Most hosting companies offer one or more email accounts with your hosting service. These email accounts are a gaping hole for fraudsters, scam artists, and other criminals to slip through take advantage of your naivety, and possibly steal your valuable personal information or sabotage your computer’s operations. Phishing: One form of such criminality is phishing where emails appear in your account that, by all rights, seem to have been sent from a trusted company with which you do business (ie a financial institution, an eMerchant, or your hosting company) claiming that your personal information needs updating in their records.
A link embedded in the email takes you to a webpage that mimics that companys website. If you dont know any better, and your hosting company doesnt catch it, youre liable to hand over such valuable personal information as your password and credit card number to a criminal.But many hosting providers include software in their hosting packages that can detect and intercept such schemes before you ever have to see them. Viruses: Another insidious crime is the sending of viruses through email attachments. We’ve all heard of viruses, and consumers and hosting companies alike often rely on such tools as Norton AntiVirus to protect their system(s). But your hosting company can often provide you additional protection.
Having a firewall as part of your hosting package, for example, is a great source of peace of mind. Its worth seeking a hosting provider that can scan attachments to ensure their virus-free, a hosting provider that is constantly updating their database of new viruses. Spam: And then there’s spam. Yuck! We’re all sick of it (your hosting provider sure is) and yet so many companies still dont seem to get it, continuing to spew it out indiscriminately. Well, you shouldn’t have to deal with spam anymore, and many hosting companies are seeing to it.
Spam filters allow hosting companies to detect suspicious emails