In the previous post we told you about 5 simple rules that help you to protect yourself from cybercrimes and taught you how to protect your personal data. Today we want to continue the topic and show you the benefits of using the EmailTray email client for Windows for managing your emails and protecting yourself from spam and phishing.

The EmailTray email client for Windows recognizes senders and enriches your email communication with your contacts’ information from their social profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn. This helps you to detect valuable emails and ignore spam, while greatly decreasing your email overload.

Besides, the EmailTray email client for Windows will show the official icons for known senders like PayPal, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. This official icons save you from phishing attacks, i.e. from the attempts to steal your passwords or credit card details. You can see the PayPal official icon on the image below.

In case a possibly spam email went to your inbox, the EmailTray email client marks it with a special warning, that attracts your attention. Now you can teach the EmailTray email client how to treat such emails in future.

Phishing emails, in their turn, are marked with bright warning sign. You will notice these for sure. And this is really important, because a mistake may cost you a lot. When the EmailTray email client for Windows suspects the email to be a phishing attempt, you will see this bright red warning.

We hope our recommendations and the EmailTray algorithm help you to avoid phishing attacks, save you from spam and make your email management easy and enjoyable.

Download and install the EmailTray email client for Windows and Androids and have an easy time dealing with your email communications and email overload.

Nowadays 68% of all emails are spam. 1 in 274 emails is blocked as malicious. The cumulative number of phishing attacks recorded through 2011 was 279,580, that’s a 37% increase from 2010.

Phishing attacks saturated the globe more heavily, with brands targeted from 31 different countries and phishing emails communicated in 16 different languages – reaching an even more diverse crowd of Internet users.

Cyber criminals become more and more diligent every day and the chance of being attacked with a phishing email increases every moment.

How to protect your personal data from cyber crimes?

1. Fight spam. Be especially cautious of emails that come from unknown senders and ask you to confirm personal or financial information over the internet.

Fortunately, the EmailTray email client, for PCs and Android smartphones, is great at fighting spam and knows how to recognize your senders while even checking the authentication of the servers used by major senders like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and PayPal. EmailTray uses a special algorithm to detect the most important emails and notify you about them. In addition, you may see a sender’s photo in the sender’s panel to better know who is writing to you.

2. Never use the links in an email, instant message, or chat to get to any web page if you suspect the message might not be authentic or you don’t know the sender or user’s handle. Even if you believe a sender to be legitimate, at least be sure to hover over the link before clicking on it in order to see what the intended URL actually is.

The EmailTray email client for PCs and Androids cares for your online safety and will mark suspicious emails with a special warning. This helps you not to mistake a phishing email with a legitimate one. Be really careful with such marked emails.

3. Do not download files or open attachments in emails from unknown senders. It is best to open attachments only when you are expecting them and know what they contain, even if you know the sender.

4. Avoid filling out forms in email messages that ask for personal financial information. Phishing websites often copy the entire look of a legitimate web site, making it appear authentic. To be safe, call the legitimate enterprise first to see if they really sent that email to you. After all, businesses should not request that personal information be sent via email.

Note that the EmailTray email client for PCs will show the official icons for  known senders like PayPal, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. By the way, PayPal and eBay are reported to be the most highly targeted site for phishing scams, according to security experts.

5. Check your online accounts and bank statements regularly to ensure that no unauthorized transactions have been made.

If you are concerned about your online security and personal data, if you do not want to become a phishing scam victim, download and install the EmailTray email client for PCs and Androids – a smart email client that solves the problem of spam and phishing.

In the previous post named 5 Ways to Make Email Work for You: Tips for Email SENDERS, we shared five email productivity and email deliverability tips for email senders. The next post of this series is meant for email recipients.
 

1. Automate send/receive from all your accounts

If you own several email addresses, it is wise to save time that you might have spent on checking each email account separately, including logging on to various Webmail services using your browser. Use one hub to track all email accounts via POP3 or IMAP. This can be a dedicated Gmail account or your favorite email client software.

