Is This Thing ON? Part 2

Book review by Bayle Emlein

Tame the email monster:

•   Sort by Sender, Date, or Subject
•   Reply at once to everything you can.
•   Keep, and file, only the stuff you >really need. Have a holding file for the stuff you truly can't finish now--not enough info, waiting for input, etc. Abby's personal rule is that she does not get to go to bed with more than 30 unfiled emails.
•  Give each document and photo a meaningful name, one that will make sense in a year and be findable in a Search.
•  Use the Who, What, When strategy. If you put the date first in a subject line you can easily find pending items in email lists.

More suggestions: Protecting You and Yours

• Protect Your Information
• Should I? (Click here, etc.)
• If you are asking the question, the answer is NO.
• It’s just good netiquette to protect the email addresses of your recipients by sending a group email as a BCC even if everyone knows everyone's address.

Help identify spam and hack attempts. If you consistently use a formal or structured greeting and closing, you build an email format that is recognizable to your correspondents and differentiates unsolicited emails and possible hacks to your address book. Folks will know whether or not you every start off with “Hey There!” and you will recognize “I was just wondering how you are doing” as something to delete immediately.

Remember, the box (TV or computer) is not talking to you personally. If an offer to update pops up, treat it like a TV ad and assume it is a link to where you don't want to go. If you think it might be a official product update, go to the application source website and check for sanctioned links.

Passwords:

•  Ideal is 8 characters, including letters, numbers, and at least one upper case.
•  Do not use a sequence (e.g.,1234, abcd);
•  Do not use publicly available information about you;
•  Develop a strategy for passwords, e.g., embed website letters into a consistent location in your standardized password.

Backups:

•   Use multiple media. Neither the Cloud nor thumb drives count in Abby’s opinion.

End of part 2