Help me clean up my computer!

This post is selfish. I am hoping that you all can help me clean up my email. I starting getting some odd emails that look like email delivery failures. What they are in fact is evidence that someone who has my email address has been infected with a computer virus or malware. This one is probably a trojan, which is so named because unbeknownst to you it hijacks your computer and secretly sends out SPAM. It could even be that someone accessed their email via the web on another computer that was already infected. It is all but impossible to track the source of these clever little beasties. The best we can do is each of us clean up the computers we use to ensure that we are not the sender. Here's how:

1. Shut down your email program. Both local and web access
2. Update your anti-virus software. (We have bought a copy of AVG for each of our users) There are many companies that offer these, McAfee, Trend.  Here is a free one for the macintosh. You should have  one. Make sure you do this on any computer you have accessed you email including webmail, then scan the machine for viruses.
3. Download and install malwarebytes(PC only)(select the free version), and run a scan also(quick scan is sufficient). Here is scanner for Macintosh.

I really hope you can help me clean up my email this way. Thanks in advance.

PS. This will also help everyone else that you email.

PPS. It is possible to set up regular scans with your anti-virus software that help you from ever getting infected. Check it out

Managing your email account

As we all know, communicating through email is a major part of our jobs. In order to keep our email service running at its greatest speed and efficiency, we must perform regular maintenance, just as we would any of our important tools. One of thing the primary things we must do to keep our email running well is to keep the size of the mailbox under control. The greater volume and size of emails and attachments that we now use to communicate now could threaten to overwhelm any system.

I have attached, in this message, links which will take you to some slick training pages that can make you into an informed email user with the tools to keep your email running efficiently. Especially if you have experienced odd behaviors with your email and you have never paid any attention managing the size of your mailbox, I recommend that you check out one of the following trainings.

Outlook 2003
Outlook 2007

PS. If you only use Outlook Web Access, there are no current training materials online, but there is a handy help menu that has lots of helpful hints. just click on the
 symbol in the upper right hand corner when you log in.

CWEB updates

Thanks to all you users using the new CWEB (https://cweb.ieminc.org) interface for logging into to FRED. We hope that it will ultimately be more convenient and secure. However while it is still new, we are still working out some kinks.

Although you are using a website to log in, you must still use your own computer. You should not use any computer that is not personally yours to log in. i.e. do not use a public computer or a parent's computer. This is for several reasons. One, because you must still have the Citrix client application installed on the computer(you cannot do this generally on public computer), you may not know the security situation and would be risking computer malware infection and finally there is an additional cost to the school for each different computer that you log in from.

If you run into any problems with this log in, please go through your normal tech support process. There is information available at www.iemsupport.com and here is a little video to help you with the initial log-in.