Tip 1

How do they get your email in the first place? Well, one way they get your email is when you sign up for something online and plug in your email on a form. They usually say they don’t sell or distribute your email but can you really expect a spammer to tell the truth? Be very cautious about where you give your information. The best thing to do for sign up forms is to use an alternate email address. Let’s say your main email is bob@yourbusiness.com, you would use this for your bank, your friends and family, and websites that you trust but you shouldn’t use it when signing up for a social network or when applying for a loan, for instance. The smart thing to do is sign up for a Google, Yahoo or Hotmail account and use this email as your junk mail account, that way all junk or spam will go here instead of your main email. It’s a real pain when you set up your phone to receive emails from your main account and you have to sift through 50 junk emails a day. Avoid that. Set up a secondary email account today.

Tip 2

Another way the spammers can get a hold of your email address is when you have your email displayed on a website. Spammers have web crawlers that go out and search the net for email addresses and the crawler pulls these emails in and establishes lists. If you have a website or your company does, they usually have a staff section of the website with email addresses displayed for the crawlers to grab. To avoid this issue, your webmaster should have a link for each staff member pointing to a form to fill out on another page and that form gets sent to your email address. This way, they don’t get the opportunity to grab up your email addresses.

Tip 3

The third way the spammers can get a hold of your email address and add it to a spam list is from emails. Have you ever received a joke or political email that was forwarded to you and asked you to forward it to 10 others? Ah, yes! This is a spammers dream! These emails can generate 100′s or 1000′s of email addresses and will eventually fall into the hands of someone that knows how to extract these emails and sell the list. There is hope though. If you must pass along a great joke or a funny video, then clean up the email. Delete out all of the forwarding emails in the body of the email so that it is just the actual joke instead of 100′s of forward messages in the body of the email. It will actually be much cleaner and easier to read.

Bonus Tips

One thing I like to do when sending an email to multiple recipients is to put my junk mail email in the To: spot and then put all the recipients in the Bcc: spot which sends them the email anonymously so that the others don’t know that they got the email. This isn’t being sneaky, its just a way to avoid exposing your friends, co-workers and family to a spam list. Now, if you send a joke to 50 people, they may send it on to someone else but now if your email is collected, it’s just your junk mail and your list of 50 people is safe.

Avoid getting on a spam list. Watch what you sign up for online and use a secondary email addresses. If you have a website, don’t put your email on the site, use forms instead. If you belong to social networks and it’s open to the public to see your information, then use a secondary email instead of your main. Clean up forwarded emails before passing them along. They are messy emails and hard to read so its a good thing to do and use the Bcc: feature to prevent spammers from getting email address of your friends and family,

The tech that arrived, saw the same things that Bill did so he rebooted the pc and inserted his “Squad” CD to run some diagnostics and check it for viruses. During the virus scan, he removed an infected system driver file that needed to be removed or cleaned but the computer rebooted with the “Blue Screen of Death”. The error message was right there for the tech to copy and research for a solution, but instead he decided to call it a day and return the next day to see if he can work it out. After about 30 mins, he decided he couldn’t fix the problem and let Bill know that he would have to format the computer, reinstall all the programs and that Bill would lose everything. Bill wasn’t too excited about the idea of formatting the computer since it was really Sandy’s computer (his wife) and she worked on it every day and hadn’t backed up in a while. Luckily for Bill, he couldn’t find his Windows CDs, so he would have to check with his wife to find the CDs and get the “Squad” tech back out the next day.

Monday rolls around and my friend calls me and tells me the situation that Bill is getting charged $300 to format his hard drive and recover NO data. I met Bill at his office and picked up his home pc, which he brought in that day, and took it back to my lab for analysis. The first thing I did was pulled his hard drive out of his computer, connected it to one of my computers via a USB converter cable, scanned it for viruses and checked it for errors. I then put it back in Bill’s pc and attacked the Blue Screen issue. Once I fixed the Blue Screen issue, it was smooth sailing. I fixed the computer, performed regular maintenance, saved all the data and had it working better than ever.

To recap, before you let some tech guy format your computer, make sure he has tried everything he can think of to retrieve your data. Some computer repair companies only allow their techs to work on a pc for an allotted amount of time so its just quicker for them to format if they can’t solve the issue. If the hard drive is still spinning and still partially booting, then you can still get your data off the drive. Don’t Format.

When running a small IT business that you plan on running for many years to come, it is a good idea to establish good relationships and IT Support contracts with your customers.  Having contracts with your customers will get you consistent paychecks and allow you to run your business without having the stress associated with having to find new customers every week.  You could probably make more money without the contracts but consistent paychecks is a good thing.  Some customers will shy away from a contract which is fine too because its great to have a good mix of computer service contracts and some hourly work or retainer clients.

I know from experience that contracts are a good thing because my customers are a mix of both hourly and computer repair contracts.  During slow times, if you have a contact the client can always find things for you to do but with no contract they will put repair work off when their budget is low.  This could mean a month or two with no work from this client.  Once again a plus for the contracts.

If you’re just starting out your computer repair business, you may find it hard to get contracts since the client doesn’t know you too well.  Work on the relationship with the client, provide good reliable service and you should have no problem getting a contract with them in a few months or so.

Cheers,

Troy