Ten years ago, consumers began to tire of the old way of doing business. Being force fed a steady diet of overly zealous commercials imploring consumers to use a product or service were largely being ignored. Company’s like Ford understood this more quickly than others, when targeting the younger audiences, and instead of commercials they did something radical.
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Unified Technology Solutions is a good place to start when you are looking to protect your network from spam and viruses. We can configure your email system using off-site filtering at your domain address (@yourcompany.com). Your mail system can be set up such that before any email is sent to an individual email address, it is first put through a filtering service instead of directly to your server.
This filtering service will run the e-mail through multiple filtering software packages to look for both viruses and spam. The reason for multiple filtering packages is, there could be the chances that a single software program does not recognize a virus, but another program could catch it.
The procedure with these filtering services is a system which works like this. On the first pass, the most common threats, which are usually all virus emails are filtered out. After that each E-mail is scanned and assigned 1 of 3 spam rankings.
Any email message where nothing suspicious is detected will be forwarded through the service to your mail server and show up in your mailbox. Email which looks most likely to be spam or infected in any way is sent into quarantine to prevent someone accidentally opening a suspicious email. The recipient of that email will receive a daily e-notifications to either add the sender to your safe list, or delete the email for good. The 3rd ranking is “definitely spam“, this is spam coming from known spam servers or matching known spam patterns, and is immediately deleted by the service.
Outbound filtering does the same in reverse, filtering your outbound e-mail to make sure your server has not been hijacked and is being made to send spam. Beyond simply checking for spam, you can set also configure filters to make sure employees do not send out e-mails with racial, derogatory, or curse words that can reflect bad on your business. You can even add a companywide legal claim to all outgoing e-mail if needed, this is much easier than keeping every E-mail client updated with the latest legal disclaimer every time it needs to be change.
Filtering service also adds a layer of protection if your server or internet access goes down, especially in a disaster. Email will be spooled on the off-site filtering servers and sent to your server when it comes back online, and you can access it from any internet connected PC if an important email is needed immediately.
Because of economy of scale, the pricing for this off-site filtering, with all it’s added features, is right around the cost of your current filtering software. In fact, it is often less expensive, with rates under $3.00 per user/month and requires little to no regular maintenance. This is very cost effective compared to on-site filtering software, and can be especially inexpensive if you are maxing out your available bandwidth and are considering the purchase a higher rate or second connection.
UTS recommends and sells off-site filtering service by McAfee, a world leader in information systems and security research.
To find out more and see if off-site filtering may be right for you feel free to contact us by email at sales@unifiedtechs.com, or give us a call at (772) 539-7667.
Your IT Guys @uts
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I hear it all the time, Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat. all of them a waste of time. They just suck up your mental energy, good for nothing. That is just Not so!
It’s time to catch up with what’s going on out there. Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram are places where friends check in with each other to learn where the best deals are, where the best food is, and what services to use in their respective communities. Recently I posted about Facebook check-ins and free WIFI. Facebook Check-Ins are helping to drive traffic to local establishments.
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How to Optimize The Performance on Your PC
Windows has built-in utilities which can help you keep your PC running efficiently. One of those is a utility called Disk Defrag.Disk Defragmenter? What does that even mean? And why should you be using this particular utility?
First, before I explain what disk defragging is, it will be helpful to understand how disk drives work, and then you can more easily understand why a utility like defrag is important.
As you use your PC, files are created on the hard drive. Rarely is there a contiguous space for those files to be written in. The operating system looks for any available space to write your new files to. It uses a system of file pointers to map out all the sectors of each file. Often a new file may be spread between numerous smaller areas or fragments of free space when being written, this causes the hard drive read heads to have to move all over the drive area to find the parts of your file.
Imagine taking all the pages out of a book and spreading them randomly all over your house and then trying to read the book. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to put those pages back together in order? Disk Defragmenter is a program that keeps the data on your PCs Hard Drive grouped together and in proper order.
Windows 10, like Windows 8 and Windows 7 before it, is supposedly set up to automatically defragment files for you once a week. This does not always happen, so if you notice your files are taking longer to load it pays to run the disk defragment utility on your own. In fact, as a preventative measure, the techs at Unified Technology Solutions recommend that on average you will want to run the Disk Defragmenter every month minimum.
If you with digital photos, music, videos editing or large databases, some users may require it more often.For those who regularly work with large files, there is software available for purchase that will continually monitor and defrag your drives.
Your IT Guys
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