Popular email clients include: Mozilla Thunderbird, MS Outlook, Windows Live Mail, EmailTray, IncrediMail, The Bat!, Pegasus Mail, Opera Mail. Some of them offer a range of useful tools for office task management, some add fancy pictures to your email signatures and some email clients offer email filtering and email sorting features.

The great news is that you can take advantage of the EmailTray email sorting features and use it absolutely free of charge. By the way, EmailTray, a young yet powerful email client, was ranked #3 by the About.com readers as one of the best Windows email programs in 2012:

Best Windows Email Program 2012 – The About.com 2012 Readers’ Choice Awards.

2. Attend to emails in priority order

Do you read and respond to emails according to the arrival time criteria (the oldest are attended to first, then come the rest of emails)? While you are looking through non-urgent emails like email subscriptions, payment receipts from e-stores and social network notifications, some really IMPORTANT emails might require immediate action!

In order to attend to emails in priority order, you most probably have to spend time on analyzing emails by importance and sorting them. The good news is that the EmailTray email client already has a built-in mechanism for email sorting based on your emailing habits, browsing history and privacy-oriented community intelligence.  With EmailTray, you won’t need to waste time on looking through all emails, deleting junk mail, archiving unimportant mail and singling out good mail. You’ll be able to focus on important emails residing under the “Top priority” and “Low priority” tabs of the EmailTray email client.

3. Do not respond to emails that are not addressed personally to you

Remember that it is not that necessary to reply to the emails which have a lengthy list of recipients in the “To:” or “CC:” fields. Some people have a nasty habit of sharing industry news, funny facts and other non-urgent stuff via email. They take advantage of the “send to all” or “reply to all” options and sometimes misuse them.

Email was not initially meant for broadcasting – there are a number of other useful tools for that such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other services. So treat those “broadcast emails” the way they are meant to be treated – read them when you have some spare time and don’t waste your time responding to them personally. To further save your time, you may wish to politely ask the sender if it’s possible to just follow their Twitter, Facebook or Google+ account and not receive emails.

4. Redirect your email communications to the other interaction channels

When appropriate, do your best to streamline your email communications to the other interaction channels according to your needs and situation. In case a matter is urgent and would definitely require several back-and-forth emails with questions and answers – think about dialing the sender and discussing things via phone. For efficient task management, you’d better use a good task management system. For group discussion, start a forum topic, post the info in a social network group or go for a chat room.

Learn more about different communication tools, their purposes, pros and cons from our infographic:

Communication Channels: Facts and Figures, Pros and Cons.

5. Keep your answers short

In the era of mobile devices, it is quite acceptable to fit your reply into one short sentence instead of a lengthy message.  Some people travel a lot and use their mobile phones to check mail most of the time, so you don’t take offence with them when they reply briefly, right?

By making your replies laconic, you actually save your time and the time of your recipients, so never hesitate to make your answer short whenever possible.

1. Use EMAIL only when it works better than any other communication channel

Email is a great time-saver when it comes to contacting a person who is located far away from you. You can always fit emailing into your work schedule, as you can send and read emails whenever you have some spare time. Email is good to share links and business information, but it is not good enough to build partnerships, especially at the last stage before signing agreements – a personal meeting or video phone call is necessary for this. Ask yourself simple questions to understand whether email will fit your needs in your situation.

Want to get acquainted with your future partner, and plan to discuss important things, face to face? –> Arrange a meeting.
Need to share urgent news or resolve an urgent matter? –> Use a phone call.
Need technical support on the software issue? –> Use email.
Plan on discussing an upcoming event with your friends? –> Use a chat room.
Benchmarking the steps taken on a large project with your colleagues? –> Use wiki.
Want to set and track tasks on a large project? –> Use a task management system.

2. Follow business email etiquette rules when composing a new message

Do you use short and precise email subject lines – to focus the reader attention on what’s important? Do you provide an email signature with your contact details? Do you use the “CC” and the “Reply to All” option with caution?

