NowITWorks.net » Email

How to Protect Yourself & Your Customers from Phishing

Chris — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:59:26 +0000

Phishing is the use of fraudulent emails, websites and other techniques to get people to give away confidential information such as credit card details and personal information by acting as a respected company. You may have encountered phishing if you received a suspected email from PayPal asking you to update your details that turned out wasn’t from PayPal at all – since PayPal has a strict policy of not asking for this information, that wasn’t from PayPal. Here is some advice on how you can prevent your customers from falling victim to phishing and stop phishers from using your reputation to steal people’s personal information.

The first thing all companies should do in protecting their customers from phishing is to start a customer education campaign. Most of the steps which need to be taken in order to prevent phishing lies with the customers but often customers are not sure of what they should be doing. They need to be taught to not give out their personal information in response to an email, to install anti-phishing software on their computer, and to inquire about any suspicious emails. If you want to protect your customers from phishing you need to start by educating them and teaching them about these steps.

The second thing you can do as a company to protect your customers from falling victim to phishing is to implement a policy in which you never ask for personal details, log-in details or credit card details via email. Publish this policy and regularly ensure that your customers know about it. Tell them what type of emails they may receive from you and what emails (including the sharing of personal information) they will never receive from you. Let them know who they should contact if they ever receive an email which appears to go against your company’s policy in this regard.

If a customer alerts you to a possible phishing incident you should take this seriously – do everything you can to get the phishing website shut down and alert your clients to this incident in order to protect them from giving out their personal information.

Going into specific details on how to secure your website is outside the scope of this article- so we recommend you speak with your IT manager or hosting provider to make sure unauthorized users do not have access to your database and that this is checked regularly.

Stop phishers from stealing your customers’ personal information and stop customers from falling victim to phishing by educating your customers about the steps that you are taking to protect them and the things that they can do in order to protect themselves. Today, people not only have the ability to ruin your reputation but also enrich themselves in the process and harm others in doing so. Protect yourself and your customers by putting an anti-phishing policy in place today.

Email is for Messaging … and that’s about it.

Jason — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:31:48 +0000

One of the most common mistakes people make with their email is thinking of it as a package delivery system. We all have an aunt or grandma who thinks it’s cute to take 400 hundred pictures of her cat, downloading them onto the new computer she got for Christmas, and then sending every single picture in one email…to fifty recipients. This scenario, as most of us can attest, is bad for everyone involved. Chances are, it will be slow to move over the tubes, possibly get blocked by security software, and just as likely as not, won’t be delivered at all.

The truth is, email was designed with one specific purpose in mind: To deliver messages, not packages. Of course, this all changed with the arrival of digital cameras, electronic business cards and *gulp* .PDF files. People started throwing any silly thing they wanted their buddies to see, in an email and sending it off. Sure, it worked fine for a while, but then the attachments got bigger. Then they got bigger. Then they… Well, you get it. A new trend shows that people are even shuffling around music and videos through email!

I suppose it is unavoidable at this point, as business has come to rely on the trafficing of such hefty digital beasts. There is, however, a limit to what your email system will allow. While quite often your internet connection will be more than adequate to handle large file transfer, your email client may not be so prepared. Most email programs, like Outlook, will choke on an attachment if it is over 5 MB in size.

From a professional’s point of view, it’s easy – make your attachments smaller. If you have a lot of pictures to send, perhaps try selecting only a choice few, shrinking their bulk with some editing software, then compressing them for good measure before attaching them to an email. If you have a large document to share with your coworkers, you can upload it to a shared folder on your company’s server, then just send out a link to it. You may also check out a little thing we geeks like to call “FTP.”

Email Tip: It’s better in Plain Text

Jason — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:45:20 +0000

Do you remember when Maureen in HR sent out that lovely email to the entire company, exclaiming to the Heavens her excitement about this Friday’s meeting -casual attire not mandatory, but encouraged- and you could barely read the text in the body of the email above the visual commotion of her Outlook stationary? Adorned with flowers and little kitty paw-prints – it’s enough to give you a headache or at least induce an annoyed sigh.

Most perpetrators of this behavior are unaware of the nauseating effect of email stationary. They simply don’t know that there are many people out there that cannot view it at all. Stationary in email is made possible by HTML code, which is also the basis of how web pages on the internet are able to be seen.

While most modern email clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) support HTML, some web mail viewers, mobile applications and text-based email programs (like Pine and Mutt) don’t show it. In fact, HTML in an email can sometimes make a message completely unreadable. Even adding colored text to your signature – only possible via HTML – can cause viewing problems on the other side.

The fact is that it’s not that important how the email is designed – it’s better to pay attention to things like grammar and spelling. With this in mind, it is most polite to format your emails in Plain Text. When replying to a message you can respond in Plain Text by choosing it on the drop down menu under the format tab. Again, the important part is in your message so try not to distract from that.