October 2009

The transfer of mail to the new mail server is complete. This mail server brings a lot of new features to the table which you should know about.

First, it has numerous ways to detect spam vs legitimate mail. If it believes an email is spam, it puts it in the Junk Email folder in your account on the server. You need to log on to the server (eg, mail.bnswest.net) with your email address and password to look at the mail in this folder. Once logged in, click on Email to get to your mailbox, and then click on the Junk Email folder. If an email wasn’t spam, you check the box to the left of the good email, and then click on Mark…Not Spam at the top of the screen. This moves it to the server inbox, then whitelists that sender, and trains the mail server to treat similar email as legitimate.

You can also go into the Trusted Senders link on the left side and put in an email address or entire domain of someone with whom you correspond.

The mail server also has a calendar in which you can place appointments (and reminders) or you can synchronize your calendar from Outlook. This goes for the Outlook address book as well. That way if you are away from your workstation and need to check or send email, the address book will be there.

It also can check outside accounts such as Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail and bring that email in to your account.

Finally, the server can also synchronize email and address book information between a smart phone and the server. This is way cool, because if your phone ever breaks or gets lost, when you replace it, adding the address book back takes just a few seconds…not days of typing. Give us a call if you would find this useful for you.

There is a lot more this server can do that we’re still exploring. Email has evolved from simple messaging to a critical communications channel for many companies. This server extends that to current uses in today’s environment.

One of the things the Internet has done is make information more readily available, such as locations of businesses near you, etc. For marketing purposes, this kind of information is quite useful. The problem is—too often companies who have it don’t share this information with the public. One way to get around this problem is by querying a company’s website with different zip codes, etc. to pull location data down. One company has done just that and offers the results pretty cheaply—www.aggdata.com. While their website isn’t anything to write home about, it gets the job done. And frankly, the data is what is important, anyway.

Best wishes!

Sincerely,

Ben Conner