Dumpster Diving – Email Style

We get overloaded with email and tend to let it just sit in our inboxes. When you max out your storage space, which is the equivalent of an electronic dumpster, you can create problems that are time-consuming and costly to fix.

Email overload became a vexing problem for a client who had 160,000 messages in their inbox, which Outlook limits to 50 GB. They wanted to delete some messages and keep some, but there were just too many messages to go through individually.

We decided the most practical course of action would be to delete all the messages except for those from the last three months. But that solution created other problems. There are limits on how much email you can simply delete. There’s also an issue of how Outlook handles deleted files: they just don’t go to an electronic landfill. They can go to recoverable folders, where they stay for 30 days before going to the “landfill.”

You can delete a large number of files by going to your Outlook online instead of your Outlook mail client. That’s what we had to do, but the process took hours. You can prevent the problem by just paying more attention to your inbox management. Try some of these measures:

  • Delete unwanted/unneeded email as you go. New Outlook’s default lists your messages on the left, and the preview pane on the right shows you the content. As long as you don’t open the email, it won’t harm your system. You can simply click on the trash can in the list to delete the message.
  • Set up subfolders within each account. Within each account, you can set up subfolders and drag-and-drop file messages there. That keeps them out of the dumpster.
  • Empty deleted emails on a regular basis. Whether you do it daily, weekly or biweekly, empty your deleted emails as a routine task. If you have Outlook on your mobile devices, you can delete unnecessary emails without needing your computer. I make deleting emails from my phone a regular task while traveling.

If you need to empty an electronic dumpster, we can help you set up and manage the process. If you need to institute a system to manage email across multiple accounts and users, we can help you determine rules that meet your needs and implement a program. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to talk about it.

Cybersecurity Climate Only Getting Worse

The heat is rising fast in the cybersecurity world. At a recent conference in Phoenix, AZ, we saw how the industry’s top hackers and defense experts team up to fight an ever-increasing number of invasion attempts from bad actors around the world. Visiting a cybersecurity war room really opened our eyes.

We were ushered into a huge room, full of screens that hackers and defenders used to monitor traffic. This link, which shows the origins of constant firewall attacks from all around the world, made a huge impression on me. The attacks were detected because they had an invalid format or invalid character. It meant that the hackers probably forgot to change the language they were using to launch the attack.

My takeaway is that if hackers get smarter or pay more attention to details, they can become more lethal. They can use AI (artificial intelligence) to eliminate the need to know English, and that’s scary. For example, as we saw, they can use Chat GPT to create malware with a specific task. It’s only going to get worse as we hit the holiday shopping season.

Helping a client deal with an email hack brought home all the dangers. They thought they had an email hack, which resulted in emails going to their contacts under the guise of coming from them about file sharing in Dropbox. They thought they had it fixed, but the same problem cropped up two weeks later. It had a link to click (always a danger sign when the recipient “trusts” the sender).

As we got into the process of fixing the hack, it involved an apple.com account with a reference to Dropbox. Our efforts were hampered by the difficulty we had getting into accounts to verify that the hackers were using Dropbox to launch bogus email.

Our client could have just ignored the problem, or they could have sent an email to their entire contact list to warn them not to open emails with the Dropbox reference. But my preference and theirs was to get to the root of the problem. You have to know where all the dots and connections are so that you can get ahead of the hackers and shut them out.

We can help you stay secure by auditing your cybersecurity practices and implementing programs to strengthen your defenses. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to discuss your cybersecurity and gain more peace of mind.

Out with the Old, In with the New

As Microsoft winds down its tech support for Windows 10, it’s time to make a plan to migrate to Windows 11 and – if needed – the hardware to run it. It can save you money in the long run when you factor in the cost of support for Windows 10 and the efficiencies you’ll gain.

As most of you know, Windows will only offer security-related tech support for Windows 10, starting next October. It will not upgrade any performance features. Furthermore, the tech support will cost you $30 per year.

We’ve been getting a lot of calls from clients whose hardware is not up to snuff for Windows 11. Your best option, in our opinion, is to have new hardware in place for Windows 11, and as you’ve probably read in our newsletter, it goes beyond just the operating system.

Older hardware and software put software vendors in a bind. They feel a need to protect all their users, and they don’t want to leave technology systems exposed to a breach. Yet at the same time, they need to serve their customers who demand more security and better performance. If not, those customers will look for other software vendors.

Hardware has a shorter shelf life, but hanging on to a device for too long can be a disservice. As most of us work with larger files, possibly in collaboration with other users in real time, the speed and security of data transfers through the cloud has become increasingly more important. We’ve had older computers crash during file transfers, putting data at risk. Data, after all, is your most valuable asset.

We saw that value first-hand when we installed five new computers for a client. During the process, we discovered there were some missing files in obscure locations. They had not been saved to the cloud or backed up. Two of the people getting new computers had issue after issue with transferring files. We had to copy files from their old computers onto another device and then transfer them from the device to the new computers.

When you combine the cloud with software subscriptions and up-to-date hardware, you have data security with system reliability and performance. It’s where technology is heading, and we think you will fall farther behind by waiting to install and maintain new hardware.

If your hardware isn’t compatible with Windows 11, we strongly urge you to start the replacement process. Rome wasn’t built in a day, as the saying goes, but your technology can crash and burn in an instant. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to develop a plan to keep your technology up to date.