Author: Ben Chouikha
Ben Chouikha
Ben Chouikha is a senior support technician and IT consultant with over 10 years experience in support and computer programming, both in the UK and Canada. But his interests are not restricted to IT and researching blog topics: style, travel and cinema are but a few of the favorite pastimes for this fun-loving team player. And we hear he’s a pretty good soccer player – both on the Wii pitch and the real ones!
Articles by this author
Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 5 Tips
Which type of email are you sending? What is your desired outcome? The clearer your intention, the more focused you will be, the better you can cater the email for the intended result, and the more likely you will get your desired outcome. (Aug 10, 2011)
How to separate your personal and professional lives online
My colleague, Mike Petsalis, recently blogged about keeping private and business email separate, but what about everything else you do online? Here are some tips to help you protect your privacy while using the Internet. If you have any other tips or suggestions, please feel free to send them. (Jul 28, 2011)
Top 5 Email Management Tips
One of the roadblocks to employee productivity can be an overflowing email inbox. It’s easy to become overwhelmed when email alerts are flashing and inboxes grow to encompass dozens of messages that require attention. In fact, a study published by IBM revealed that 45 percent of 629 respondents, all of whom were management-level, said having too many emails in their inbox caused workplace stress. Fortunately, there are plenty of steps that employees can take to ease the email management tension. (Jun 28, 2011)
Your Next Network Infrastructure Decision
The network infrastructure, which historically was just a means to move information from one place to another, touches every user and device, making it the critical integration point for security technologies. (May 23, 2011)
Inbox Zero: My Approach
Mike Petsalis wrote about how he achieved Inbox Zero in his 6-part Email Overload series, but I find that these few easy steps work best for me. Here's my approach: Processing Rules, Processing Messages, How to Handle Different Types of Email. (May 12, 2011)
What to do about Spam: Best Practices
You can't really prevent spam from reaching you altogether; however, there are some things that you can do to minimize how much you receive. (Mar 30, 2011)
How to Analyze Spam Email Headers
Spam characteristics appear in two parts of an email: the message header and the message content. Headers are important to examine because they show the history of the message delivery path as well as some common characteristics of spam. When a message is initially generated, it should include standard header fields such as From, To, Subject, Date, and Message-ID. Other standard headers include Received, Cc, Bcc, etc. (Mar 22, 2011)
How To Deploy a Spam Filter with Exchange: Whitelists & Blacklists
Installing Exchange Server anti-spam components (for Exchange Server 2007 and 2010) can improve security by allowing the administrator to apply whitelists and blacklists on the Edge Transport and Hub Transport servers. But, over time, they can also place a burden on administrators because they must be managed manually. (Mar 15, 2011)
Top 10 Tips for Choosing a Spam Filter for Exchange
Spammers use common tricks to bypass the primary mail server security to spam an Exchange Server. One solution would be to install a separate spam filter to scan for and trap unwanted mail before it reaches the Exchange Server. (Feb 25, 2011)
Top 5 Reasons Why Data Security Matters
Data is at the heart of every business, but is your company’s data secure? The implications of data loss can be significant: from lost business to damage to your reputation. (Feb 21, 2011)
Three ways configure a spam filter with Exchange Server
Here are three ways that you can configure a spam filter with Microsoft Exchange Server. (Feb 07, 2011)
How to Troubleshoot 501 5.7.1 Errors with Exchange
If you’ve ever had “501 5.7.1 This system is not configured to relay mail from…” errors when relaying email through Exchange, it means that your email client did not properly log on to the mail server because it failed the SMTP authentication check. (Jan 31, 2011)
Email Encryption: Is your email secure?
So, you’ve secured your mail server and implemented all the necessary security policies. You think all your data is safe now and your privacy is protected? Think again. What about your correspondence? (Jan 24, 2011)
25 Most Common Mistakes in Email Security
The 25 most common mistakes in email security. (Jan 14, 2011)
How To Deploy a Spam Filter with Exchange
Spam, any unwanted email, has been an increasing problem for business. Not only is it a nuisance, it can often be downright dangerous for your business, carrying viruses and other malware. Various spam filters exist; however, choosing the best option for your company can get complicated. Do you use a separate server to act as a mail relay, a third party program, or integrate the filter into your firewall or your mail server? (Dec 07, 2010)
How to keep your company’s name off Wikileaks
The Wikileaks document dump has been all over the news this past week. How was this enormous security breach possible? Because so many people had access to a huge network that was not well secured. Have you looked at your own security procedures recently? (Nov 30, 2010)
How to troubleshoot “Insufficient system resources” errors on Exchange
Your email gateway server is unable to deliver messages to your backend Exchange mail server because of an “Insufficient system resources” error. Here's some troubleshooting help: (Oct 28, 2010)
More Recent News
Grand Prize Winner Spam Survey
We are extremely pleased with the tremendous response that we have received to this point from our Fight Email Spam survey. As promised we have randomly selected winners of our gift card prizes and most recently,... (Feb 21, 2012)
Recent Spam Survey Winners
We are extremely pleased with the tremendous response that we have received to this point from our Fight Email Spam survey. As promised we have randomly selected winners of our gift card prizes and the grand prize... (Jan 23, 2012)
New Year's Resolution
We spend 8 to 10 (or more) hours a day at work - more time than we spend anywhere else - and our desks/workspaces are becoming our kitchen tables. But, do you realize that our desks are covered in more bacteria... (Jan 20, 2012)
