Tip I – Adding a BCC Recipient to an Email

To add a BCC recipient to your email, click Compose and then click directly on the TO field. This will result in a pop-up box to add recipients in the BCC field.

Tip II – Turn on a Vacation Message

Will you be out of the office for the holidays? If so, activate your vacation message to let senders know your schedule. To activate your vacation message, from webmail, click Settings, then Incoming Email, then Auto-Reply, and set the status to “On”. You can then fill in your message and, if you’d like, enable the message for a specific timeframe. Once your preferences are set, click Save and your message will activate immediately or on the scheduled timeframe that you selected.

Tip III – Create Signatures

Shave a few seconds off of email composition by creating and saving your signature. With webmail, you can save multiple signatures, even upload custom .jpeg, .gif, or .bmp file of your signature. To create a signature, click Settings, then Composing. In the Composing window, click the Signatures tab, then the Add New Signature link. Enter your signature information or click the picture icon in the toolbar to upload a signature file. Click OK. Select how you’d like your signature to appear on messages, and then click Save. If you would like to make this signature your default signature, this can be done by editing your identity on the Identities tab. Once you click Edit you can choose a default signature at the bottom.

For more instructions on using Rackspace webmail, view the Support Site section on Webmail Settings.

Larry Dignan, Editor in Chief at ZDNet, is preaching to the choir when he wrote, “The most galling issue: There’s no one to really yell at,” in a blog post where he discussed his recent Google Apps support issue. While no provider likes being yelled at by customers, we can understand Larry’s pain. When you count on hosted services for your business, we believe you need a real partner that you can actually call 24×7.

We are working hard to help preach the message that Larry is helping bring some spotlight to—but we need your help. How can we help more businesses realize the benefits of choosing a partner who values support, before an issue occurs? Better yet, how can we improve on delivering an incredible service experience? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

Rackspace® Hosting will be in Santa Clara, California on November 1-4, 2010 for the Cloud Computing Expo and we would love to visit with you while we’re in town.

 Please join Rackers from across the company as well as our 
OpenStack team for an evening of networking and free food & drinks.

We’ll be here to discuss all things tech… or whatever else you want to talk about.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010 8:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m. Hyatt Regency Mezzanine Level 5101 Great America Parkway Santa Clara, CA www.santaclara.hyatt.com

CLICK HERE TO RSVP

When you first set up Cloud Drive, you get to choose which cloud storage service to use (i.e., where your files will be stored). We provide two options: Rackspace Cloud Files and Amazon S3.

The services are essentially the same—but, as you can see, we waive the Data Transfer and Data Request fees when you choose Rackspace Cloud Files (you know, since we’re Rackspace and all). It’s a simple way for your business to get into the cloud, and save some extra money!

(1) Using the same password for everything 
(2) Playing golf in a thunderstorm
(3) Getting involved in a land war in Asia

and

(4) TYPING EMAILS IN ALL CAPS

But why? There are all kinds of reasons out there, things such as, it is not good ‘netiquette’ or it comes across as aggressive and is considered SHOUTING! Although some may consider one way ‘right’ and another way ‘wrong,’ I am not willing to take this route. As a little history lesson, it is interesting to note that:

Manual typesetters kept them [capital letters] in the upper drawers of a desk or in the upper type case, while keeping the more frequently used minuscule letters in the lower type case. This practice might date back to Johannes Gutenberg.

“Capital and small letters are differentiated in the Roman, Greek, Glagolitic, Cyrillic and Armenian alphabets. Most writing systems (such as those used in Georgian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Devanagari) make no distinction between capital and lowercase letters (and, of course, logographic writing systems such as Chinese have no “letters” at all). Indeed, even European languages did not make this distinction before about 1300; both majuscule and minuscule letters existed, but a given text would use either one or the other.”

- Wikipedia

So, as you can see the caps issue was a neutral one. I think the best reason that typing in ALL CAPS is a bad idea is simply an issue of effective communication. Peter Bilak says it best with this quote:

“Right and wrong do not exist in graphic design. There is only effective and non-effective communication.”

— Peter Bilak – Illegibility

So while folks have…

(1) Used the same password for everything
(2) Played golf in a thunderstorm
(3) Gotten themselves involved in a land war in Asia

and even
(4) TYPED IN ALL CAPS

…they may not be the best ideas and should be avoided.

With this integration, our customers can choose to manage Rackspace hosted email accounts through Spiceworks rather than launching a separate portal. Spiceworks will support all of Rackspace’s cloud email offerings, including Rackspace Email, hosted Microsoft Exchange, and our popular hybrid offering, with the ability to monitor email usage, administer accounts and collaborate with other Rackspace users in the Spiceworks community.

