Here's The News from Hen's Teeth Network

Free Newsletter published by Hen’s Teeth Network (www.hens-teeth.net)
June 2003

Contents:
·    Feature: What can I do about spam?
·    Product news: Professional and Family Email Accounts
·    Did you know about: Email aliases

Feature: What can I do about spam?

Spam is unsolicited email, the email sibling of postal junk mail. It tends to be commercial or pornographic in nature. The cost of spam is amazing. The president of Brightmail (www.brightmail.com) predicts that by the end of this year half of all email will be spam, and estimates that spam costs U.S. businesses $10 billion a year in lost productivity (from NewsScan Daily May 22, 2003). Another source (The Observer - www.observer.co.uk) in an article of March 2, 2003 says that 10 billion spam emails are sent every day and that 150 spammers send 90% of all email.

Spam is irritating and often offensive. Email connects friends and family easily and cost-effectively. Email helps businesses run efficiently. Spam turns email into a nightmarish burden.

Fortunately, many solutions exist to manage the flood of spam. These range from technical traps at the internet service provider (ISP) level to software that can be run on an individual email account. Such software automatically weeds out and destroys spam as it is received. One such software solution is SpamAssassin (www.spamassassin.org), which is included in all email accounts available from Hen’s Teeth Network.

There are several approaches used to identify spam: a “blacklist” of known or suspected addresses that produce spam, a heuristic ranking of the content of the subject line and the message to mark as spam messages that meet a “spam profile”, and a statistics-based decision, relying on text analysis, of whether or not a message is spam.

Managing spam is something that requires constant adjustment, since spammers have a vested interest in learning to evade the spam management tools. Using a software solution to manage spam generally requires regular updating (similar to updating virus control software). Hen’s Teeth Network includes such regular updating in all its Signature Hosting and email accounts.

One of our Hen’s Teeth customers, www.email911.com, deals with email, its problems and promises. Among many helpful features on this site are discussions of spam and how to manage it.

For another discussion of spam, see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming


Product News: Professional and Family Email Accounts

Convenient, cost-effective, and capable – our new email account packages come in two varieties tailored to meet your family and professional email needs. Packages start for as little as $2/month.

Packages include:
·    Your email account in your own domain
·    An email address that will never change, even if you change ISP (internet service provider)
·    An email account that is spam-protected
·    Generous disk storage space (10-20 times more disk space than is included in Yahoo! or Hotmail accounts)
·    Email that is accessible from any web browser
·    No pop-ups or advertisements
·    Up to three email aliases (see Did You Know About section)

These email packages can be bundled with other features:
·    Several individual email addresses
·    A web site
·    Privacy feature for your domain registration

If you are tired of ads on your email, if you dread the turmoil that comes with changing ISP and having to move email to new addresses, if you need more storage space, or if you need a professional email address using your own domain name rather than one in a generic account, then one of these packages may be exactly what you are looking for. See http://www.hens-teeth.net/html/products/email.htm for details.


Did You Know About: Email Aliases

Email aliases are addresses that expose a role rather than a particular name. Email aliases can be forwarded to one or many other email addresses. Such aliases are often used in professional settings, where sales@yourdomain.com could be forwarded to the email box of a salesperson or to the email boxes of several salespeople so that vacations or sales trips would not leave a message unanswered. Email aliases are useful for volunteer organizations where the individual holding a position may change rather often, but the person holding that position needs reliable email (such as treasurer@yourorganization.org being forwarded to the email box of the person currently serving as treasurer). In the case of a family email account, you might want to use an alias such as dad@yourfamily.com to forward to your email box.

Each Hen’s Teeth Network Express Hosting, Professional Email and Family Email account includes up to three free email aliases. HTN Signature Hosting and Virtual Private Servers support an unlimited number of email aliases.

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Thank you.
Candy Zemon, editor