Emailing, Spam and Wattpad

This week in Business Certificate lll, we talked about emails at work, spam and social networking sites.   We watched a power point presentation on sending and receiving emails at work. We had to think about things such as why most staff have log in procedures at work, how you could deal with urgent; confidential; personal or suspicious emails received at work, what you must consider before sending an email at work or if your company can read your emails on your personal account.

I thought the answer to those questions were pretty straight forward, but as we talked about them, I realised I was wrong. For example, I always thought companies had log ins so only people from that company could access files in the computer system, and while that is part of the reason, it goes a lot deeper than that.  Yes, it’s for security, but it’s also so that person can save their preferences or favourite programs on the desktop, and another reason is so the company can track what you’re doing if need be.

We also talked about how you would deal with different types of emails.  I have listed a couple below and how to deal with them.

 Urgent emails

Urgent emails are usually ones that need to be read straight away. They may have a red box or flag next to it to show it’s a high priority email.  If you need to send an urgent email to someone, it’s always best to follow up with a phone call letting that person know you’ve sent them an email, just in case they are not at their computer or they are in a meeting.

 Suspicious emails

A few points to consider if you think an email may be suspicious are;

Ø  Do you know the person sending the email?

Ø  Is it a strange email address asking for personal information?

Ø  Is it listed to a unclosed recipient?

Ø  May be sent to junk folder.

Ø  Suspicious file type.

Ø  Does the email make sense?  Is there broken English?

 

Spam

We then went on to look at what spam was and how to manage it.  Did you know spam has it’s own Act called Spam Act 2003?  There are three main rules when it comes to spam, which are; consent, identity and unsubscribe.

Consent

All commercial messages sent electronically must have your consent before sending any.  There are two types of consent and these are express consent and inferred consent.

Express consent is when you have intentionally opted to receive messages from a certain company or sender. 

Inferred consent is when you have an existing relationship with the sender and because of this, they can send you electronic messages.  For example, you may have subscribed to a magazine, and because of this, they think it’s alright to send to massages.

 Identity

All commercial messages sent to you electronically MUST have identification which is clear and accurate which you can see.  This identification must include how you can contact the sender.

Unsubscribe.

All electronic messages must have a link where someone can go to unsubscribe, which means they must not send you electronic messages any longer.

Remember, if you receive a spam email which looks suspicious, delete it and report it to your email provider immediately.  Spam can sometimes become a nuisance if you are receiving it in your inbox every day. You can manage it easily by going into settings in your email account and activating the spam or junk preference, or you can purchase a spam filter.

 

Social Networking

Social networking has become a major part in many people’s lives these days, with a lot of people depending on the internet for different reasons, whether it’s for promoting business sales or products, to using it to keep in touch with friends and family.  Gone are the days when we used to send letters via post to get in touch with others or called them by telephone. Although I must admit, I do still send the odd letter to friends and even family overseas.

I chose to do my research on a site called Wattpad which is a social networking site centred around books.  It’s become quite popular since 2007 when it started, with millions of people now using it. When I first looked at this site, I thought I had gone to heaven because I’m always looking for a new book to read, and here were millions of them on this one site. To sum up Wattpad, it’s basically a huge library online full of free books, articles and poems.  Users can read and write stories, give feedback, share stories and even follow their favourite authors.

There have been over 500 successful Wattpad authors who have had their book published because their story had been read millions of times.  Wattpad is a great stepping stone for young and upcoming authors who want to become recognised.

If you’re a book lover, I recommend you take a look.  I have provided a link to the site below.

http://www.wattpad.com/