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In North Carolina Carolina Digital Phone offers the ability of reducing communication cost by utilizing a SIP enabled IP PBX phone system instead of a traditional PSTN PBX network is the first advantage people think of when switching to an IP based PBX phone system. Essentially phone calls made over an IP network are free. Typically an IP PBX by-passes the wholesale charges made by the incumbent telephone company. (AT&T, Verizone, Qwest, SBC, Bell South and Sprint) This by-pass occurs as the customer is connected to a SIP enabled trunk provider, via an broadband Internet circuit like a data T1 line, as opposed to multiple telephone lines to the incumbent phone company’s switch. The SIP provider will use the Internet to by-pass the long distance and international charges as long as the distant end party is connected through a SIP enable connection. For example, an international call that is placed over an IP PBX will be carried on the IP network from the point of origin to a break outpoint in a foreign country. The SIP provider will incur its capital costs of the IP infrastructure and only the wholesale charge for the foreign national leg of the call. Previously, the service provider would have to pay charges to the local phone company, an international carrier and the foreign carrier. The end result is long distance and international call charges are significantly lower than traditional phone companies.

Benefits of an IP PBX Phone System:
Simplify. An integrated infrastructure that supports ALL forms of communication allows more standardization of equipment and a single cabling infrastructure. This leads to a further overall fall in operational costs.

Flexibility.
An IP Telephony system is based primarily on software rather than hardware, making it easier to alter, up grade and maintain. IP Telephony allows you to safely set up a fully functioning office anywhere a broadband connection is available including the home office and telecommuters.

Scaleable.
Traditional telephone systems are difficult to expand or upgrade, it is easy to outgrow your current system and you may need to replace hardware or, even replace your entire system. IP Telephony systems however are easy to upgrade in line with your company as it grows, as your needs change your IP Telephony system can adapt easily to your changing telecommunications requirements.

Easy Installation.
IP Telephony allows corporate users to use a single high-speed Internet connection for all voice, video, and data communications. This is known as convergence and is one of the primary driving forces behind corporate interest in VoIP. As we have seen VoIP is not just about reducing call costs, it gives companies much more than that. By using a single data network for all communications, it is possible to reduce overall operating costs, increase employee efficiency and allow greater flexibility in communications than ever before.

Your local sales engineer working with Carolina Digital Phone in Greensboro, North Carolina is Nicky Smith, and can be reached by dialing his direct dial number (336) 346-6004. If you are not successful in reaching Nicky Smith immediately, you should call our number in Greensboro, North Carolina at (336) 346-6000 and press option 2. Or call our Toll-Free number (888) 400-5557. Our in-house sales office hours are 8:30 AM until 5:00 PM EST.

A small company in North Carolina is growing to become one of the most popular hosted PBX service providers in the United States. Carolina Digital Phone with their small staff of just 4 very knowledgeable software engineers have deployed a VoIP cloud based service that saves small businesses more than 50% on their traditional telephone system monthly expenses. Their hosted PBX is available anywhere you have good reliable internet access and router with QoS and bandwidth management. In early 2005 Nicky Smith, the owner of CAROLINANET.COM made the investment in VoIP Technology by 2009 they had more than 100 local North Carolina small businesses using their superior digital hosted VoIP service.In the Triad area of North Carolina, Carolina Digital offers services in Winston-Salem, High Point, Burlington, Kernersville, Statesville, Hickory and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Carolina Digital Phone as not only made investments in the local community of Greensboro, NC by has expanded into neighboring states South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia. Kentucky. Indiana and Ohio You should take a few minutes and read some of the excellent customer testimonials listed on their web site.Their hosted PBX VOIP phone system replaces expensive phone systems, installation, handsets, land lines and numbers with a simple, cost-efficient alternative. Carolina Digital Phone provides a powerful phone system, hosted in the cloud, which is available to use on a monthly subscription basis. Each user can use a softphone or handset, which just needs to be plugged into their broadband or office network to allow them to access features such as voicemail, IVR and more, all from their control panel. They offer a competitively priced alternative to premise-based IP PBX solutions. There is never a long-term contract commitment because the service is offered on a month-to-month basis unlike the traditional telephone companies that require long-term contracts.

