10 tips on how to help reduce spam

Applies to: Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
Follow these guidelines to help lower your risk of receiving junk e-mail.

1. Take advantage of the Junk E-mail Filter in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. Office Outlook 2007 helps to mitigate the problem of spam by providing the Junk E-mail Filter, which automatically evaluates incoming messages and sends those identified as spam to the Junk E-mail folder.
2. Block pictures in HTML messages that spammers use as Web beacons. Office Outlook 2007 has an additional anti-spam feature. By default, this feature blocks automatic picture downloads and other external content in messages if the content is linked to a server. If you open a message that has external content when this feature is turned off, the external content downloads automatically, inadvertently verifying to the server that your e-mail address is a valid one. Your e-mail address can then be sold to a spammer. You can unblock external content for messages that come from sources that you trust. For details, see Block or unblock automatic picture downloads in e-mail messages.
3. Turn off read and delivery receipts and automatic processing of meeting requests. Spammers sometimes resort to sending meeting requests and messages that include requests for read and delivery receipts. Responding to such meeting requests and read receipts might help spammers to verify your e-mail address. You can turn off this functionality. However, read and delivery receipts and automatic processing of meeting requests are useful features that you should not be afraid to use within a secure corporate network.
    Note:   Delivery receipts can be turned off only by your e-mail server administrator.
   

   Turn off read receipts

   • On the Tools menu, click Options.
   • Click E-mail Options.
   • Click Tracking Options.
   • 
     Under Use this option to decide how to respond to requests for read receipts. Only applies to Internet Mail accounts, click Never send a response.

   
   

   Turn off automatically acceptance of meeting requests

   • In Outlook, on the Tools menu, click Options, and then click Calendar Options.
   • Under Advanced options, click Resource Scheduling.
   • Clear the Automatically accept meeting requests and process cancellations check box.

4. Limit the places where you post your e-mail address. Be cautious about posting your e-mail address on public Web sites, such as newsgroups, chat rooms, bulletin boards, and so forth. When visiting public sites, you might want to use an e-mail address that is different from your main e-mail address. Remove your e-mail address from your personal Web site. Whenever you list or link to your e-mail address, you increase your chances of being spammed.
5. Review the privacy policies of Web sites. When you sign up for online banking, shopping, or newsletters, review the privacy policy of the site carefully before you reveal your e-mail address or other personal information. Look for a link or section (usually at the bottom of the Web site's home page) called "Privacy Statement," "Privacy Policy," "Terms and Conditions," or "Terms of Use." If the Web site does not explain how your personal information will be used, consider not using the services at that site.
6. Watch out for check boxes that are already selected. When you shop online, companies sometimes add a check box that is already selected, which indicates that it is fine with you if the company sells or gives your e-mail address to other businesses (or "third parties"). Clear this check box so that your e-mail address is not shared.
7. Don't reply to spam. Never reply to an e-mail message — not even to unsubscribe from a mailing list — unless you know and trust the sender, such as when the e-mail message comes from a service, an online store, or newsletter that you have signed up with. Answering spam just confirms to the spammer that your e-mail address is an active one.
8. If a company uses e-mail messages to ask for personal information, don't respond by sending a message. Most legitimate companies will not ask for personal information to be sent in e-mail. Be suspicious if they do. Such a request could be a spoofed e-mail message disguised to look like a legitimate one. This tactic is known as phishing. If the possible spam appears to be sent by a company that you do business with — for example, your credit card company — then call the company to verify that they sent it, but don't use any phone number that is provided in the e-mail. Instead, use a number that you find by using other means, such as directory assistance, a statement, or a bill. If the request is a legitimate one, the company's customer service representative should be able to assist you. The Junk E-mail Filter also includes phishing protection to help identify and disable suspicious messages.
9. Don't contribute to a charity in response to a request sent in e-mail. Unfortunately, some spammers prey on your goodwill. If you receive an e-mail appeal from a charity, treat it as spam. If the charity is one that you want to support, locate their telephone number or Web site to find out how you can make a contribution.
10. Don't forward chain e-mail messages. Besides increasing overall e-mail volume, by forwarding a chain e-mail message you might be furthering a hoax — and meanwhile, you lose control over who sees your e-mail address.