Working with Spiceworks to integrate Rackspace hosted email management was an easy fit, since we’re both focused on making IT simple and affordable for businesses. And our relationship is a great example of how customers and partners are taking advantage of Rackspace’s Email APIs to integrate with our cloud email platform.

You can download the free Spiceworks application and start managing your Rackspace email accounts today.

But some simple outside-of-the-box thinking can protect you from even the more advanced attacks.

Ideally, you should have a different password for every login. It’s possible, and can be surprisingly easy to remember. You can come up with your own system, but maybe start with something like this . . .

Create a Core Password

Choose a non-English word. Then, mix it up with some uppercase characters, lowercase characters, numbers, and non-alphabetic characters (such as !, #, $, %). For example:

·       Amour246!

Add a Variable

Now let’s add a variable that’s based on the service you’re logging into. For example, adding the first two letters of the service name:

·       For your Amazon.com account, add “am” to the beginning:  amAmour246!

·       For your Facebook account, add “fa” to the beginning:  faAmour246!

·       For your eTrade account, add “et” to the beginning:  etAmour246!

You get the idea. And since you choose the core password and the variable method, it should be 1) easy for you to remember and 2) hard for hackers to figure out. The more complex the variable, the harder it will be to crack. 

It’s still always smart to change your password every few months. Even a small change to your password (like maybe choosing a new core password, but keeping the same variable) can help to keep hackers at bay.

Think you need to change your email password now? Go to:

http://www.rackspace.com/apps/support/portal/1513 for Rackspace Email
http://www.rackspace.com/apps/support/portal/4245 for Rackspace Hosted Exchange

In the past, businesses had to put together their own backup plans in-house. It often involved backing up individual computers to a main server, creating a tape backup of the server, and then storing the tape offsite. Unless the data is backed up daily, though, the business risks losing days’ (or weeks’ or months’) worth of data. And retrieving data from a backup tape can be cumbersome and time consuming.

With our products, you can schedule automatic backups of your computers and/or servers to our online data centers—securely and safely. And if you’re a Rackspace hosted email customer, you can also back up your email—every incoming and outgoing email for your entire domain. This way, your business data is always backed up, located in our secure data centers, so you can have peace of mind. And whenever you need an email or file from the backup system, it’s easy to log in and locate and restore the data.

It’s easy to have a “that will never happen to me” mentality when it comes to a disaster. But when it comes to your business files and data, it’s worth it to have a solid backup plan in place.

The Postal Service is taking a new strategy in its war with electronic mail–if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em.

After last week’s announcement to cancel mail delivery on Saturdays, the Postal Service has decided to route all conventionally delivered Saturday mail over the internet. They have chosen Rackspace Email & Apps as their email hosting service provider for dependability and Fanatical Support.

Their plan is to scan all paper mail, send it to the destination office via email, and print out each piece for hand delivery. Routing and fuel costs provide the majority of savings. Sending each digital piece of mail through Rackspace’s triple layered spam filtering provides even more cost savings by reducing the overall volume by two-thirds.

“It’s amazing how much junk snail mail and spam email have in common”, says Postmaster General, Allegro Monotoni. “Rackspace cuts out most credit card pre-approvals and cable company introductory offers. I have yet to see one ad for Viagra make it through.”

The Postal Service lost $3.8 billion last year, $10 million per Saturday, and plans to provide the same level service at a fraction of the cost.

“We see this as a testing ground. If it goes well for Saturdays, we’ll consider converting our entire delivery to the new hybrid paper-electronic model,” says Monotoni. “Until we investigated Rackspace, I figured a bailout was our only option.”

Illustration by Klaus Shmidheiser

Sometimes teams simply get out of control. Maybe there are too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Maybe people have no idea who the chiefs are. Maybe every time your team meets to discuss, they are all looking at different version of the same document.  Maybe you can’t find emails because your team has “reply-all” discussions that pollute your inbox with 20 emails each day. 

SharePoint is designed to help turn even the most chaotic teams into well-oiled, productive machines. 

One of the most basic and commonly used templates in SharePoint is the Team Workspace. Here, team members can share documents, saving older versions, and even use the Check-Out feature to ensure no one is working on the same information at once. Teams can assign tasks to specific users, so no one is confused about what to do, or with whom a decision lies. You can even set up team calendars that sync directly to Outlook, so you-know-who doesn’t have another excuse for not attending the weekly meeting.

Keeping all of your team’s information in one place can be incredibly valuable. It eliminates the conversations where everyone has a different answer to the same question. Simply say, “Check SharePoint” and there is the official answer you’re looking for. 

Stop worrying about how to make your teams more effective and save your money on hiring a Project Manager. SharePoint gets your team in working order by giving them one central location to manage multiple projects, share documents, participate in (and document) team discussions, and share information. 

Do you think that your team is too small, too chaotic, too busy to utilize SharePoint? Give it a try for free. You’ll never look back.