How do I keep in contact with my leads? (Autoresponders)

18th Feb 2014 | General Information

Imagine you have a website with a sign-up page. Someone (or something) signs up on your site and expresses interest in your product.

What next?

In old way of doing things, you would look at the information, perhaps drop them an email and, if they were interested, follow up from there.

There are so many problems with that, not least the problem with ‘spambots’ automatically signing up to anything they can find. More junk to deal with.

So, the next line in your armoury is to put on a reCAPTCHA onto your form. You know, one of those unreadable things that proves you are a human being. Problem is, some of the spambots CAN read those things and some human beings cannot. I know that after I have mis-read one of those a few times I give up trying.

There must be a better way!

Fortunately there is. There are ‘auto-responders’. What one of these does is when someone signs up it sends a welcome message and asks them to confirm that they intended to sign up. This has two benefits:

• It stops spambots dead
• It stops people signing up (fraudulently or for a joke) for other people.

If the person does not respond then they do not end up on your list. No reCAPTCHA, and a significant reduction in fake leads. Better still, you do not end up bothering people who are not interested in your product.

Additional benefit: if you are offering advice/information you can set up a sequence of emails that follow up on the lead… AND you can automatically import the lead information into your Salesforce leads.

Our preferred autoresponder is aWeber. (Warning: this is an affiliate link.) There are others, but aWeber has a rock-solid reputation and an extremely high ‘deliverability’ rate. In other words, their emails are rarely blocked as spam (because they are sending information from companies that leads have actually signed up to and those leads really want the information). Pricing starts at just $19 per month.

We have been setting up some other clever things with this service… but more of that next time.

CryptoLocker – the most dangerous malware yet?

23rd Dec 2013 | General Information

Imagine losing all of your files… and all of your backups… and not being able to do a thing to get them back unless you pay a ransom.

That is what CryptoLocker does. You may pick it up from an email attachment or from a spurious ‘downloading’ site. It hides on your computer encrypting everything… but letting you access it seamlessly. Finally, it completes encrypting everything and it tells you that you have 72 hours to pay up.

If you do not pay up in time, the decryption key will be deleted and your files will be irretrievable.

Better than that, while your backups were connected it did the same thing to them… and your Dropbox account… and any new files you try to save.

72 hours to pay up or your business goes fizzle.

It doesn’t need you to be logged in as administrator.

It cannot be detected by anti-malware software.

Time for some good practices – no downloading from ‘download’ sites. No opening of email attachments unless you are sure of the identity of the sender. (You may want to institute digital signatures for your email, to guarantee that you are getting emails from who you think you are. We can assist you with that, but really we wanted you to know of this SERIOUS threat.)

Read more about it at:

https://www.zdnet.com/cryptolockers-crimewave-a-trail-of-millions-in-laundered-bitcoin-7000024579/

I was terrified. You should be too.

Google Gmail reads your email – should you worry?

11th Nov 2013 | General Information

Google Gmail reads your email Microsoft Outlook.com scans your email. Is there a difference?

When my grandma went away on holidays, she always used to send us postcards. To slow down our post-lady from reading them, she would write the message upside down (compared to the address). An abiding memory is of said postwoman nearly falling off her bike when one of grandma’s postcards arrived. General email security is like that of a postcard. Emails fly around the internet fly around the internet without any form of envelope. They are in plain, open text and can be read by any of the computers that they pass through on their way from sender to recipient. Here is an advert with Microsoft’s (not impartial) take on the matter. [ss_screenshot width=’300′ site=’https://www.keepyouremailprivate.com’]

Back in the early 1990’s, when the internet was young, most people had not heard of a computer virus. Then again, the internet was, for most people, very slow – it would have taken too long to download a virus. You would have simply cut the connection.

Now, everything has to be scanned for viruses, trojans, key loggers, ‘bots and countless other malware. Failure to do so would almost guarantee that your computer would become infected. There are also scams and charlatans on the internet who send out massive amounts of spam, hoping that someone will fall for their cons and tricks. We take it for granted that our email will be scanned to put malware in some safe dumpster and scams in our junk email (in case we did want to read about fake Rolexes and a chap who is having difficulty getting unfeasibly large quantities of money out of his bank account). In other words, a computer program reads your email and decides what is good for you and what is bad.

What Google then does is retain that list of words from the scanning and uses it to target adverts at their account holders when using Gmail on the web. Their calculation is that people will not mind a bit of advertising in exchange for free email. Being able to target the adverts to the recipient makes their advertising more likely to result in a sale for their advertisers (so Google sell more adverts). Is that wrong, or unfair?

Now, while that is (possibly) fine for a person who has signed up to Gmail. What about the sender or recipient who has not? If I send an email to someone with a Gmail account Google will read it. If that person sends an email to someone who does not have a Gmail account, Google will still read it.

There is no way to opt out.

An alternative is to download your emails with Outlook or Mac Mail or some other application, so that you do not see Google’s advertising (if you use a Gmail account). The emails will still have been read/scanned, but you will not see the adverts.

For total security, you can go down the Public-key Infrastructure (PKI) route. This encrypts all your traffic so that no-one can read (or scan) it. It will mean that you need the public encryption key of everyone you want to send an encrypted message to. (There are services to do this.) Recipients can then decrypt the message with their private key. You need to distribute your public key to everyone who will send you an email. (The clever bit about PKI is that the ‘public keys’ are truly public – you can distribute them freely or publish them on your web page. Only the private key, which allows the decryption, must remain private.) There are services that will distribute these keys for you. At that point we are heading towards James Bond territory.

The balance is between how important your privacy is to you, how much inconvenience you are prepared to put up with (e.g. distributing encryption keys) and how much you are prepared to pay.

You decide, please comment (below) and if you want to discuss the encryption options, get in touch.

John

John holds a CompTIA Security+ qualification and still uses Google Apps!
He also has the facility to encrypt emails.