Now you can cut your current phone bill in half and have the high-quality service and features previously only available to Fortune 500 companies. Get the complete business phone system that delivers outrageously affordable, incredibly advanced business phone service right over your Internet connection.

Reason to Swap your Old PBX for a VOIP Hosted PBX

Looking for A Reason to Swap your Old PBX for a VOIP Hosted PBX — How About Eight Great Reasons!

1. Lower CAPEX Costs: Buying a traditional phone system is like buying a new car, it significantly depreciates the day you place it in service. Plus, you own a piece of equipment that you’ll have to one day replace. You can put that money to better use by spending less up- front by intstalling a VoIP Hosted PBX system.

2. VoIP Hosted PBX is Dynamically Scalable: Up-size and Down-size on the fly. VoIP Hosted PBX Service lets you buy the exact number of users you need right now – later you can add users when you actually need them. This helps preserve capital in comparison to guessing what size PBX system you need to buy today to support the number of users you think you’ll have in 3 – 5 years.

3. Hosted PBX System Significantly Reduces Depreciation Losses: Traditional PBX systems depreciate almost 70% the day you take them out of their box. With a VoIP Hosted phone service, you won’t have to worry about depreciation since you’re not purchasing equipment.

4. Hosted PBX is Cheaper, Easier to Maintain and Update: Moves, Add’s and Changes no longer require on-site changes to your phone system. Most VoIP Hosted PBXs can be remotely configured by the vendor, thus the flexibility to add, change, delete or move users within hours. Your expenses will be reduced by eliminating costly monthly maintenance contracts or the high labor cost required to have a tech onsite for every change you need.

5. Hosted PBX Uses Non-Proprietary Components: When you buy a traditional PBX phone system, you’re locking your company into a long term commitment to a proprietary architecture that may or may not keep pace with technological changes. Bottom line, you are betting your company’s future that the proprietary technology will remain compatible with evolving industry standards. In the future, there’s a good chance with a traditional PBX you’ll be at the manufacturer’s mercy for repair and expansion since only their parts will work with your purchase. Make sure your VoIP Hosted PBX system works with multiple phone manufacturers. So if you decide to move to a different system, a forklift upgrade won’t be necessary.

6. Hosted PBX System Eliminates Technology Obsolescence: Since you’re not purchasing a phone system, you don’t have to worry about the equipment becoming obsolete. Updates and new features are automatically available to you with Carolina Digital Phone’s Hosted PBX service.

7. Disaster Recovery/ Emergency Protection: A hosted PBX product will protect your company’s calling infrastructure the same way you protect your website and email – with specialized, secure off-site hosting. Make sure if you are considering a VoIP hosted PBX that the vendor provide security and redundancy so you don’t have to worry about the physical requirements and support of your phone system.

8. Improved Features for Improved Productivity: Most enterprise Hosted Voice PBX service providers include advanced calling features that are not available with traditional phone systems. Features that will improve the way you control your calling, like Visual Voicemail, unique DID’s, Find-Me/Follow-Me, Click-to-Call and Outlook Integration.

In Greensboro, North Carolina you can get a VOIP Hosted PBX Internet telephone service that is state-of-the-art technology for your business. Hosted PBX VoIP internet phone services allows you to keep your local Winston-Salem number. And new numbers anywhere in North Carolina are available for immediate activation. Now available at a great savings for any size business. Our broadband VoIP (Voice over internet protocol) is instant, reliable, and there for you considering the calling features you have appreciated previously. Hosted PBX VoIP plans in North Carolina are available at a great value and will save your business a lot. Call us right now (336) 714-4500 and we shall show you exactly why so many of your respective businesses are switching to hosted PBX platform.

Carolina Digital Phone is a locally owned hosted PBX provider of high quality VoIP services. IP-based, broadband telephone service delivers the excellent advantage of not requiring other lines or wire being hooked up directly. You already have high-speed internet access, now you can harness that power with a hosted PBX system.

Your email is your business life-line for communications to your clients

Small, medium and large businesses are keeping closer tabs on expenses today. Unexpected costs wreak havoc on even large budgets. Many enterprises are opting for the convenience and predictability of email hosting for business.

