Imagine a day when you open your email to find that all of your messages are from actual people that you know. No offers for prescription drugs, home loans or sexually explicit content, and no more sifting through mounds of trash to find the few messages you actually want to read…

… okay, so maybe that will never happen. But while eliminating all that junk mail may be impossible, there are a few things you can do to seriously limit the amount of spam you have to deal with in your inbox.

1. Protect Your E-mail Address: The best way to avoid getting spammed is to keep your personal and business email addresses private. If the spammers don’t know you exist, you’re not a likely target. To stay off their radar, avoid Newsgroups, bulletin boards, and chat rooms that require you to enter your email address. (And if you can’t resist, try try tip #2.)

2. Create a Spam E-Mail Account: If you’re finding it difficult to keep your personal e-mail address completely private, setting  up another email address may be the solution. Email accounts are easy to set up and often free, and this address is perfect to use when you have to register for that newsgroup, bulletin board, sweepstakes, or in any other situation where you’re not quite sure your privacy will be protected. The best part about this is that, because you aren’t expecting any important mail at this account, if it becomes over run with spam, you can throw it away and get another one to catch all your unwanted spam.

3. Message Rules in Outlook / Outlook Express: If you’re using Outlook or Outlook Express as your e-mail client, you can create message rules in the “Tools” drop down menu. You can set up rules that allow you to analyze sender’s names, subject line and message body before processing them. For example, you could set up a rule  that automatically sends any message with an offensive word in the subject line to the Deleted Items folder.

You can also add notorious spammers to your “Blocked Senders” list without having to create a rule… and in a few clicks, a sender of unsolicited e-mail can be added to your personal blocked senders list. Whenever mail arrives from this sender in the future, it will skip the inbox and go straight to the Deleted Items folder.

4. Third Party Software: There are tons of applications that you can for purchase (or download for free) that were designed to filter spam as it enters your inbox. Basically, these programs recognize the telltale signs of spam and keep them out of our inboxes. There are a lot of companies out there producing spam filters, but they all do essentially the same thing: allow users to take control of the spam in their Outlook or Outlook Express mailboxes.

5. Server Based Solutions: Most major internet service providers offer a spam filter as part of the package offered to its subscribers. At DE, we use Barracuda Systems to keep our mailboxes clean… and since we’re an authorized Barracuda partner, we strongly recommend this product to our customers. (As a testimonial, I’ve been at Dynamic Edge for about three months now, and have yet to receive any spam at my business email address.) If your office email is being spammed, it may be because you’ve inadvertently signed up for it… but it could also be because your server’s spam firewall isn’t performing. Call us at 734.975.0460 if you’d like to talk to one of our expert consultants about that!

Final thoughts:
Spam is a nuisance that impacts just about everybody on some level. Even if the content is not inappropriate or offensive, it is a waste of time and money. That said, protecting your email address and  getting the appropriate spam filter will greatly reduce the amount spam in your life… which leaves you more time to read blogs, like this one!

Here’s a little discovery that was made last week:

The key that’s called “Num Lk” is not, in fact, your computer’s shortcut to a very cold lake.
Its actually a function that allows you to enter numbers.

If you’re using a desktop PC, these keys will be in a block to the right of the keys you generally type with. Yes I know… obvious. But if you’re using a laptop (specifically, one that looks like mine — pearly pink with silver keys) you won’t have those off to the side. The numbers are actually hidden in with the lettered keys. Ok, so you probably already knew that too.

But on my laptop, they’re really small. I mean tiny, small. So small that I didn’t know they were even there.

Here’s the point: if you press “Num Lk,” you will not be able to type normal letters. And until you find that magical key again, you’ll be typing 0123456 instead of m, j, k, l, u, i and o… which can be really agitating. My suggestion: find your “Num Lk” key and NEVER push it.

later!

storm

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could activate Excel 2007’s Formula bar without using the mouse? You can… try this!

Press the F2 key. This will let Excel know that you want to edit the contents of a cell. The first time you do this, Excel will probably expand the information in the cell and let you to edit the information inside that cell… but you can tell Excel you want F2 to open your formula bar by doing thisi:

1. Click the Office button and then click Excel Options. Excel displays the Excel Options dialog box.
2. Click the Advanced option at the left of the dialog box.
3. Make sure the Allow Editing Directly In Cell check box is cleared.
4. Click on OK.

And that should do it… Now you should never have to take your hands off the keyboard while you’re putting together those worksheets!

The last several posts have been pretty much just the facts, ma’am… and that’s good, but I’m a little worried that you might be getting a little bored with that. So this will be a 60-second update of life at DE this past week or so:

Deb had an incident with the dumpster. It’s big and she’s small, so there was a little bit of a hubbub in the parking lot. Nothing major really, and I think the dumpster got the worst of it.

One of our owners had a landmark Birthday. I’m not going to say which <owner> or which <birthday> because I like my job <a lot> and I would really like to keep it. Great party(ies) though, Tim!!! You don’t look a day over 23.

Friday was haircut day. Bruce braved the clippers and Dusty donned a mohawk… at least for the weekend. I really wish we’d have had a hair dryer and some glue, though.

This week is the Ann Arbor Art Fair, so Brittani’s been driving the bus all week. Traffic is awesome, we all love it so much!

Today, I got out of my improper right-turn ticket for $1.15 — .65 for parking and .50 for a tiny locker to put my cell phone into. There was much rejoicing!!!

Rest assured, more factual information will follow this post, but I’m sure you’ll all admit this posting was more fun to read than the excel tip that’s just above it… (I’m bumping it down out of sequence to help our SEO — Rock on!)

Have a Good Weekend (even though I’m post-dating this to Wednesday).

stormie

to be added very soon!

That’s right, I’m scouring the office leaving no stone un-turned to find any great and useful tips and tricks to post on the blog for you: our lovely readers! I’ve already got a pretty good list going on here, so be looking forward to at least one juicy tidbit per week in this space.

My next post will contain our favorite Excel tip… so stay tuned!

Hey! For those of you who may not already know this, Dynamic Edge, Inc. has a consulting side that I don’t think I’ve mentioned in this blog before. Yep, it’s true. So not only are there people here who can help with all of your technological woes, there are also a handful of experts that can get you out of that Peachtree Problem, QuickBooks Quandry or Oracle Obstacle.

Ok, so  I probably didn’t have to be so alliterative for y’all, but I had a few pangs of guilt over talking about DE all the time without mentioning the good people that help a lot of our clients keep their businesses on track. This was a shameless plug for them…

… and now… a link to our friends at Dynamic Edge Consulting!

and to their awesome Quickbooks and Peachtree Support pages!