From: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA012300261033.aspx?mode=print 16/08/08, 5.14pm

The productivity killer

Time wasting on the internet

Recent reserach has confirmed that the internet is a major source of time-wastage for many employees, including salacious material and social networking websites.

More than half (55%) of the human resources decision makers polled in a Clearswift survey had caught employees wasting time on the internet, or had disciplined employees for wasting time.

Pornography was found to be a particularly prevalent time-waster: 60% of respondents had either found staff accessing pornography or disciplined staff for accessing it via the internet.

A large majority (79%) of HR professionals reported blocking access to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Despite these policies, 68% of surveyed HR decision makers reported leaving monitoring to the IT department.

From http://www.mybusiness.com.au/newsletter/index.php?issue=76

Optimize Windows for better performance

Limit how many programs load at startup

Many programs are designed to load automatically when Windows starts up.

Software manufacturers often set their programs to open in the background, where you can’t see them running, so they’ll open right away when you click their icons.

That's helpful for programs you use a lot, but for programs you rarely or never use, this wastes processing power and slows down the time it takes Windows to finish booting up.

Sometimes it is obvious which programs are running, as there will be an icon in the taskbar. Look here first to see if there are any programs running that you don’t need. (Position your mouse over each icon to see the program name.)

Make sure you click the 'Show hidden icons' button so you don’t miss any.

Even after you have checked the taskbar there may still be some programs running automatically.

You can find and disable them using Windows Defender.

The Software Explorer screen in Windows Defender shows which programs automatically start when you launch Windows

If you’re unsure about whether a program should open automatically at startup, you can try disabling it, restarting your computer, and then using the program.

If that causes any problems with the program, you can go back and re-enable it to start automatically.

Alternatively you can also use the System Configuration tool in Windows Vista to manage which programs start automatically. 

Learn how to say no!

Learning when to say no is an extremely important customer communication skill.

If you don't do it, you'll be overworked and risk looking like a pushover. Most clients respect our boundaries, but there are always some who try to push their luck.

Rather than just agreeing to put yourself out for your customer when they ask you to go that extra mile, take a minute to decide the impact of taking it on.

Ask how agreeing to this short-notice job will affect me/my business/my other customers, as opposed to automatically being empathetic with your customer's predicament.

Yet it's common to acquiesce to unreasonable requests, as we worry our customers will think badly of us if we turn them down.

But saying no shows you've taken control of your firm, so your customer's reaction is more likely to be "they've really got their act together" than "it's unprofessional to turn down work".

If the thought of saying a harsh-sounding “no” distresses you, surround it with a comforting phrase, such as "I'm going to have to say no, but thanks for asking me".

By taking a tougher line, your customers will learn to respect your limits. Bending over backwards to please not only sends signals that you're a pushover, it ultimately saps your energy.

Having effective customer communication skills and the confidence to say no is a real asset, so take control, be clear-headed about your policies, know your limits and when to just say no.

From: http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,22467201-36437,00.html

Web 2.0 implications for business

Before embarking on a Web 2.0 strategy for your business, there are some things to be aware of.

• Don’t pick the technology to find an application. Instead, work up a clear idea of how you could benefit in such a set up and find a technology to achieve this. For example, if you are a computer training business, you wouldn’t want to publish a free knowledge store of how to use software – that’s your business. Therefore a Wiki is probably not the answer. Instead, you might want to involve your customers more in how you can deliver a better training environment, so a blog might be more appropriate.
  
  
• Be aware that is possible (probable) that your customers will not be interacting with your content in the context you expect. Establishing brand therefore needs to be done at the lowest level (“content-unit”). You will not be able to assume users are on your website.
  
  
• To encourage your customers to become contributors you must make it easy for them to do so. Technology is the means to the end, not the end in itself.

However, with this in mind, there can be huge benefits. If you can create a ‘community’ around your business or brand, members will stay incredibly loyal.

A recent McKinsey study found that members of an online community:

• visited a site 9 times as often;
• stayed 5 times as long; and
• represented 65% of sales, even though they represented just 35% of visitors .

So use your imagination. There are numerous applications of Web 2.0 concepts, especially if you are prepared to share some of your business’s intellectual property.