By using Dataglide’s Kerio Connect, businesses don’t need to concern themselves with periodic maintenance and management tasks. At the same time, they enjoy a hosted Microsoft Exchange type service, eliminating the cost of upfront licensing for the products and hardware upgrades.

One of the major benefits of using Dataglide Kerio Connect is its hosted email and hosted email archiving. Clients can rely on its security advantages for encrypting and digitally signing sensitive internal emails. Companies using this kind of security layering are less exposed to outside hacking and surveillance by competitors.

Hosted email archiving gives companies instant access to past correspondence filed in a logical and easy to use system of folders and synced calendars. Using Dataglide’s email hosting for business means office staff and mobile personnel stay in touch and on the same page hour by hour without waiting for an on-site server’s nightly updating.

Dataglide’s hosted email not only saves on the cost of licensing and equipment but also plays a big role in keeping a company’s message handling requirements up to date. Even better, Dataglide Kerio Connect ensures interoperability of a mobile staff’s cell phones and tablet computers with the home office’s computers. Moreover, personnel can use Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome browsers to access their Dataglide Kerio Connect accounts. Our hosting service is compatible with Outlook for Windows and Mac, Apple Mail, Entourage, iCal and more.

Even during challenging economic times, business systems and solutions are constantly evolving. Using Dataglide’s Kerio Connect hosted email provides problem-free hosting for businesses of all sizes.

Many email hosting companies operating according to their own needs, not those of their customers. In comparison, our client companies will not experience unexpected shutdowns for maintenance. We provide advance notice when we need to shut down our servers for maintenance and upgrades which is rare and is always scheduled between 2am and 3am on weekends when access is not often needed. When a maintenance is scheduled you will never loose an email communications because we queue email for delivery with backup mail replays. Even better, we schedule these periodic tasks to avoid conflict with our clients’ hours of operation.

Dataglide Kerio Connect clients retain all rights to their hosted contents. There are some email hosting companies that retain the right to handle or mishandle customers’ information as they see fit. We maintain your email, events and data as highly confidential and never use it to discover what your interest are, your buying habits or what merchants to direct their advertising towards. Your data is safe and secure.

Some companies even limit the number of emails allowed within a 24-hour period. We don’t do that. Dataglide puts the needs of its clients’ front and center on the email hosting for business stage. Comparison shopping among providers illustrates the superiority of Dataglide’s Kerio Connect capabilities.

You will find Dataglide services offer:

• Set monthly costs, with never a surprise when you possible go over soft limits
• No licensing or upgrading concerns for clients
• Interoperability among browsers and operating systems
• Multi-layered security make your data safe and confidential
• Real-time syncing of devices and computers
• Logical and easy-to-use functionality and access
• Convenience that you will always have US-based telephone and email support
• Protection of proprietary content so that robots and search engines don’t watch your data activity

Dataglide Connect does all of this better than the other providers out there. This is why so many companies are turning to us for their hosted email needs.

Have More Questions?

Are you ready to talk to a Dataglide specialist? Ready to place your inquiry order online? As trained Kerio professionals we are ready and available Monday-Friday 8AM-5PM to answer your calls. Call us Toll-Free (888) 400-5557 or local in Greensboro, NC (336) 346-6000.

Whether you’ve been kicking around the idea of switching over to VoIP Broadband Phone Service or you’ve never even heard of it before, if you’re interested in increasing both the quality of your phone service and the money that stays in your bank account, then listen up. As I see it, here are just some of the reasons why you should lose all of your current phone services in favor of VoIP over both traditional land line and cellular services:

With Voice over Internet Protocol phone service, you will no longer have a need for your land line phones any longer. Now I’m not telling you to rip out your old phones and throw them in the trash, yet. The technology is still in somewhat of a transitional period and you may need to find a way to use both services while getting used to a new system, but soon enough you will find that your old system is no longer needed. VoIP phone service will also eliminate the need for any long distance services you currently have and will save you money by dropping these expensive services and, eventually, your land line service altogether.

