Posts tagged email
Manage your email with Aliases
Oct 21st
Mail aliases allow mail to more than one email address to be delivered to the same mailbox. Large companies use aliases all the time. Now small companies and individuals can as well. All ipHouse mailboxes now include 2 aliases.
If you are a small business with just a couple people, you can use addresses like sales@mydomain.com, support@mydomain.com and billing@mydomain.com and have all the email delivered to the same one or two mailboxes.
The use of aliases gives your business a more professional look while at the same time making it easier for your customers to remember how to get in touch with you.
Within your mail client, you can setup rules that sort or mark mail differently, depending on the alias it was sent to. If all your billing mail, for example, is in the same folder, it makes it easier for you to read through all of it before you post invoices.
If you are an individual user, aliases can help you track who is selling off your email address. Just setup a couple aliases that you can use when responding to different offers. Then watch to see which of your mail addresses are receiving any unwanted email.
Setting up your aliases is easy. Just go to our customer account management system ipMom and click on Aliases.
Ice Phishing
Dec 16th
So, how about that minus 20 degrees this morning – that cold enough for ya? Along with these near record lows last night and this morning, we received reports from a few users about a Phishing Scam that claims to be about their webmail account. This latest version asks the user to respond with their webmail username and password. This latest round has several give aways that are good reminders of what to look out for with scams in general.
Phishing is spam that attempts to extract personal information from the recipient. Here are some quick points about Phishing:
1. Email asks for your password: ipHouse will never ask for your password via email. This is a common policy with many companies so feel free to make it your own policy: Never send a password via email even if you think you know the recipient.
2. Strange reply-to address: The reply-to email address is not an official email address. ipHouse employees and internal addresses are all @iphouse.net. This latest round had the reply-to as an email address in Brazil (.br) or a yahoo.com address. A general rule for anyone is to always check a provider’s website for valid contact information. When going to their website type in the address yourself or use an existing valid bookmark. Do not click a link in an email even if it looks valid is it may be a “masked” URL whose destination is a different address.
3. Credit card fraud. While this email was looking for passwords, many Phishing scams ask for credit card numbers. And for decades there have been phone-based credit card Phishing scams. ipHouse will never ask for your credit card number via email nor ever via a call we initiate. Feel free to make it your own policy with everyone – never send a credit card number via email and never give your credit card number out to someone unless you initiate the call.
4. Spam filters don’t catch everything. While our multiple levels of Antispam catch most Phishing expeditions, some can get through. This one was harder to catch as it didn’t have any off-site hyperlinks and had enough words that it looked valid to the filters. We don’t publish for spammers how we adjust but trust me that we do adjust. Of course we do want to see what might get through. For example, yesterday alone ipHouse blocked 1,463,418 spam, Phishing, and viruses. We pride ourselves on an extremely low “false positive” rate. If a spam or Phishing message does get through, please forward it with full headers to spam@ipHouse.net. If you have an individual question or concern, our Support team can help.
5. Learn more! Here are some links to several sites’ take on Phishing:
- Blogs about Phishing: PhishingScam
- Popular OS: Apple, Microsoft
- Popular Guides (always with a grain of salt please): WikiPedia , About
- Trade/Industry groups: APWG, National Cyber Security Alliance, AARP
- Government: Stop-Think-Click
- Eric
Is your account really secure?
Sep 15th
By choosing ipHouse, or any good ISP, you may think that your account is automatically protected from random hackers. And you would be right, but only up to a certain point.
We can and do patch our machines and lock them down as much as possible. However, as an ISP, our job is also to make sure that information flows smoothly to and from your account. To a very real extent, you are in direct control of the weakest security link for your account, your password.
We have lately seen a rash of accounts compromised because they had passwords that were less than ideal. You may think your account isn’t worth hacking, but you would be wrong.
Meet ipHouse Customer David Pogoff
Aug 26th
Recently I sat down to talk with David Pogoff of Complex Programming Incorporated. David uses ipHouse for corporate email and domain hosting, as well as his DSL connection.
Filtering Email for Spam and Viruses
Jul 28th
ipHouse engineers have been waging a battle against spam since the 1990s. As the Internet has grown and changed during the last 15+ years, the amount of spam has increased exponentially.
The problem of online viruses has also grown. Effective spam and virus filtering is now an essential component of any mail server.
The dilemma is always how to balance false positives with reliable protection.