These and other rules were created to increase email productivity for you and your email recipients. Using business email etiquette rules is a matter of politeness and a sign of respect towards an email recipient, so make sure to follow these rules.

3. Comply with the CAN-SPAM rules if you send bulk mail

To protect the privacy of email recipients, the US Federal Trade Commission issued the CAN-SPAM Act which covers numerous examples of fraudulent or inappropriate use of email as a means of communication.

The following principles are outlined in this act:

• Don’t use false or misleading header information.
• Don’t use deceptive subject lines.
• Identify the message as an ad.
• Tell recipients where you’re located.
• Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you.
• Honor opt-out requests promptly.
• Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.

The CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business
http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business

4. Follow the email sender guidelines posted by the most popular Webmail providers

If you are an authorized email sender, Gmail, Hotmail and other Webmail providers make it easier for you to reach your customers Inbox by providing you with email sender guidelines. The most obvious things for senders to follow are offering an opt-in feature and easy unsubscribe, using sender authentication and managing the reputation of your outbound IPs. Use the links below to refer to the email sender guidelines of the popular Webmail providers:

Email sending policies, practices, and guidelines from Microsoft
http://mail.live.com/mail/policies.aspx

Improving E-mail Deliverability into Windows Live Hotmail, PDF
http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/3/3/e3397e7c-17a6-497d-9693-78f80be272fb/enhance_deliver.pdf

Best practices for bulk mail senders and postmasters when sending to Yahoo! Mail
http://help.yahoo.com/kb/index?locale=en_US&y=PROD_MAIL&page=content&id=SLN3435

Bulk Senders Guidelines from Gmail
https://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81126

Bulk Sender Best Practices from AOL
http://postmaster.aol.com/Postmaster.Guidelines.php

Technical and Policy Requirements for Sending Email to AOL
http://postmaster.aol.com/Postmaster.Tech.php

5. Ensure that your email address is on the whitelists of your recipients

If you don’t want your messages to get blocked by spam filters and the email service providers of your recipients, have your most important sending email addresses whitelisted. You can also publish information on your site asking your subscribers to add your email address to their list of trusted contacts.

Hope these pieces of advice and reference links help you build your email campaigns efficiently and avoid email deliverability issues. Email CAN be a great helper unless you misuse it

In the era of technical progress, email messaging, telephone, online chat, wiki and other communication channels have become more and more important in our daily life.

See below an infographic on the most popular communication channels which includes quick facts and figures, distinctive features, advantages and disadvantages of each method of communication. Click to view the full-size image:

Feel free to post this infographic on your blog using the code below:

<a href="https://www.emailtray.com/blog/communication-channels-infographic-facts-and-figures-pros-and-cons"><img title="Communication Channels Infographic: Facts and Figures, Pros and Cons" src="https://www.emailtray.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/communication-tools-infographic-23+.png" alt="Communication Channels Infographic: Facts and Figures, Pros and Cons" width="605" height="1106" /></a>
<a href="http://emailtray.com">EmailTray – a Smart Email Client</a>

Any user friendly and popular email client should be excellent in the following ways:

-          it should be easily set up;

-          it should defend from spam;

-          it should notify users about important messages;

-          its contact book should be convenient.

The EmailTray email client for Windows has its own smart algorithm to conquer spam and it’s great in notifying users only about the emails that are worth their attention. Now it’s time to talk about the EmailTray contact book that has some unique features:

1. You need to do nothing to have your contact book fill with contacts.

EmailTray will fill your contact book for you. All contacts, that you have correspondence with, are automatically added to the contact book. Also, the contacts from all added email accounts are imported; plus you can import contacts from your LinkedIn and Facebook account if you wish.

2. The EmailTray contact book adds a “human face” to your inbox.

EmailTray tries to find and add a sender’s photo to the sender’s cards in your contact book (using Facebook or LinkedIn profile pictures, for example), but if there is still no photo or you want to change it, you can easily do this while editing your contacts’ details. These photos will be shown in your Inbox when you receive email from any particular sender and this will help you notice important messages faster.