Communications with VoIP are unlimited. Once you choose which VoIP service provider you’re going to go with you will be put on a flat rate service where you can have unlimited communications worldwide. Depending on your equipment, many service providers don’t even charge extra for international calls. But even the ones that do, their fees are next to nothing compared to what you were paying for the same services with traditional land line and cell phone services.

Conference calling is no longer limited, either. Previous 3-way calling service found with land line and cellular phones are no longer limited to just you and maybe 2 other people on the conversation. Now you can have as many as you want on the call because virtually all VoIP service providers offer a better solution. Since the internet is used as the method of delivery with VoIP service, technology is no longer 2-dimensional. Using VoIP phone service for both conference calls and teleseminars is relatively simple which makes it an excellent idea for business.

VoIP service is cheap: But not in the sense of not being worth what you pay for it. You will definitely be getting more than your money’s worth. Why, even the most expensive of VoIP service providers are much less expensive than traditional services. By eliminating the middlemen and others that have a hand in helping to provide you with your current services, VoIP can bring your costs down dramatically. In addition, since your connection is established and maintained through the internet you don’t have to worry about the need for it to have to go through land based wiring systems that are in need of constant repairs, maintenance and upgrades. Now initially there may be some small additional charges when the person on the other end of the line you need to talk to is still using a land line or cell phone service (at least until they wise up and get VoIP) because the need for the “middleman” still exists. Just be sure to check with your chosen provider for any rates that may apply.

No additional costs for Internet services – Service packages offered by most VoIP providers allow you to save money on your broadband service from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) by providing you with the same quality service included in your VoIP service plan. By going with a VoIP service provider that offers the option of broadband Internet service, too, you will save more money by being able to get rid of the added expense of a separate ISP.

There are all kinds of free services and features with VoIP – Many VoIP service providers don’t even charge you to use their services at all. For example, since VoIP operates using your computer’s broadband technology, if the person you need to talk to has VoIP, too, all you need to do is activate your VoIP service and that’s it because most with most VoIP service providers computer to computer calls are free. By eliminating the need to pay for the rental fees of cell towers or land lines there are no expenses involved when placing calls over the internet to someone else with VoIP service. In addition, many of the features you would normally have to pay extra for with traditional services like caller ID, call waiting, three-way calling, call forwarding, voice mail, etc., are included and already set up for you in most packages available from your VoIP provider. Many of these features were rarely even used with the other types of services because there were always additional fees that were charged for them. Once you acquire these features along with your VoIP service and begin using them, you will be asking yourself how you ever did without them. Once again, always be sure that you check with your provider for the services and features included with your plan and any rates that may apply.

VoIP is capable of sending both files and data – VoIP service allows you to send files or data, like faxes, over the connection, too. Just like you would over your broadband connection from your computer, you can send faxes anywhere faster and at a much lower cost than you would with a cell phone or a land line. VoIP allows you to send files or data much in the same way that you would if you were downloading a file from the internet.

VoIP goes with you where ever you go – Since the internet is accessible throughout the world, VoIP will always be there with you. Where ever you can establish a broadband connection you can use your VoIP service to make a call. Wireless, or WiFi, “hotspots” are available in hotels, coffee shops, airports, etc., all over the world so you will almost always have your service there with you. If you’re out on the road a lot, just think about all the money that you’ll save by not having to pay extra for long distance calls or additional cell phone service fees when you need to make a call back home. Staying in touch with the office or, if you’ve gotten rid of your old traditional service at home, too, the family will be just like being there. All you will need to do is hook up a headset and microphone to your laptop and you’ll be good to go. There are also VoIP phones, or softphones, available that are a lot like cell phones with software installed on them that will allow youto use the service much in the same way by tapping into an existing internet signal. Some VoIP service providers include these phones as part of the package you choose so that anywhere there is a broadband connection available, you can use your softphone to make calls just the same.

Hopefully this has helped to clear up any of the questions you may have had in regards to why you should get rid of your current land line or cell phone service, or both, and go with VoIP service instead, whether it be for your business or personal use. Besides, if you already have a computer with a broadband connection, a router, a microphone and/or a headset, then you’re already more than halfway there.

