http://applicant.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/b4.jpg

If it were up to me, this wouldn’t matter since I am a firm believer in if you show up and do your job, then anything that happens outside work should not matter. But this is not the world we live in. People who make false injury claims and then post skiing videos from the weekend on facebook are going to get caught. It all comes down to common sense. If you add your boss on facebook, then don’t bash them. Or otherwise don’t add them if you intend to bash them. A friend of mine once said: “It’s a window into your life and if you’re dumb enough to change in front of it without closing the curtain first then you’re going to get seen by a lot of strangers passing by.”

There you will see when the last login was effectuated, and using which IP address. You can also click on “Details” to see a list of the last logins, their IP address, browser and so on. All you need to do, therefore, is to check if you are really the only person using your Gmail account!

Make sure that you pass on this trick to everyone you know, just everyone. Most common culprits are friends and relatives who might be more interested in keeping track about your activities and the idea of getting caught will keep them away from your Gmail account! Start using all the social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Orkut or Digg to spread the word around – passing the link to this article, telling everyone that you’ll find them out if they tried looking through your Google Mail account.

Together with one of my friends who also aspired to be a Management Graduate, I set out to attend the fair. It was quite impressive, as we got a chance to hear directly from a few of the best entrepreneurs in the country who graduated from these schools a few years back. We were briefed about the application process, and were given an opportunity to ask questions. Due to limited time slots not all the questions could be answered, and so we were asked to be patient, when in the second half of the event we could speak one-to-one with the admission officers at stalls hosted by each B-school in a large hall.

In the second half, I and my friend started off by visiting select B-schools in the hall, going to their stalls and speaking to their representatives and getting our doubts clarified in respect of the application process and procedures of the schools. These representatives encouraged us to leave our  visiting cards in a drop box so they could get back to us with answers to some questions we were looking for. I did just that, and left feeling that attendance of the event was a most pleasant experience. I can highly recommend these fairs to anyone who is looking for a Management degree. They certainly helped me clarify my thoughts and ideas, and introduced me to quite a few new facts.

The days passed and I started receiving communications from a few schools to the email address printed on my visiting cards. In a few days, I realised there was too much! Quite a few schools had started spamming my mailbox with events on their campus, newsletters, guest lectures and what not! I tried unsubscribing from a few mailing lists, but for some that did not work. But worse. I was now getting e-mails from B-schools that I hadn’t visited, some of  which hadn’t even attended the fair. This  was two years back, and I am still receiving emails from some of these schools.

As best practice,  I would recommend that you create a brand new e-mail address, and print it on visiting cards produced solely for such fairs and exhibitions. Then you won’t be inviting a whole lot of spam into your regular mailbox!

This teaches a salutary lesson. Often, as you surf the internet, you come across websites that ask you to sign up just to read the content. During the sign up process these websites cunningly add you to their newsletter subscriptions and administrator alerts. They often even confuse you with ambiguous negations in the same statement. For example,

You confirm that you DO NOT wish to opt out of our partner marketing programs.

Clicking on that confirmation will ensure that junk mails will soon be entering your email box.

As a best practice, we suggest that everyone should have at least two spare background email addresses. Corporate email addresses or the primary email addresses should be used only for important communications, and an alternate email address should be used for all signups on websites. Care should be taken during signups to recheck options for newsletter and marketing campaigns. Spending 20 seconds more here to read these statements, will save you many minutes every day. Also, it lessens the chances of you missing that important mail hiding in a bunch of junk emails. Additionally, as previously mentioned in Email Best Practice #2, you may want to flag some emails as spam or create filters to reduce the bulk entering your inbox.

Best Practice: Avoid checking emails or using other password protected internet applications like Facebook or Orkut when using someone else’s computer. But what if you end up in a situation where you have no choice other than to use such a machine to locate an important piece of information in your mailbox? Here’s a tip. Make sure that you do not type in your password directly, but instead juxtapose a few characters using the mouse pointer.

For example, type the last few characters first, and then change the location of cursor using the mouse, or use the pointer to block previously typed characters and overwrite them, eventually leaving the characters of your password in their correct places – any key-logging software will pick up the wrong and much longer password.  Be Prepared! Practice this technique using your own keyboard! Most key logging scripts do not have the intelligence to manipulate the position of your mouse pointer and hence you password might just remain safe.

Finally, make sure that you change your password immediately you have access to your own personal computer.

From the best practice entries on this blog you may be getting the impression that I am recommending you stop mass e-mailing. Well not quite! There is one situation that I recommend to all my students: using mass e-mails as a defensive weapon in the workplace. The business schools tell you that companies are full of rational people, all with unified aims. Reality check! Many are liars, cheats, fools, incompetents, psychopaths, all with their own agendas. Never take any of their verbal statements at face value, immediately note it down in an e-mail, and send it straight back to them (and others, as witnesses), asking for clarification. Now it’s on the record. Use e-mails to pass the buck – proof that wrongdoing lies elsewhere.

