I’m seeing a lot of communications floating around here lately about Spam. Not the canned food, but the electronic version, of course. Unlike the food, there are many varieties of electronic spam such as email spam, mobile phone spam, instant messaging spam, and many others. The one type of spam I’m hearing so much about lately is the type that comes into your email mailbox, you know, the unsolicited and undesired electronic junk mail that’s trying to sell you something you really don’t need or want. Often, the email doesn’t even appear to be addressed to you but it is because your address is on the blind carbon copy (bcc.)
So how do spammers get your email address anyway? Well, there are many sneaky sites out on the internet that you visit that asks you for your email address for the sole purpose of getting your address to sell. It might be a survey form or an entry into a contest. It’s important to always read privacy policies before giving out your email address. Another source of email addresses is on those “chain” type emails that get forwarded multiple times and have multiple addresses embedded. If you’re sending emails to multiple people, consider using the blind carbon copy function so none of the addresses are visable to the recipients. And, if you receive emails with addressess embedded, be sure to strip those out before forwarding the email onto anyone else. Finally, spammers might even get your address by hit or miss, that is by simply making up email addresses by taking a common name and adding a @wowway.com, a @msn.com, or a @hotmail.com to it.
If your WOW! email box is getting deluged with spam email, turning on the spam filter can help. But, you’ll need to remember to check the “junk” folder on a regular basis to make sure legitimate emails that you want to receive are not getting blocked. If they are, there are email filter settings you can set to allow them to get through. If you need help with spam or email filters, feel free to give us a call. As always, we’re here to help you get the most out of your WOW! service.
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My technical knowledge about Internet risks and dangers skims the surface of all there is to know and as I’ve been talking to people and writing articles here, I’ve been learning a lot more. Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz from our troubleshooting teams about phishing, so for today’s article, I thought I’d explore this term I’ve heard but don’t know much about. Up until today all I knew was whatever it was, it had to be bad because it’s always mentioned in the list of dreaded Internet risks and dangers, like viruses and bugs. As I began to research, I quickly learned that phishing is bad, very bad indeed. So, if you missed the article from our own Technology Editor, Steve Stanfill, about his own personal experience with phishing, and some good advice he offered in his article, click here http://www.thewowbuzz.com/blog/technology/gone-phishing-or-not to read it now. It’s definately a topic worth talking about again, to educate and to warn our customers about this terrible act of “phishing.”
According to Webopedia, “phishing (fish’ing)(n) is the act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. The e-mail directs the users to visit a web site where they are asked to update personal information, such as passwords and credit card, social security, and bank account numbers that the legitimate organization already has. The web site, however, is bogus and set up only to steal the user’s information.” The name “phishing” is a variation on the term “fishing” with the idea that the email “bait” is being thrown out with the hopes that some will be tempted to biting the bait, while most will ignore it. Phishing scams are so prolific that there are lots of websites devoted to providing advice and tools on how to protect yourself from these frauds.
The latest gab from the call center technical team is a brand new variation of phishing called “tabnabbing.” Tabnabbing is described as the process of replacing the entire contents of a page while it’s in a background tab. If you’re interested in learning more, I encourage you to go googling on the net to learn more about it. It’s an interesting and slick scam for sure and as we learn more, it will make a good topic for a future article.
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Well it has been just over a year now since we moved to the new WOW! Mail product and the usage of email online (webmail) has really increased. We have received some great feedback and we will continue to look for ways to improve the product.
One of the ways we are improving the product is by updating to the latest version available to us. Since new releases of software usually have bugs when they are first released, we wait until a few of the earlier versions are released before we decide to do an upgrade to our system. This allows any issues with the new release to be worked out before we present it to customers. We also do rigorous testing to ensure that everything works the way we want it to. As a result we will be releasing a newer version of WOW! Mail around the mid-April timeframe. Besides fixing the minor known bugs in the current version there will also be some new features that will provide a better experience when using WOW! Mail. Some of the new email features will be:
- Read receipts- you will have the option to enable/disable read receipts. This feature is requested by users on a regular basis.
- Tabbed email compose – the compose tab will now be its own tab instead of replacing the inbox tab when composing an email. This will make moving between the inbox and composing much faster. It also provides the ability to compose multiple messages at the same time. Simply select to compose a new message and a new tab will open.
- Three pane reading view – there will be an additional option for the reading pane to be displayed on the right now. The reading pane options will be – off, at the bottom, and on the right.
In the Calendar section the new features will be:
- Fish-Eye View – from the month view you will be able to click on a date and zoom into the calendar entries for that particular day.
- List View – this feature allows you to view 2 weeks of appointments in a list view.
Look for these new email features to arrive around the middle of April and stay tuned for even more improvements to WOW! Mail and your WOW! Customer Home Page this summer.
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The WOW! Customer Home Page is your one-stop page for all your online needs. Besides easy access to your email and WOW! account management, you can also check the weather, your WOW! TV listings or even watch online video all from the WOW! Customer Home Page.
You can easily customize your page by selecting the add content button in the top right corner of the page. There are numerous categories to choose from like Business, Entertainment, News, and Sports. You can also choose what column to add the content too and the content can be dragged up or down within column so you can put your favorite information where you want it.
Checking email couldn’t be easier either. While logged in to your customer homepage you can see the 3 newest messages that are in your inbox and you can use the quick compose tab to send an email without opening the full email window. Do you need a break from email? Why not try the Games channel and try your hand at some mini golf or maybe a game of Bejeweled 2.
Still not convinced? Take a tour now to see for yourself here. So with all these nice features, why not try the WOW! Customer Hompage today?
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