3. With EmailTray your contacts information is always in order.

When EmailTray finds duplicate contacts in your contact book, it will merge them automatically. In case there are several contacts, for example, with identical full name but different titles, EmailTray will draw your attention to them and merge them in one contact card if you claim this to be the same person. This feature helps you keep your contact book in a perfect order.

4. Your EmailTray and Gmail contact books are always synchronized.

When you set EmailTray to sync your list of contacts with your Google contacts (please note that currently this is a beta option), you will never need to worry whether your contacts book is up-to-date. EmailTray will create the same groups you have in your Google account. With your contacts being synchronized in this way, you may be sure that important contact information is always within reach.

Our EmailTray development team believes that everything should grow and improve in the spring. And they implement this approach in our smart free email client development. That is why today we have some great news: both the EmailTray for PC and the EmailTray for Android email app have been updated.

What’s new in the EmailTray for Android email client app

The main changes in EmailTray for Android email client app have been about usability and the interface. Starting with widgets that have become neater and better looking, look out as well for an updated settings screen that is now even more intuitive. These changes are not all that noticeable at first sight, but they do make your experience more pleasant.

EmailTray on your mobile device is becoming more and more full-featured at a pace to be envied: now you can save a signature to be added to all your emails and cut the sender’s signature in a reply. This is great for quick and informal mobile email communications. Besides, more options for your unread email sorting were added and now you can arrange your emails in the most comfortable way.

As always, we are glad to get your comments and feedback!

What’s new in the EmailTray for Windows

First of all noticeable updates have been made to the EmailTray address book. Now it’s a full-featured address book that makes your contact management easy and quick. You can move contacts from multiple webmail accounts to the EmailTray email client with ease. An advanced data import system now includes the automated import of contacts from email accounts of major webmail providers, full data synchronization with Gmail Contacts and the on-demand import of contacts from Facebook and LinkedIn.

We all have our own ways to work with everyday email. EmailTray wants to make your everyday routine as pleasant and free from email overload as possible. That is why we give you freedom in choosing comfortable settings. Now you can arrange incoming messages not only by date or email account but also by sender. Changes were also made to your signature settings: you can not only set different signatures for a new letter and a reply/forward, but also have no signatures added.

EmailTray continues to care for your online safety: all suspicious, spam or phishing emails are marked with a special line, informing you about possible malicious content.

The support for major webmail service providers has been improved. Now the support of IMAP accounts features instant notification on new mail, i.e. you will know about new important messages the moment they appear in your webmail Inbox. So there will be no need to check your email every minute, while you wait for something important that you expect.

As it has been said previously, one of our main goals is your data safety. Now you can backup your EmailTray mail database including: all messages (Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Trash, Archive), your address book, your signatures and all possible settings (list of your configured accounts, custom rules, your business card, alerts, etc.). Moving to another PC or laptop? Restore your mail data from the backup file and proceed with your work without delay.

Why some email messages are lost

Most Webmail providers and Internet Service Providers offer a feature of email filtering which is executed right on their servers. That means that some emails initially routed to your Inbox will be rejected at the server level. This is point #1 where the emails get sifted and some of them land in a Spam folder.

Further on, a built-in email filter used in your desktop email client or a separate email filtering program installed on your computer may screen incoming mail again. It will look for suspicious mail and put it in the Spam folder. This is point #2 where incoming mail is filtered again.

As a result, an end user receives only part of the emails initially routed to their Inbox. Some emails are rejected on the server and some end up in the Spam folder of your favorite email client. The good news is that you can manually check what’s inside your email client’s Spam folder. The bad news is that email clients normally will not download the contents of the Spam folders of your tracked accounts. That’s really sad.

