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By Robert Michael
Most hosting companies offer one or more email accounts with
your hosting service. These email accounts are a gaping hole for
fraudsters, scam artists, and other criminals to slip through
take advantage of your naivety, and possibly steal your valuable
personal information or sabotage your computer's operations.
Phishing: One form of such criminality is phishing where emails
appear in your account that, by all rights, seem to have been
sent from a trusted company with which you do business (ie a
financial institution, an eMerchant, or your hosting company)
claiming that your personal information needs updating in their
records.
A link embedded in the email takes you to a webpage that mimics
that companys website. If you dont know any better, and your
hosting company doesnt catch it, youre liable to hand over such
valuable personal information as your password and credit card
number to a criminal.But many hosting providers include software
in their hosting packages that can detect and intercept such
schemes before you ever have to see them. Viruses: Another
insidious crime is the sending of viruses through email
attachments. We've all heard of viruses, and consumers and
hosting companies alike often rely on such tools as Norton
AntiVirus to protect their system(s). But your hosting company
can often provide you additional protection.
Having a firewall as part of your hosting package, for example,
is a great source of peace of mind. Its worth seeking a hosting
provider that can scan attachments to ensure their virus-free, a
hosting provider that is constantly updating their database of
new viruses. Spam: And then there's spam. Yuck! We're all sick
of it (your hosting provider sure is) and yet so many companies
still dont seem to get it, continuing to spew it out
indiscriminately. Well, you shouldn't have to deal with spam
anymore, and many hosting companies are seeing to it.
Spam filters allow hosting companies to detect suspicious
emails Ð for example, ones that have been sent out en masse to a
list, or ones sent from addresses that dont match any in your
personal address book. Some hosting companys spam filters can
even learn over to time to match a growing list compiled
partially by you and partially by your hosting company of
unsolicited and unwelcome senders. Text analysis technology
allows your hosting company to review the actual content in
emails sent to you to discover impersonal, targeted marketing
pitches, often matching those sent to others of their hosting
clients.Then you let your hosting company know whether to
automatically delete suspicious emails from your account or
simply store them in a different mailbox for you to review at
your convenience.
Keep in mind, spam isn't only annoying; it can also be
dangerous. Spam can contain viruses that'll infect your system
before you or your hosting provider even notice there's a
problem. Your mail is private, and so is your precious personal
data. If your hosting company doesnt protect your mailbox like
Brink's security, find another hosting provider. There are
plenty.
About The Author: Robert Michael is a writer for Farsi Hosting
which is an excellent place to find hosting links, resources and
articles. For more information go to:
http://www.farsihos
