Safe Computing for Small Business

Over the last year, many of my customers have really found it a challenge to keep their computer systems free of spam and viruses. Advertising messages now easily outnumber legitimate communications on most e-mail accounts and, where I used to have perhaps half a dozen calls about viruses a year (my customers are generally low risk), I currently have four fighting off viruses.

The problems of spam and viruses are different for small businesses than for large corporations. The latter have an IT department which will hire a large computer services company to screen e-mail and, if some legitimate messages are thrown out, nobody seems to worry. As a small business owner, you're stuck with retail anti-virus programs which make trouble and have to be up-dated constantly. And you worry that spam filters are trashing customers' messages (which is likely true).

Here's what I do:

1. I don't worry about spam. It takes me the first thirty seconds after I check my e-mail to delete (hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard, click on each spam message, hit the keyboard delete key). I've tried spam filters including MS Outlook's and, with the latter, it regularly sent all e-mail from one of my customers to "Junk E-mail" while still letting through most of the spam. A small business doesn't have time to fight this nuisance. Forget-about-it.

2. I don't use anti-virus programs. I've tried Norton, McAffee, Trend Micro, and F-Protec and they were all too much trouble and took too much time to administer. (F-Protec was the best; it was small, ran quickly and got rid of viruses without "quarantining" or other complicated stuff. I haven't seen anything about it lately though).

I send mainly plain text e-mail without signatures or attachments. When I have to send an attachment, I make sure the recipient knows it is coming, perhaps telling him when we speak on the phone or sending a separate e-mail to tell him. When you start being careful like this, it rubs off and people will start being careful with e-mail they send you. As a result, most of my business e-mail doesn't contain attachments, signatures or formatting and so can't contain viruses.

Very occasionally, perhaps twice over the last six months, I get an attachment which I open and which looks suspicious. If I think I have a virus, I go to http://antivirus.com, click on "free tools" and ask for a "housecall, for local disk". The Trend Micro software checks my computer for viruses on line and gives advice if it finds anything. It takes ages the first time but after that it's faster and you can do other things while it works away. It has reassured me a couple of times when it gave my computer a clean bill of health.

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