Be Leery of All E-mail - Think Before You Click

Hackers Are Out There -Think Before You Click

The Christmas and Holiday seasons bring out the spammers and hackers. By being vigilant and somewhat leery of all e-mail you receive, you could save yourself some serious headaches.

So, am I saying that you shouldn't read your email? Of course not. What I am saying is to be careful. Spammers and hackers have come up with some pretty tricky ways to get your attention. Some of the messages appear to come from trusted sources, including in some cases, friends or others that you know.

Always hover over links (or otherwise check them) to determine their destination before you click on them. Sometimes even this is tricky. For example, you may be associated with "xyz.com" and a link shows up as "xyz.com.cn". xyz.com.cn is NOT the same as xyz.com. This could be a "phishing" attempt - an attempt to gather personal information from you for the purpose of identity theft.

Always excersize caution with links in email.

This advise is true all he time, but over the holiday season, the sheer volume of these messages will intensify.

As somebody that receives about 500 messages a day during the normal year, and that number will probably increase to over 1,000 messages per day during the holiday season, I know it can be a daunting task to closely look at all these messages. But I can tell you that having to clean and/or reformat your hard drive and restore from backup is much worse and more time consuming.

We are in the process of determining if our clients would like a good spam blocking service. We use one here that traps the vast majority of our spam and places these messages into quarantine that we can actually see for up to 25 days before they are permanently deleted.

As there is quite an investment in this type of software, if this is something you would be interested in, please contact us using the contact form and indicate in the message field that you are interested in spam blocking; we'll keep you aprised of our plans. If we have enough interest, we will make the investment in the software. Our price point will be similar to others on the market.