What exactly email spam filters do

• Analyze email headers, message subjects and bodies for suspicious content
• Block suspicious emails by IP address, server, email address or by country code
• Offer sensitivity settings and custom rules
• Offer a spam-complaint mechanism
• Run black lists of suspicious senders and white lists of approved senders

Weak points of email spam filters

• Good emails from real senders can get trapped by a content filter in case “suspicious” words are used in the subject or message body
• Emails from prospects and partners can be mistakenly regarded as spam because of the country code
• You can still get messages from spammers because their IPs or email addresses haven’t yet been added to the black list
• Good emails can get blocked because your email spam filter sensitivity settings are set to be too strict
• Cost: You are expected to pay $19-$29 to use one of the popular email spam filters

How the EmailTray email client sorts emails

• Analyzes user emailing habits (read/reply/forward/delete actions)
• Analyzes interconnections between all EmailTray users
• Assigns a priority to each email sender
• Ranks all incoming emails in your Inbox
• Inspects the contents of the Spam folders of all your accounts for important messages
• Rescues good emails mistakenly trapped by email spam filters and sends them back to your Inbox
• Files all incoming messages under the Top Priority, Low Priority, No Priority and Spam markers

In other words, EmailTray processes emails just the other way round. Instead of taking suspicious mail away and leaving you face to face with all emails (both important and unimportant), EmailTray singles out important emails and lets you focus on them right away. Learn more why EmailTray is better than a regular email spam filter.

With EmailTray, you no longer need to look through the contents of the Spam folders, searching for any lost important emails. You no longer need to sort emails in your Inbox. You can now get focused on the contents of the Top Priority and Low Priority tabs and stop stressing out over email overload. That’s easier than you could expect.

So you use email as one of the important channels for business and personal communication, receive tens or even hundreds of email messages per day, and get distracted to your Inbox many times a day… For those who practically apply time management principles to their everyday life, it is vital to use productivity tools to conquer information overload – in order to focus one’s attention on important tasks and eliminate unnecessary distractions.

So where is the way out? A smart email notifier is definitely the best solution here.
Why would you need an email notifier? There might be several reasons for that:

- You want to be focused on your daily tasks rather than checking mail dozens of time per day
- You don’t want to miss any important emails
- You want to know about each important mail in time, not in a batch only three times a day (which is what some email overload experts have suggested as a strategy).

In other words, a good email notifier is supposed to free up your hands and save your time, help you manage email efficiently, let you focus on important tasks and improve your email productivity.

Standard features expected in a simple email notifier

• Easy and hassle-free setup
• Popular Webmail provider support
• POP3 and IMAP support, including SSL
• No limit on the number of email accounts to track
• Visual and sound notifications that can be disabled on demand

Extra features you would love to have

• Tray icon notifications about new important emails
• Access to the Inbox directly through the email notifier
• Custom mail check interval for each email account
• Locking your email data with a password
• Low cost, or NO cost at all

Advanced features of a smart email notifier

• A smart email sorting mechanism which ranks emails by priority
• Notifications about IMPORTANT emails only
• Smart reminders
• Ability to sync mail data between your desktop and Android devices
• Having messages from the Spam folders of all your accounts aggregated in one place for a quick check and mass deletion

Do you want to get the most out of your email software? Then go for EmailTray, a FREE email client and a smart email notifier which offers you everything you could ever dream about in an email client.

EmailTray offers easy and lightning-fast setup: just enter the login and password details for each email account (this data will be stored locally on your PC), and this smart email client will configure everything for you.

EmailTray supports all popular Webmail providers (Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail and AOL Mail), POP3 and IMAP accounts. You are not limited to the number of email accounts to track.

With EmailTray, you can read, reply to and forward emails in HTML; open, save and send attachments, take advantage of the instant search feature, manage your contacts and sync them with your Android devices… and more.

Thanks to an advanced email sorting mechanism, EmailTray knows which emails you need to attend to first and it does not bother you with each and every email. It will notify you about the top priority emails only with a popup window and sound.

