with NDRs.  And we know that many of you currently have inboxes that are filled with NDRS because several of you have called us to ask what’s going on.

Rest easy.  The fix is coming soon.  Until then, you can just ignore the NDR–assuming it’s for a message you didn’t initially send. 

Every time email and email filtering gets more sophisticated, the spammers respond by creating a new wrinkle in their tactics, resulting in a new kind of headache for you.  Spam isn’t going away, folks.  In fact, it’s only going to grow more prominent and more advanced.  Thankfully, you’ve got us to help keep you informed–and hopefully you have a powerful professional spam filter like Postini, who are on the cutting edge of the technology used to fight the spammers. 

If you’d like to learn more about Postini, you can do so here on our website. 

We know the NDRs are annoying you–we’re getting them too.  But it’s a temporary thing that will be sorted out soon enough.  If you have specific questions, or if you think your NDR problem is not the same as what we’re describing here, feel free to shoot us an email or call our office and we’ll be happy to take a look. 

A lot of the SPAM email you see in your inbox comes from strange email addresses.  I’m sure you’ve noticed some of them. 

Some SPAM even appears to come from your own email address.  If that happens… don’t worry.  We get SPAM messages all the time from ourselves.  It’s often a source of amusement to me, in fact.

As this article points out, the email address that appears in the “from” field has basically nothing to do with where that message really came from.  Sadly, it’s terribly easy to set up a message to appear as though it’s coming from a trusted source.  From the article:

In fact, so-called address spoofing is such a common trick that it’s become a major tool in phishing scams. The hope is that a suspicious recipient will just look at the sender, see it says “admin@ebay.com” or “service@paypal.com,” and assume the message is legitimate. Of course, it’s as phony as a three-dollar bill, and if you click on the links in that message, you’ll be whisked off to a scam website.

Long story short… you should have good antivirus and anti-spyware software running to protect your machine, just in case you ever click on a phony link unsuspectingly. But, in general, getting SPAM messages from yourself doesn’t mean that your account has been compromised. 

It’s a brand new year, in case you hadn’t noticed. We thought it’d be a good time to look back at the past year and make some solid tech-related resolutions for the coming year. We hope these will help make 2008 a great year for your business, your website, and how you are able to use technology to better server your customers.

1. I will protect my data and the data of my customers.

This article says that computer breaches hit an all-time high in 2007, and show no sign of slowing in 2008. Those of us here in Nashville might wince a little more at this news, considering the recent theft of our voter registration records from a government building (the thieves used the rather high-tech break-in technique referred to as “throwing a rock through the window.”) If you voted in the last election as a registered Nashville voter, your full social security number is probably in the hands of some small-time crooks. Ouch.

But stories like this are a dime a dozen. Federal government agencies have seen laptop thefts compromise the data of hundreds of thousands. Companies everywhere are still being reactive instead of proactive. Identity theft has tripled in the past year.

Here’s a resolution that can save a lot of strife down the road: protect your computers and the data that they store. Password-protect things, and use a real password, not “12345“. Run a firewall (please, for the love of all things holy, run a firewall). Don’t put employee or client data on laptops. Encrypt your wireless router. Basically, all the security steps you’ve avoided because you thought these things couldn’t happen to you.

Start 2008 off fresh, lock down all your data, and be prepared. The consequences are far too scary to skimp on security. We’re happy to help you get set up.

2. I Will Do My Part to Help Search Engines Rank My Site Properly

The latest numbers on search are in, and guess what… search engines are more important than ever. In November 2007 alone, over 61 Billion searches were performed. That’s an average of more than 10 searches per month for every living person on the planet.

According to Enquiro–a web search statistics firm–56% of people use search engines on a daily basis. 26% of those people will give up their search if they can’t find what they’re looking for in the first two pages of search engine results. So, the point is, if you’re site isn’t listed in the first two pages of the rankings for your target keyword phrases, you’re not reaching the very audience that’s looking for you.

It is simply no longer acceptable to just have a website. If you’re not being found in search engines, you’re business is falling behind. Again, we’re happy to help with this sort of thing, but whether you use us or someone else… the fact remains that if you’re not optimizing your site for search, you’re throwing money away.

3. I will stop spamming my clients with ugly, unsolicited emails.

You type up a wonderfully-worded marketing message, paste it in the body of a new email message, and then carbon copy your entire contact list… raise your hand if you’re guilty of this?

This may be annoying some of your customers who don’t necessarily appreciate SPAM messages. What’s worse, your messages probably aren’t even getting to many of your intended recipients. One of the first things spam filters look for is numerous recipients of a single message–even the most basic filters will often block your message before the customer even has a chance to see it.

What if I told you there was a way to send a marketing message through email that looks beautiful, a message so branded and personalized that the customers actually wanted to recieve it? Would you believe that such a thing already exists? We call it Keymail. Keymail is an email marketing product that conforms to all spam laws. It is custom designed to match your existing website, logo, or other graphics. It has personalization features to make recipients feel like a prized client. And best of all? It’s cheap. So cheap that not using it is almost criminal.

4. I will stop wasting time and money dealing with unwanted spam emails.

Spam costs money. Most of our clients say they get between 100-200 unwanted solicitation emails per day–at least, those not using our Postini email filter. Wading through all those messages to discern the junk from the business correspondance wastes precious time. Even if you only spend 10 minutes a day sorting email, that adds up to over 43 hours a year. I don’t know what you make per hour, but multiply that number by 43 and you’ll see a very real dollar amount for how much money spam is costing you.