Set up mass mailings and audit trails that cover your back. Always ensure that all commitments or agreements are conditional – practice the art of plausible deniability. The organizational chart doesn’t identify responsibility, only authority. The buck doesn’t stop here – with authority – it stops anywhere you can dump it. The hot potato of responsibility ends up with the poor sap at the end of an audit trail. When blame is flying around, use e-mails to make sure it doesn’t end with you – because believe me, that’s just what the other guy is doing.

Take the scandal of the Shell oil reserves, where senior executives tried to blame one another for misrepresenting the level of reserves. Chairman Sir Phillip Watts blamed the head of exploration, Walter van de Vijver, who in turn produced an e-mail he had sent to Watts in November 2003, saying “I am becoming sick and tired about lying about the extent of our reserves.” E-mail as a smoking gun. Both men bit the dust. But it got worse: the SEC fined Shell $120 million, and the FSA hit them for £17 million.

Once an e-mail is out there, you can never get it back. It’s no good asking IT staff to destroy the evidence. They have more sense than to get sucked into a conspiracy. Destruction of documents be they paper, photographic or electronic is now an admission of guilt – and you can never be sure there isn’t a residue somewhere in the system; however, keep the documents and any litigant has the right to gain legal access. My advice is never put anything in an e-mail that you wouldn’t want the whole world to see; but anything you want the world to see put in an e-mail, and they will see it! 

Online Money Transactions are never safe. However, some businesses like ‘B2C pure play traders’ rely solely on online transactions to receive payments against goods delivered.

With a plethora of options available in today’s market place, it has become tricky for traders to identify the safest payment gateway solution. The web is flooded with numerous payment gateways, some of the most prominent being PayPal, Protx, WorldPay, 2Checkout and Google Checkout. However none of these methods are completely secure.

Online Traders often land up in difficult situations when fraudulent users place orders with stolen credit card numbers. In such cases, the actual owners of credit card complain  to the credit card companies about fraudulent transactions whenever they see them on their credit card bills – often weeks after the actual fraud has taken place. To safeguard customers, credit card companies claw the amount back from the bank account of the transacting traders. By the time the traders get to know about the fraud, it is simply too late and the goods have been shipped & delivered. Result – losses for the traders!

In order to minimize frauds of this nature, traders should rarely ship goods if the Billing Address and Shipping Address of customer are different . In such cases, traders should keep the orders on hold, and demand valid alternative proofs of identity and addresses from the customer before the order can be shipped.

Most authentic orders will have the same billing and delivery address. Only in relatively few situations do customers request their goods shipped to a different address (like when sending gifts). To handle this situation, traders must alert customers of additional security checks  needed. Ideally, genuine customers will be happy to go through this process provided they were warned in advance. Traders who follow this procedure have a higher chance of resolving disputes with complaining customers.

To avoid spam, ideally users must drop themselves off the mailing lists of any friend or colleague who indulges in forwarding emails to dozens of people collected together in ‘To’ lists. Every time your address is passed around, it opens the door to spammers.

Typical forwarded emails contain pictures, jokes, or e-mails received from others, this is particularly the case between co-workers – the latter risks the whole company e-mail address book getting into the hands of spammers: a fate suffered by many university departments.

You really shouldn’t feel guilty about not forwarding on e-mails, and it is good practice to delete all but critical messages anyway.

However, even though you don’t actively participate in these round-robins, the mere appearance of your address in a list can invite trouble.

Should you need to email a large group of people, then you should use the BCC feature wherever possible, as this prevents spammers getting access to your network of contacts.

It’s also important to delete any propagating list of contacts and email addresses that appear within the body of a received email prior to forwarding it on.

PS: Official emails may be the odd exception in some scenarios, but treat every forwarding decision with care.

If you are planning to start off your own website and need to list your contact email address on the ‘Contact Us’ page of your site, here’s a simple piece of advice.

Ideally you should use techniques listed in Email Best Practice #1. However, should you think that your readers will get confused by using special characters in the listing of your email address, one simple technique is to use picture file of your email address in ‘jpeg’ or another image format. We have listed a couple of samples below.

Most web crawlers don’t have the functionality to perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to identify the text of an email address within such an image.

Unfortunately, this technique is only viable provided you are allowed to upload an image, something that not all blogs, websites and fora allow. Nevertheless, be prepared! So whenever you create a new email account, at the same time produce and save a small image using any of the image editing tools available. The images below were created using Microsoft Paint – an application that comes free with every Windows installation.