Email

Tips and discussions on how to better manage your email and enhance productivity

Easy encrypted email

In my daily communications with clients and providers I’ve noticed that sometimes they will send confidential information over email. I have received credit card information, social security numbers and other data that in the wrong hands can wreck havoc. I appreciate very much the trust these people put in me, but the fact is that email in transit is in OPEN TEXT form for EVERY computer between the sender and the receiver can read it. There are typically one or two dozen computers in any internet communication and trusting everyone in that chain is extremely naive at best.

Emcrypt your message easily, protect your informationI just discovered a service called Encipher.it that will solve this problem. you just need to visit https://encipher.it/ and write your message in the box. when you click on “Encipher It”, it will ask for a password (called an encryption key in spy parlance) and it will convert your message into gibberish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For example, I used it to convert:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

to

EnCt28070c2f6ffc645fabbd087024256938eb2ba3c038070c2f
6ffc645fabbd08702K4MihJ/DkQM
YtPvd0VA4AMsZdSIbul5ai/
of3Gp9qYQrFD3yJBQQHtzgZrJFciYmkxkonSTuDM7g7D7ow2
aENwokAhV
0v12tQfKiLj5h5HmZ5hA4NdXoVQKWJ2DZYCVO
kCJoD5r4yMxUWwNUrvh7y0Qy5ModBzGPjjqdF4ytDlG
qiuPQ
M8JqRqGSreaIiPUspLcHIwEmS

Using ‘password123’ as the encryption key (a TERRIBLE password by the way, please read my article about password strength HERE http://goo.gl/36yti)

You can copy and paste this encrypted message into your email (it has a feature to directly insert into Gmail or Google Mail for Business) and you can even ask to convert it into a short URL, you send the encrypted version and then you can contact the person receiving the message via phone, fax or a SEPARATE email message. This last option diminishes the risk because each email is likely to take a different route but is much less secure.

To watch a video on how it works please click HERE https://encipher.it/help#video

You can set up a bookmaklet in your browser if you want to but is not required. I tested with my iPhone and it worked as expected and they even have a mobile website that works great

PC World published a review HERE http://goo.gl/FCiYT

Hope this little tip can make your communications more secure.

 

 

 

Is your email address hurting your Business?

As new media professionals we deal everyday with requests from prospects, clients, providers and other parties, and just by looking at their email address we can tell a lot. A prospect who is looking for website development or hosting with an aol.com address -in our experience- spells trouble. Being still attached to AOL as a business resource tells us that you are likely very reluctant to change or that you are technologically averse. Not very different from asking us “I want a website but I don’t do email”. (insert sound of alarm going off)

NOTE: I have nothing against AOL, was their customer from 1996 to 1998 and it once was the dominating online provider, but it is a company that got complacent in its business model, trying to make it easy for the customer but refusing to adapt to an ever changing environment. Their services fulfill a role in personal communications, but we deem them very lacking in the business ecology.

Let’s revise our recommendations for business email:

  • Use your own domain: Instead of using ForImage@hotmail.com set yourself up with info@ForImage.com (obviously an example only), here is why:
  • Your domain is yours: As long as you pay the domain registration (ForImage.com in this example) only you own the use of it. That works towards building your brand, it tells everybody you are serious and accountable about your business.
  • Your domain is portable: You are not tied to a provider, you have the capability of moving your operation to another provider if you want/need. If your email address is ForImage@yahoo.com and you change providers you have to notify every party you do business with of the change and you will most probably lose business.
  • Your can increase your productivity: By embracing a new technology your email can become way more than your email. It can become your instant message platform, your scheduling system, your document collaboration platform and a lot more.
  • You have control over mail flow: you can set up info@ForImage.com to send copies of every email to Joe@ForImage.com and Kate@ForImage.com and even set rules of which emails to send or delegate someone in your organization to screen your email.
  • You can have your email everywhere: Modern email implementations (notably using IMAP) will hold the email on the server so you can access it from your office PC, check it, search and reply from your tablet at the coffee shop and check it again in your home PC, accessing all the time the same messages in all the devices.
  • You can expand the use of your domain: Your domain allows you of course to have a website set up on ForImage.com and/or www.ForImage.com but you can also set up fb.ForImage.com to re-direct to your Facebook page and tw.ForImage.com to your Twitter feed.

I’d love to hear your opinion

AMPHION communications  concentrates in Google Apps for Business. We have been doing Web and Email hosting since 1996 and have discovered that relying in Google for email and online collaboration means better service and happier clients.

Give us a call at 888-AMPHION (888-267-4466) for a free 10 minute consultation and see if what we are doing for our clients can help you.

Get your inbox back!

Aren’t you tired of having to delete, archive label or move to a folder the same offers, newsletters, statements and requests day after day?

Don’t you wish you had a slim inbox with only the relevant messages ?

One solution is of course to set individual filters that will do the archiving/labeling/organizing for you, but doing research for one of our customers I’ve found a much easier way:

Enter Zigmail.com

The clever guys at Zigmail have devised a very effective procedure and after some quick setup their system will seem to suck up all the less relevant email. It’s like having a personal assistant constantly cleaning up your inbox. Apparently they have put some serious AI (artificial intelligence) behind this process. After initial setup ZigMail processed some 5,000 messages in my account and screened my email, leaving only the good stuff behind. Their process will ask you when in doubt so it can learn what you consider relevant.
Right after you create your free account with Zigmail.com you will need to provide your User ID and Password to your current email provider. This is needed so they can retrieve email clogging your inbox. They DID NOT delete the messages from my inbox. They are just archiving them and labeling as ‘zigmail-backup’ so your email is always there and available to be found with a search.

Their tech support is fast at responding and either they have vastly outperformed Siri or they have real people handling your requests. There is nothing I despise more than getting a canned reply that has a few keywords in common with my question but suggest that the support team did not read or has no clue. Obviously not the case with ZigMail.

After using the system for a while, I am very excited about reclaiming my inbox and above all getting back the 20 minutes daily I spent doing repetitive tasks (amounting to 7 hours per month). Not too shabby! That’s 20 more minutes per day for more productive work.

Every day you’ll get a digest with a breakdown of the messages that ZigMail have processed in your account and a VERY CLEAN inbox

At this time ZigMail’s QuickStart system only works with Gmail (but no Google Apps yet), Yahoo and AOL. They are working to bring other IMAP supported accounts online in the near future.

ZigMail was awarded Best Email Innovation for 2011 in the About.com 2012 Readers’ Choice Awards. Well deserved!