For example, a Canadian gold mining company made its highly prized geological survey data available on the internet and offered a cash prize ($500K) for anyone who could analyse and predict gold deposits. 110 targets were returned, with an 80% hit rate, yielding $3bn worth of gold!

What is Web 2.0?

Most of us have heard of Web 2.0, but what does it mean?

In short, it is a ‘way’ of using the web technologies that humanises the internet, allowing users to share, rate, review and connect like never before.

The internet, as we know it, has been around for over fifteen years. To begin with, it was principally used for searching, browsing and reading and posting relatively static information.

For a little while now it has been evolving into something quite different. The web soon allowed us to interact – fill in forms. Later E-commerce and internet banking allowed us to transact.

Now Web 2.0 gives us a qualitatively richer internet experience than all these things put together: we can now collaborate.

It is important to remember that Web 2.0 is coined phrase. It is not a ‘standard’ or propriety version of any software. Indeed Web 2.0 uses the same protocols and programming languages as “Web 1.0”, and many of its products are free!

The web is merely the platform; content is king. Users don’t just want to look at or read information; they want to share, leave comments, upload music or photos and build knowledge bases and social networks.

And excitingly, with the increase in user friendly interfaces, it is now possible to roll out enterprising and complex applications with limited technical knowledge.

Web 2.0 toolbox

• Blogs are journals written by individuals or companies, available on the internet. Blogs can be made up of text, images and rich media, appearing in chronological order, with the most recent entry shown at the top of the page. Comments and feedback are openly solicited in most instances.
  
  
• Wikis are collaborative spaces used for building knowledge bases, such as encyclopaedias and dictionaries. Multiple (or infinite) users can contribute to or edit entries in a live environment: the idea being that the ‘collective’ intelligence will always be greater.
  
  
•  Social networking includes sites like MySpace and Facebook. Here, people post a public profile of themselves. They can add their favourite photos, music and website links and choose to share these with friends only, or the general public.
  
  
• Podcasting and vlogs (video-logs) are audio or movie files posted on the web. The Web 2.0 flavour comes from the sharing and commenting on these files. Youtube, for example, makes it easy to embed any of its posted content within your own webpages.
  
  
• Syndication is the sharing of content, typically done through the use of news / RSS feeds. Your online experience can be perfectly tailored to your demands. You decide which content to pull in, rather than have third party content ‘pushed’ to you. What can my business get out of Web 2.0 applications?

Network your business

Even if your business runs only a handful of PCs, a shared network, run from a centralised server, can bring big gains in productivity.

New generations of hardware and software are making installation and operation much cheaper and easier.

For example, servers from Dell or HP can cost as little as. $1,000. Microsoft's Windows Small Business Server 2003 software sells for under $600.

Benefits of setting up a server network:

1. By centralizing data on a server, you can better manage critical business information. Sharing files and other data across PCs becomes much easier, as does migrating data from one PC to another.
   
   
2. You can protect your data using backup tools integrated into the networking software.
   
   
3. You can collaborate better as a business. Some network software - Windows Small Business Server 2003 for example – ships with collaboration packages. This allows your employees to work on the same data via the web-based applications.
   
   
4. Some servers enable authorized out-of-office workers to log-in and have secure remote access to the network.
   
   
5. You can share high-speed broadband access across all the office PCs.
   
   
6. You can set up new computers, add users and deploy new applications more quickly and easily. You can also better manage firewalls, monitor threats to your data and more easily deploy virus protection and intrusion detection.
   
   
7. A server can improve the performance of your desktops, by storing large chunks of data, it frees up memory on individual PCs (particularly older PCs).
   
   
8. Server software enables you to consolidate your e-mail accounts into a single, company-hosted e-mail account, improving your image to customers and partners. You could also have several aliases from one root e-mail address so a server can make a lot of businesses look bigger than they are.

Do you Facebook?

Australian businesses are having mixed reactions to the rise of Facebook, the latest ‘next biggest thing on the web’.

Internet filtering company Surfcontrol estimate Facebook is costing Australian businesses $15bn per annum in lost productivity, from employees spending time ‘net-working’ rather than simply ‘working’.

Organisations also see Facebook as a threat to commercial confidentiality, with the risk of employees both advertently and inadvertently posting sensitive information on the internet. As a result, many have blocked it.

