Seven Creative December Newsletter (12 December 2009)

Introduction

Seasons Greetings! In this issue; AVG update time, steps to avoid spam, Seven Creative affiliate scheme and a very useful Outlook utility.

Is your Anti-Virus software up-to-date?

If you’re using AVG free edition version 8.5 or earlier on Windows, you will more-than-likely need to upgrade to version 9 in December. To check which version of AVG you have, double-click the AVG icon in your task-bar (the red, blue, green and red square at the bottom right corner of your screen) then look at the bottom-left area of the AVG window when it opens.

To upgrade to version 9, follow the links from the AVG window or click here to go straight to the download location: https://tinyurl.com/cbe7be (I’ve shortened a very long URL here if the address looks a bit unusual!). When installing, watch out for the ‘Yahoo toolbar’ option. If you don’t want it, be sure to un-tick the box – it’s not a mandatory element of the AVG software.

Making money with the Seven Creative affiliate scheme

Did you know we have recently rolled out an affiliate scheme? Send someone in our direction (make sure you let us know to expect their call) and you’ll receive 10% of the value of the services they purchase including business stationery, leaflets & flyers, websites & blogs and marketing campaigns. We save time and money from doing less marketing and you could receive a nice cheque in the post. Simples! Please contact us for full terms and conditions.

Getting spammed?

Unfortunately, Spam is fact of life at the moment for all email users. The best we can hope to do is cut the number of spam emails we receive by taking some simple steps.

If your website is hosted on our Namesco hosting facility, you can blacklist persistent spammers by logging in through your control panel, selecting ‘email & ftp’ then adding an email address to the ‘blacklist’. Emails received from that address will in the future be automatically rejected. (Conversely, adding names to the ‘white list’ will mean they are automatically accepted).Also, you can change the sensitivity of your spam filter. The anti-spam software rates each received email according to how likely it thinks that its spam. For example, if the rating is more than 6 they are accepted. If the rating is less than 6 they are rejected. Change the threshold to 5 and the sensitivity is increased. Go to your control panel, ‘email & FTP’ then select ‘spam filtering’.

Websites hosted on our Zoom facility, log into your control panel and enable ‘Spam Assassin’

Things you may not know

Seven Creative offers the full range of business marketing services including websites and email accounts, however, you may not know we also offer:

• Social network marketing
• Pay-per-click advertising
• Print media advert design
• Email marketing and mailing list management
• Regular website backups
• Plus much more

Please call us for more information

A useful utility for Outlook

If you use Outlook on a Windows computer, you’ll no doubt either already regularly back-up your emails or at least, it’ll be on the to-do list. It’s a simple procedure; select ‘file’, ‘Import and export’, ‘Export to a file’, choose the format for the backup (personally I use Personal Folder File (.pst), select ‘Personal folders’ (tick the ‘Include subfolders’ box) and the click ‘Next’ to choose a location for the back and begin). The problem comes when you have a lot of large attachments. Your backup file may end up being huge and take an age to complete. A quick work-around is to remove all the email attachments saved in your Outlook and put them all in a separate file on your computer. A free utility that does this for you is available from www.kopf.com.br/outlook/. Download, install and you’ll get a little toolbar along the top of your Outlook window called ‘Attachment remover’. Click it, follow the instructions and hey-presto, all your attachments are neatly put in a separate folder and replaced with short-cuts in your emails meaning your Outlook backups should now be a whole lot quicker.

That’s all folks

This brings us to the end of the Seven Creative December newsletter. From all us here at Seven Creative Towers, we’d like to wish you all the best over the festive season for the New Year.