Google–you might have heard of them–they own Postini, and use it on their Gmail service. Google says more than 70% of all email to their Gmail accounts is spam. If you’re not experiencing a similar level of spam, count yourself lucky. Oh, and act now, before it gets worse.

You owe it to yourself to free up your time. And like Keymail, Postini email filtering is every bit as inexpensive as it is effective.

5. I will throw my server down a flight of stairs in a cathartic release

Okay, we don’t really encourage you to do that. Servers don’t tend to survive such trips, as our video above shows. Yes, that’s really us, at our real office, chucking a useless and hated server to its death. (Hey, we thought it would be best to end this list of resolutions with something fun). Should you ever find yourself so frustrated with your machine that you can’t help but recreate the above scene–we’ll do what we can to help you get back on your feet. But it’s easier if we set up the new server before destroying the old one!Happy New Year, Keystone clients! May 2008 be filled with technology solutions that see your business grow beyond your dreams.

It’s fun sending email, isn’t it?

Especially those funny stories or videos where you carbon copy all the names in your contacts list.

Wait… no. That’s wrong. Those are not fun, those are annoying.

Apparently, Basex Inc.–a web analytics firm–agrees with me. They named “information overload” as the number one problem for the coming year of 2008. Seems that workers get disoriented and distracted every time they receive a new email–keeping them off balance and off-task. And people, I guess, just get endless amounts of joy from hitting the “Send” button, so we’re sending more and more email every day. From the article:

“It’s too much information. It’s too many interruptions. It’s too much lost time,” Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira declared. “It’s always too much of a good thing.”

Hang on a second….I just got the most hilarious email forward that I have to go check out.

(2 hours later)

Still there? Good. Sorry about that. Now where was I?

Man, I guess these Basex folks are right… email can be a distraction. In fact, They estimate that this “information overload” cost employers about $650 Billion in 2006. Yikes! Their advice? Resist the urge to reply immediately to all incoming messages, and tone down the instant messages and use of the “reply to all” feature.

Or at least make sure the folks you’re emailing constantly don’t have a full-time job to be distracted from.

How do you pick the perfect password?

(Here’s a hint:  Don’t use your first name, or the word “password”).

Yahoo Tech has put together a nice roundup of articles they’ve featured regarding password security.  Most of us know not to write down our passwords for email, programs, and other online accounts.  A post-it note on your computer screen with your password is not the most secure method of remembering it. 

However, most people go too far the other direction.  They know they need to keep their password private and in their memory, so they end up choosing something easy to remember.  Problem is, most hackers have learned how to guess the “easy to remember” passwords. 

Here’s a list of the 10 most common passwords.  If your password is on that list…change it immediately. 

They also have an article on how to properly choose a safe password.  It’s full of great ideas such as using words that are easy to pronounce, but are spelled wrong (like “piktshure”). 

Here’s a great round-up of all sorts of general password safety tips. 

It’s pretty depressing to read that, given enough time, a hacker can figure out any password.  But that’s all the more reason to make it as tough for the hackers as we can.  Hopefully, they’ll move on to another person who hasn’t put as much effort into creating a secure password. 

Google has a little page up patting themselves on the back for stopping so much spam–rightfully so, I guess.  The article mentions that 70% of all incoming mail to Gmail accounts is SPAM.  Wow.  That’s quite a lot.  But thankfully for Gmail users, only 1% of that SPAM gets through to the user. 

What’s strange to me is why Google wouldn’t mention Postini.  After all, it is Postini’s revolutionary SPAM filtering system that is catching all these unwanted messages. 

Then again, Google owns Postini–bought them for $625 Million back in July–so I suppose they can give or take credit for Gmail’s SPAM filtering as they see fit.

How does all this apply to you?  Well, you may or may not remember that Keystone offers Postini service to our clients at a very reasonable price.  As the stats from the Gmail article show–it is an extremely powerful tool in the fight against SPAM.  If you spend even 10 minutes a day going through your email to weed out the SPAM from the real messages you need, that is equivalent to an entire week over the course of a year.  Think about that.  What would it be worth for you and your employees to have one more week per year of actual work time?  Whatever that number is, Postini is less than that.  Check out our website to learn more, or give us a shout and we’ll be glad to talk about it further. 

Yahoo has unveiled their new web-based mail system, an overhaul 2 years in the making. 

Among the new changes:

• built in instant messaging
• real-time chat, right from within Yahoo Mail, without having to run your IM application
• send text messages directly to a cell phone, and receive texts in return
• unlimited storage space (Gmail offers 2.9GB, Hotmail 5GB)
• improved search function to search your own mail by keyword
• send attachments up to 10MB in size per message
• Drag messages to new folders
• select a group of messages at once
• right-click a message for expanded options
• new tabbed interface
• a message preview pane (just like Microsoft Outlook)

Overall it is a vast improvement, and almost immediately vaults Yahoo to the top of the web-based email marketplace.  You can sign up for a free Yahoo Mail account here. 

Back off, Apple. The REAL KeyNote is Keystone’s technology newsletter. If you want the REAL KeyNote, which costs you nothing… click here to sign up.

Hey, who hasn’t been unjustly blocked by some spam filter? Well, there are a few words you simply shouldn’t put in email subject lines if you want your message to be received. You’ll have to find other ways to let you’re friend know that “you’re a winner!”

We regularly get the question, “Can you setup my email so that I can send a 20MB file?” Well, unfortunately for you, the answer will be “no” for quite some time to come. Luckily, there is a way around that problem that doesn’t involve FTP (let’s not get into what that is right now). YouSendIt is a service that allows you to transfer large files to people without bringing the Interweb to its virtual knees. Hey, they even have a free account for you bargain hunters. Click and learn.