EmailTray software is available both as a Windows email client and an Android email app. In fact using EmailTray on several devices improves the accuracy of email sorting across all your devices, as EmailTray remembers the email actions you applied to each email sender and uses this data for better email sorting.

New mail notifications in the EmailTray Windows email client

New mail notifications in the EmailTray mail app for Android

What is effective email management? It’s having your emails organized, responding to them in a neat and timely manner, never losing important emails and having no stress at work because of a cluttered Inbox (email overload). See below five elements which make the process of email management more effective and worry-free.

Element #1: Track all mail in one place

How many active email accounts do you run? Three, five, ten, or even more? Let’s give it a count.
First, you surely have at least one personal email address to communicate with your friends and relatives.
Second, you most probably use a corporate email address for your business. If you run several business projects you will be using several corporate email addresses, right?
Also, most of us have a couple of extra email addresses used for online subscriptions, one-time registrations, trials, etc. You do not expect any important messages from these email accounts but you still have to check them from time to time – to confirm online registrations, get your promotion codes and download links, etc.

It’s a wise thing to use an email client to manage multiple email accounts from one place, preferably offline as well as when your computer or mobile device is connected to the Internet. You will need to choose software that runs on your operation system and supports all email services and protocols that you deal with – including most popular Webmail providers (Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, and AOL Mail), POP3 and IMAP. If you use the Windows OS or an Android smartphone, the EmailTray email client could be of great help here.

Element #2: Classify emails according to their priority

Before you start dealing with your emails, it is important to classify messages according to their priority – to be able to attend to them in a priority order. Thus, will need to separate the wheat from the chaff – so that you can focus on the most important emails first and reply to urgent messages quickly.

The process of email sorting traditionally includes three important steps:

• Deleting spam messages from your Inbox
• Sorting the rest of the emails by priority: urgent and most important first, less important to come next – including news, subscriptions, payment checks, etc.
• Revising the contents of the Spam folder – just in case any good messages have been mistakenly trapped by spam filters.

You can do all this by hand, several times a day, taxing your brain and wasting your time. Or you could delegate spam detection and email sorting jobs to email productivity tools – to free up your brain and your hands and save valuable time. See Element # 5 in this list for more details on email productivity tools.

Element #3: Unsubscribe from what you no longer read

Unsubscribe from the newsletters and services you no longer need or read. Are you a parent of a grown-up kid? That probably means that you no longer need a subscription to your favorite kids clothing store where you used to shop several years ago… Reading too many newsletters on the same topic and coming across the same entries often? Stay subscribed to those that cover the events most efficiently, and say good-bye to those who copy-paste.

A bad habit of being subscribed to “everything I might possibly need in the future” eats up your time and productivity. Email overload has been recognized as a serious hindrance to getting things done in the corporate world and in modern personal lives. So find a day to run a detox hour with all of your email subscriptions and unsubscribe from those that clutter up your Inbox and add no value to your everyday life.

Element #4: Keep your answers short and neat

It is for the benefit of you and your email recipients to deal with emails as quickly as possible. So keep your answers short and value your time and the time of people you communicate with.

Tip: Use email signatures to save an extra minute on typing salutation and your name at the bottom of the email message. The good news is that most of the advanced email clients will give you a possibility to create different email signatures for each individual email account.

Element #5: Use email productivity tools

As mentioned above, if you value your time, make sure to use smart productivity tools to automate email management jobs. It is not enough to have all your email messages aggregated in one place. It’s important to have your emails organized.

For example, you could take advantage of the smart email filtering feature offered by the EmailTray email client. It will detect the emails which are important for you because of your email habits and give you the option of dealing with these messages first. EmailTray is also capable of rescuing important email messages mistakenly trapped by spam filters, so you can forget about the problem of missed emails!

A good email contact management system will sync across various devices (desktop, smartphone, notebook) and keep all your email contacts in one place.

It would also be cool to set up your mail client to alert you to the most important emails only, not to each and every email. Can your favorite email client do this for you? EmailTray can, so grab your copy of the EmailTray free email client now!