Getting The Most From Your Hosting. By Robert Michael At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

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.

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