The Royal Mail is including daily news on service information for customers.

The Royal Mail has lost business to other companies delivering parcels and also due to the increased use of emails over letters. As part of a cost-cutting process I always recommend a business review how it can save money in postage by simply using email to send such things as invoices and make electronic payments instead of sending cheques.

Once you have paid your internet service provider (ISP) and broadband services, emails are free to use, more environmentally-friendly and for the period of postal workers industrial action, will be, more than ever before, a better way to do business.

So, it goes without saying, during the forthcoming postal strike you will be able to generate success and manage your business more effectively if you can avoid relying on the Royal Mail to send and deliver your letters or parcels.

Here is a list of things to consider while the Royal Mail postal service suffers disruption:

• Use email or telephone rather than sending letters

• Use other companies to deliver parcels

• Where possible, pay bills online or at banks, building societies and Post Offices as late payment due to mail being undelivered may result in charges

• Where possible do not rely on receiving post & let your customers know how the industrial action may affect your service or payment.

• Keep communication channels open with all your customers & let them know of any possible delays

To help generate business success, use this latest disruption in the postal service to consider ways in which you can cut costs and be less affected by further industrial action and postal disputes in the future.

For the technically-minded, Changes in Spam Levels this week Posted by simonw illustrates the level of disruption and may grow an interesting discussion from server managers – it seems the reduction is less than the 75% reported in some news services, but still significant.

This is great news for all good internet users. It’s disappointing if the spam hosting service won’t have to pay any of the costs they’ve inflicted on other computer users in some way. The only practical negative that I’ve noticed so far is that much of the stopped spam was pretty easy to identify and filter out, so the reduction in spam reaching my “unsure” mailbox hasn’t been anything like 50%. Still, less spam hitting the filters means less computer power used, which means less electricity and network data transfer used, which means lower costs for us. Yippee!

And finally, I smiled at this comment over on the WebmasterWorld discussion:-

“Our spam email has dropped so much in the past 2 days that I was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with our email accounts.”

In general, it’s a little disappointing when you get a “null pointer” from a private company, but it’s particularly annoying from a university. University mistakes like “technology transfer programmes” (that stop software becoming free software available to social enterprises) are justified by a need to get more money – but clearly this particular university has money to waste. How about others?

If there was a way to subscribe to email or blog news of their research publications, I probably would have subscribed. Instead, I’ve just ranted here (without rewarding them with a link) and now I’m going to recycle the flier. I’ll probably have forgotten the three-letter acronym by next week. It’s simply bad marketing. It’s paper spam. Please, if you are putting things into conference handout packs, ask yourself why? What are you hoping to get out of it? How are you going to measure its success?

As a BT customer I was not informed of this change; and the BT Broadband support representative I spoke with informed me there had been no changes.

So, if today you have found you can recieve but not send emails and your ISP (Internet SErvice Provider) is BT, then check your email account settings.  If in the Outgoing Mail setting you are using SMTP (eg. smtp.btinternet.com), change it to MAIL (mail.btinternet.com).  Save your changes and test.

This follows BT’s recent change that had customers receiving error messages, requiring authentication codes to be added for each non-BTemail address.

Spam for Breakfast is No Fun At All

Trust me – Waking up to spam for breakfast is no fun!

Like everyone else who works with the Internet, I have seen a massive increase in the amount of spam I receive over the past years.

Furthermore, I regularly have frustrated clients asking if I can do more to filter the spam on our dedicated servers before it gets to them and, if not, what they can do to tackle the time consuming problem.

The problem with increasing the spam filter on our servers is clients begin to lose emails they want to receive.

I hate to sound like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but I can only see spamming getting worse. Furthermore, I can never see a time when spam software is just one step ahead of the spammers of the world.

The best thing I can recommend is to put in place a good quality anti-spam & anti-virus software program that automatically searches for regular updates and manages spam filtering with intelligence – that is the more spam it handles the more learned it becomes of your settings.

Anyone active on the internet will undoubtedly receive more spam emails today than they did one year ago, so what we are aiming for here is a manageable process that effectively filters the majority of your spam, learns from its actions, and regularly updates itself against new attacks, allowing you to get on with managing your business.

Yes its frustrating that I receive 100s of spam email each day but it no longer takes up too much of my time since changing from Norton Internet Security to Zone Alarm Internet Security Suite.

Neither I nor my companies belong to any affiliate scheme or make any commission from promoting Zone Alarm, but I can honestly say, it works for us.  And if it becomes as ineffective as Norton became for us, we’ll be asking you for your recommendations!

I know some of our clients are now using Zone Alarm; and considering the lack of calls, I assume its working for them too.  I know at least two use AVG Internet Security.

So, as far as good advice goes, consider buying the best solution not the cheapest and make sure it offers, and you sign up for automatic updates.  And be aware the best anti-spam software won’t necessarily stop you receiving spapm but it will at least manage what can otherwise be, an uncontrollable situation.

Anyone who uses a BT Yahoo! Mail account should have received an email from BT explaining that, as an account holder you will need to make some changes to continue sending emails from alternate addresses.

BT are asking that all customers verify the mail accounts so that they can be passed as safe email addresses. If you don’t verify the mail addresses your outgoing emails may be blocked and you might get an Error 553 message.

For more information visit www.btyahoo.com/verify.

BT are now preventing their broadband users, both personal and business, from sending emails using some non-BT email accounts. This, BT say, is for adding protection to their customers, though it appears to be more a move for security to their servers.

My frustration was not so much with this new step, but the fact that as a long time BT customer I did not receive written warning or information about the change; which resulted in too much of my own time trying to understand the problem and then getting the correct information from BT.

BT stated that, for security reasons, they were now preventing their customers from sending emails from email client software such as Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird, when the SMTP or ‘from’ email address is not a BT Yahoo! email address or a “validated alternative email address”. Last month, Sky stopped the use of their SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) servers to send emails.

Both of these changes have meant that many Sky and BT Yahoo! broadband users have been unable to send email until they change their SMTP settings, or in the case of BT Yahoo! customers, go through a process of validating their email address.

For anyone using BT broadband as their ISP (Internet Service Provider) and are currently using or about to set up non-BT email accounts you can still do this, but instructions on how to set up your non-BT email account has changed. See the BT website for more information and help.