VoIP is the future of telecommunications and the future is now. So before you go and sign on for another year with your current cell phone provider or commit to another annual contract with your land line phone service, I highly recommend that you look into VoIP phone service instead. Not only will you begin to reap the benefits of saving money by eliminating your current service providers right off the bat, you will also realize the convenience and quality that comes with VoIP, too. By doing so now, you will show other businesses that you’re staying on the cutting edge of technology and why they should be doing business with you and not somebody else. Because if you wait too long and suddenly find yourself falling behind in the game, it could already be too late. Let’s put it this way, if another business is trying to get a hold of you and find themselves having to pay additional charges because they’re calling your traditional land line office phone, or cell phone for that matter, do you think they’re going to call back if they’ve managed to get a hold of someone else that’s not costing them additional money? Think about it.

Learn more. Visit www.CarolinaDigitalPhone.com

Easy Free Mail Calendar Sync Gone in Windows 7

Is mail calendar sync important to you?

Is mail calendar sync important to you? Apparently, Microsoft doesn’t think so. It’s no longer available as an integrated solution for free with the latest version of the Windows operating system. For some odd reason, the company decided to do away with years of tradition and bundle separate calendar and mail applications — as a download, no less!

That’s right; not only is there no mail calendar sync like before, but the alternatives provided aren’t even provided “out of the box” — they have to be downloaded first. This is due to Microsoft not wanting to go to court over monopoly accusations anymore. By providing just about anything and everything a casual computer user could want out of the box, it had been sued numerous times for stifling competition by the makers of such software as web browsers and, yes, e-mail clients. So with the latest version of Windows available on the market, Redmond’s decided to make everyone download such freebies, thus signifying consumer choice as opposed to somehow being forced to use only Microsoft products by virtue of their free inclusion with the operating system.

So, all well and good, but why oh why did it also have to have taken away the intuitive mail calendar sync provided by the integrated solution it used to, well, provide?? What would having calendar and contact functionality together in a free e-mail program have done to its fears over looking like a monopoly? Such features are almost always found together now, and separating the two into two separate programs is indisputably a step back. Or is Microsoft just being snarky with the government and its competitors — at the expense of Windows end-users?

Who knows what they’re thinking. Who knows why they stopped including pinball in their free games line-up! It’s a silly decision, which is compounded by their silly response that there are separate Windows 7 programs for calendars and contacts!

Hosted email gives your business a much more professional feel, which should give you a leg up with prospective clients, especially in this economic climate! To stay competitive, helpfully sophisticated messaging tools can provide a highly efficient way to not just access communications but also manage contacts and schedule tasks.

Hosted email also has the advantage of allowing you to scale up and down as needed. Pay-as-you-go models minimize your risks while maximizing your benefits! Letting information technology professionals operate your e-mail server saves you time and lets you concentrate on your business. Even if you have your own IT staff on hand, letting someone else do the grunt work frees up your own people for more important matters!

And again, it all just feels so much more professional. Hosted email means that you don’t have advertising running along your messages. It means you needn’t see any yourself when accessing your e-mail. Such premium services are mostly geared towards small to medium-sized businesses, giving you enterprise-level power at a fraction of the cost of running your own servers like the Big Boys! Instead of fiddling with configurations, you just tell your host how you want things, and because it’s professionally hosted you can be sure of expert quality second to none. Why waste time with free webmail and the like? Plans are affordable and the convenience can’t be beat.

Again, you also look better, and in business as in much else in life, first impressions are lasting impressions! Have you ever had someone hand you a fancy business card with a free webmail account listed? How did that make you feel about the person or his or her company? Not very positively, in all likelihood. Well, spare yourself some of that uncertainty in the minds of others, especially potential clients!

Hosted Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Communications
No equipment Required – phone services delivered from the cloud

Our hosted VOIP phone system replaces expensive phone systems, installation, handsets, land lines and numbers with a simple, cost-efficient alternative. Carolina Digital Phone provides a powerful phone system, hosted in the cloud, which is available to use on a monthly subscription basis. Each user can use a softphone or handset, which just needs to be plugged into their broadband or office network to allow them to access features such as voicemail, IVR and more, all from their control panel.