Facebook is typical of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. It is a ‘social networking’ site, which allows users to create profiles, invite friends to contribute, build communities of interest and – most importantly – share content.

The website is exceptionally ‘sticky’. Its developers regularly roll out new applications to trigger return visits to the site. Best of all for them, invites come ready-endorsed from people you know. Friends can post questions or just ‘write on your wall’.

Facebook presents are highly consistent interface, making it more user-friendly than the likes of MySpace. Content remains the focus; not the often highly-stylised designs associated with other networking sites.

All this has proved too much of an attraction to employees.

However, travel company Flight Centre has taken a different view – seeing the best attributes of Facebook as an opportunity to help its consultants better sell their product: holidays.

Flight Centre knows their customers use it and it also knows its consultants use it; posting photos and content from the places they have visited. Facebook also integrates some great travel applications.

Flight Centre uses Facebook to both communicate and share content with its customers. Facebook offers travellers and consultants the ‘raw’ information: that honest and unsullied by marketing hype view of the world – all with an air of independence.

Deciding whether Facebook works for your business should definitely be done on a case by case basis.

Undoubtedly Facebook can be highly addictive and can chew up employees’ productivity. There are many self-professed Facebook ‘tragics’ out there more than willing to spend your time on their hobby.

Conversely, Flight Centre has demonstrated that even the traditionally ‘social’ applications of the Web 2.0 generation of websites can create rich networks of people and information. It can also engender a very personalised and relaxed way of communicating with customers.

Account managers and consultants can build up networks that can help generate high levels of trust between your business and your customers.

Try it first, then see.

ATO publishes compliance program

The Australian Tax Office has published its compliance priorities for FY07 with the release of the Compliance Program 2007-08.

Tax Commissioner Michael D’Ascenzo maintained Australia enjoys high levels of compliance with tax and superannuation laws.

“Our program is as much about helping people to comply as it is about dealing firmly with those who don’t want to do the right thing.

“Initiatives to better support individual and business taxpayers as well as tax agents are a priority in this year’s program. These initiatives include help to improve tax governance, support tools for trustees of self-managed super funds, and improved access to expert advice for tax practitioners.

“We want to work with the community to reduce red tape and minimise compliance costs,“ said Mr D’Ascenzo.

“For example this year we will provide more services including an assistance program for small business, more pre-filling options to help people complete their tax returns accurately and quickly, and products to assist people with their super obligations.

“Our aim is to be as unobtrusive as possible to the majority of people who meet their obligations, but to be highly visible to those who don’t.

“This is about fairness and creating a level playing field for everyone,“ Mr D’Ascenzo said.

Areas that face increased scrutiny this year include:

• corporate restructuring
• mergers and acquisitions
• the cash economy
• self-managed super funds
• super guarantee obligations
• serious fraud and evasion

New laws also mean the ATO can also act against promoters of schemes involving offshore and other aggressive arrangements.

A copy of the Compliance Program 2007-08, summary of priorities and key activities, and the Commissioner’s speech are available on the Tax Office website www.ato.gov.au

Get the most from your PC

Increase your workspace

When you need a really big window, don't just maximize it: go full screen!

To view a window full screen, hold down the Ctrl key and double-click the window's title bar—or when the window is active, press the F11 key at the top of your keyboard—to get the biggest window possible.

Add the Links toolbar to My Computer

You can put all your most well-used applications and documents onto your PC’s toolbar, so you can open them from any window at any time.

1. Click Start, then My Computer.
2. Now right-click the toolbar and then click Links.
3. You now have the Links toolbar on your windows, just like in Internet Explorer.

Note: Make sure that Lock the Toolbars is not checked. Click on it to deselect it if it is.

The Links toolbar is completely customizable.

Try this: Navigate to your favorite application and drag and drop its icon to the Links toolbar. You just created a shortcut.

Do this again and again for as many applications as you want to appear on the toolbar.

Arrange windows on your screen

You can display any two windows side by side on your screen by first clicking a window's button on the Taskbar.

Next, press and hold the Ctrl key and right-click the second window that you want to open, then click Tile Vertically.

You can now preview, or work on two documents simultaneously.