VoIP is a means of carrying phone calls and services across digital Internet networks. In terms of basic usage and functionality, VoIP is similar to traditional telephony, and a VoIP-enabled telephone works exactly like a ‘normal’ one. However, VoIP has a number of other advantages, such as cost, ease and future proofing.

When your customer adopts VoIP technology, they have typically been driven by the lower costs of IP telephony over traditional methods – a powerful incentive for most businesses. However, hosted VoIP from Carolina Digital not only brings them lower costs, but also gives them a complete array of other benefits. It is the perfect complement to our hosted desktop service, giving you comprehensive access to an affordable, mobile, scalable, state-of-the-art business infrastructure on demand.

Now you can cut your current phone bill in half and have the high-quality service and features previously only available to Fortune 500 companies. Get the complete business phone system that delivers outrageously affordable, incredibly advanced business phone service right over your Internet connection.

How? You might ask. With Carolina Digital voice over IP phone service – available wherever there’s an Internet connection

Carolina Digital Phone delivers IP-based Fortune-500 PBX features with Polycom phones as your only hardware investment. No other equipment or software is needed. Companies of any size to achieve a great business phone system with a full suite of PBX features offered. Moreover, communication through hosted VoIP enables mobile workers to stay in touch while working from remote locations.

Rethinking the ‘Never Unsubscribe’ Rule for Spam
The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry.

When it comes to junk mail, the rule, for 15 years, has been: Never respond. Don’t even try to unsubscribe, even if they give you instructions for doing so. You’re just letting the spammer know that your e-mail address is “live,” and that you’re a dummy who actually opens those messages and reads them. You’ll wind up getting put on even more spam lists as a result.

Well, I think it’s time to revisit that advice.

I use Mac and Windows, but my main carry-around machine is a Mac laptop. Onto it, I’ve installed an amazing antispam program called SpamSieve. After reading countless glowing reviews, I gave it a try, and found it indispensable. It works with all Mac e-mail programs, and does an astonishing job of putting all spam from all my accounts into the Spam folder.

I still have to pore over it, though. Every now and then, a piece of legitimate mail winds up in there.

Now, my e-mail addresses are fairly public. I do have one private address that I never, ever use on the Web. (That’s how spammers get your e-mail address, by the way — they scour the Web for e-mail addresses that people type into forms online. Which is why you, too, should have a separate e-mail address that you use only for private correspondence and never use when, for example, ordering products or signing up for things.)

But since my addresses are public, I get added to every mailing and spamming list under the sun. And even with SpamSieve’s assistance, it’s gotten out of control — the amount of time I have to spend double-checking the spam folder is growing year after year.

So a couple of months ago, I decided to try an experiment: I’d violate the old rule. I’d deliberately try to unsubscribe from every spam list. And I’d report on my findings.

First, the good news: it worked. An awful lot of the spam comes from “legitimate” companies. Now, I don’t consider spamming O.K., ever, and I think these companies should be ashamed of themselves. But “legitimate” means that they’re real companies with real Web sites and names and addresses — and, almost always, real Unsubscribe buttons at the bottom of the spam.

The best Unsubscribe button by far is the one provided by something called SafeUnsubscribe. I don’t know much about it, except that it’s a service offered by a company called Constant Contact, and it claims to have 370,000 customers — companies who pay to use SafeUnsubscribe.

Bottom line: When you see SafeUnsubscribe at the bottom of the message, click it. You land on a Web page that basically says, “O.K., that’s it. We’ve taken you off ALL mailing lists.” One click.
These 370,000 companies, clearly, are the ones with a guilty conscience. “We’re going to spam you, but gosh, we feel bad about it — at least we’ll make it easy for you to get off our lists!”

I like SafeUnsubscribe because it (usually) knows, and fills in, your e-mail address. What really irks me is the other ones: spam with an Unsubscribe button at the bottom — and when you click it, you go to an unsubscribe page when you have to type in your email address! You spammed me, you idiot — you already know my e-mail address!

Those “dumb” unsubscribe buttons mean that I have to go back to my e-mail program and look up which address they spammed, then go back to the Web page and paste it in. When you have 30 of those a day, it’s exhausting.

Anyway: after a couple of months of this, I’m happy to report that, as far as I can see, not a single one of these companies has contacted me again. Unsubscribing in 2011 really works.

(Note that I’m talking about spam with an Unsubscribe button at the bottom. The ones pitching you Viagra or bigger body parts won’t unsubscribe you — and don’t pretend that they will.)

The corporate spam, in other words, is usually easy to stop.

Now, the bad news: That spam isn’t very much of the total volume. I’m still inundated by the less responsible spam:

– All kinds of messages in Russian and Asian languages. (Hint: Dudes, you’re wasting your time.)

– A million, zillion e-mails from a firm called Rodman & Renshaw (not sure if it’s really them, or someone impersonating them).

– The usual phishing scams — fake e-mails from banks (that I don’t even have accounts with), asking me to log in to correct some kind of error.

– A million “I was in the U.K. and I was mugged, old pal! Can you help me out?” scams.

– Variations on the old Nigerian scam: “I’ve just come into possession of $50 million, and I need your help getting it out of the country…”

– Invitations to have my product manufactured at a company in China.

– A lot of weird ones where the entire message is a single Web link. Do they think I’m some kind of sucker?

In any case, I think it’s time to revise the old “Never respond” rule. It’s true that you should never, ever respond to a piece of spam by rewarding it with a purchase. Don’t ever click “click here” — you’re only encouraging them.

But my experiment (confirmed by my Twitter followers) is that clicking legit-looking Unsubscribe buttons does reduce the spam flow, if only from actual companies.

And perhaps best of all, it gives you a fleeting, illusory feeling that you actually have a way to fight back.

Less and less of today’s computing is done on desktop computers; cloud computing, in which operations are carried out on a network of shared, remote servers, is expected to rise as the demand for computing power increases. This raises some crucial questions about security: Can we, for instance, perform computations on data stored in “the cloud” without letting anyone else see our information? Research carried out at the Weizmann Institute and MIT is moving us closer to the ability to work on data while it is still encrypted, giving an encrypted result that can later be securely deciphered.

Attempting computation on sensitive data stored on shared servers leaves that data exposed in ways that traditional encryption techniques can’t protect against. The main problem is that to manipulate the data, it has to be first decoded. “Until a few years ago, no one knew if the encryption needed for this sort of online security was even possible,” says Dr. Zvika Brakerski, who recently completed his Ph.D. in the group of Prof. Shafi Goldwasser of the Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department. In 2009, however, a Ph.D. student at Stanford University named Craig Gentry provided the first demonstration of so-called fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). But the original method was extraordinarily time consuming and unwieldy, making it highly impractical. Gentry constructed his FHE system by using fairly sophisticated math, based on so-called ideal lattices, and this required him to make new and unfamiliar complexity assumptions to prove security. Gentry’s use of ideal lattices seemed inherent to fully homomorphic encryption; researchers assumed that they were necessary for the server to perform such basic operations as addition and multiplication on encrypted data.

Brakerski, together with Dr. Vinod Vaikuntanathan (who was a student of Goldwasser’s at MIT), surprised the computer security world earlier this year with two recent papers in which they described several new ways of making fully homomorphic encryption more efficient. For one thing, they managed to make FHE work with much simpler arithmetic, which speeds up processing time. And a surprise discovery showed that a mathematical construct used to generate the encryption keys could be simplified without compromising security. Gentry’s original ideal lattices are theoretical collections of points that can be added together — as in an ordinary lattice structure — but also multiplied. But the new research shows that the lattice does not have to be ideal, which simplifies the construction immensely. “The fact that it worked was something like magic, and it has challenged our assumptions about the function of the ideal lattices in homomorphic encryption,” says Brakerski.

Their result promises to pave a path to applying FHE in practice. Optimized versions of the new system could be hundreds — or even thousands — of times faster than Gentry’s original construction. Indeed, Brakerski and Vaikuntanathan have managed to advance the theory behind fully homomorphic encryption to the point that computer engineers can begin to work on applications. These might include, for instance, securing medical information for research: A third party could perform large medical studies on encrypted medical records without having access to the individuals’ information.