Chapter 13
RMail Extras

RMail Inbox and RMail Web pro­vide cer­tain addi­tion­al fea­tures that you may find use­ful in your email cor­re­spon­dence.

SideNote

Side­Note enables you to include a note in your email mes­sages just like a yel­low Post-it note for paper. The recip­i­ent of the email does not see the Side­Note. Only you and those you copy on the email mes­sage (CC or BC) see the Side­Note. Thus, the Side­Note is not intend­ed for the recip­i­ent but is intend­ed for oth­ers in your orga­ni­za­tion or out­side col­lab­o­ra­tors relat­ed to the busi­ness of the email.

This is a fea­ture you should try imme­di­ate­ly, because you might find it more use­ful in rou­tine mail cor­re­spon­dence than you might imag­ine.

PDF Conversion

You can use the PDF con­ver­sion fea­ture for Microsoft Word, Excel, or Pow­er­Point attach­ments to your email. By doing this, the recip­i­ent will be able to read such attach­ments even if the they do not have Microsoft Office. (Note that because the Microsoft files are attach­ments, they are inde­pen­dent of being dis­played cor­rect­ly by a par­tic­u­lar email pro­gram.) Although this con­ver­sion capa­bil­i­ty is avail­able in oth­er soft­ware, RMail makes it avail­able at the point that you need to use it.

Metadata Removal

Meta­da­ta is infor­ma­tion embed­ded in a doc­u­ment about the doc­u­ment itself. It is not vis­i­ble in the doc­u­ment but is acces­si­ble via the orig­i­nal author­ing soft­ware (e.g., Word). The meta­da­ta in a doc­u­ment can pro­vide a recip­i­ent more infor­ma­tion than they should have. Per­haps most meta­da­ta are harm­less, but some can be pro­pri­etary or at least con­fi­den­tial. There­fore, the best prac­tice for many busi­ness­es is to remove the meta­da­ta before send­ing a doc­u­ment to any­one.

RMail Inbox and RMail Web enable you to remove the meta­da­ta from doc­u­ments with one click (tap) of a but­ton.

Anti-phishing

The RMail plug-ins for Out­look and Microsoft Office 365 includes anti-whal­ing (spe­cial­ized anti-phish­ing) algo­rithms to reduce your risk of being a vic­tim to an imposter email. How does this work?

To under­stand whal­ing you first have to under­stand phish­ing. Phish­ing is an email sent to you by some­body intend­ing to get you to do some­thing. The From: email address show­ing in the email mes­sage, how­ev­er, is not that of the real sender. The From: email address show­ing can be any­thing the sender wants it to be.

For instance, John Fish­er­man with an email address of JohnFisherman@​gmail.​com might send you an email with the From: email address of Amer­i­can Can­cer Soci­ety <donations@​AmericanCancerSociety.​com> show­ing in the email mes­sage. The email solic­its a $25 dona­tion to the Amer­i­can Can­cer Soci­ety to be sent by you ask­ing you to click (tap) on a link with the text Amer­i­can Can­cer Soci­ety Dona­tions. Such a link takes you to a pho­ny web­site sim­u­lat­ing the web­site of the Amer­i­can Can­cer Soci­ety but belong­ing to John Fish­er­man. Because you rou­tine­ly donate to good caus­es, you read­i­ly make a dona­tion. The dona­tion goes into John Fisherman’s pho­ny web­site, not into the Amer­i­can Can­cer Society’s bank account. John gets the funds.

Why do they call this phish­ing? Because John Fish­er­man sends out thou­sands of these emails fish­ing for a few suck­ers to take the bait. If he sends out 10,000 emails and 10% of the recip­i­ents make a $25 dona­tion, he ends up with $25,000 result­ing from this scam.

But don’t think hack­ers use phish­ing just to scam mon­ey. They use it to get use­ful infor­ma­tion too. And that infor­ma­tion can even­tu­al­ly lead to more seri­ous scams. Read Chap­ter 16.

Keep in mind that any­body can do this; it takes no advanced exper­tise. And it’s easy to fool peo­ple. In fact, we all have prob­a­bly been vic­tims of this phish­ing with­out ever even dis­cov­er­ing it.

Much email soft­ware has anti-phish­ing algo­rithms that detects phish­ing attempts. It’s quite sim­ple. They match up the email address show­ing on the From: line with the actu­al email address from which the mes­sage was sent (hid­den in the meta trans­mis­sion data). If the two do not match, it’s phish­ing.

Anti-whaling

The insid­i­ous ver­sion of phish­ing called whal­ing is high­ly dan­ger­ous. That is where the hack­er directs the phish­ing specif­i­cal­ly at wealthy indi­vid­u­als or at indi­vid­u­als who are involved in major high-val­ue trans­ac­tions (e.g., real estate clos­ings). In this case, the phish­ing involves catch­ing a whale; so this vari­a­tion of phish­ing is called whal­ing. And the RMail plug-ins for Out­look and Microsoft Office 365 con­tain anti-whal­ing algo­rithms.

A typ­i­cal whal­ing attempt might be by some­one who knows that you’re involved in a high-val­ue trans­ac­tion, such as the clos­ing at the Ten­nessee Trans State Title Com­pa­ny for a real estate invest­ment. In this case, John Fish­er­man show­ing the From: email address sends you an email with the return address of Ten­nessee Trans State Title Com­pa­ny <closings@​TennesseeTransStateTitleCompany.​com> show­ing. The email directs you to wire the $83,972, that you’re oblig­at­ed in the trans­ac­tion, to the Clos­ing Fund account at a cer­tain bank. This is pret­ty straight­for­ward, because you know you’re clos­ing, and you know you have to come up with the mon­ey. So you duly arrange to wire it to the bank as request­ed. Lit­tle do you sus­pect that you’re wiring the mon­ey to John Fisherman’s Clos­ing Fund account at his bank, not the title company’s bank account.

For­tu­nate­ly, the RMail anti-whal­ing func­tion will pick up this whal­ing activ­i­ty and alert you to the fact that John Fisherman’s email is not a legit­i­mate request. Were you to email the funds as per the request, you would find out some­time lat­er the funds did not go to the Ten­nessee Trans State Title Com­pa­ny. They went to John Fisherman’s Clos­ing Fund bank account. You still owe the Ten­nessee Trans State Title Com­pa­ny $83,972 for the clos­ing.

Beware that often hack­ers in oth­er coun­tries do the whal­ing, which puts the scam well beyond the prac­ti­cal reach of US law enforce­ment.

Beware also that you can­not rely upon anyone’s anti-whal­ing algo­rithms to ful­ly pro­tect you. Nev­er ever respond to an email request­ing funds for any pur­pose. You always ini­ti­ate the pay­ment of funds sep­a­rate­ly from the email and only to email address­es, web­sites, Pay­Pal accounts, or bank accounts that you know to be legit­i­mate.

Phish­ing and whal­ing can be very con­vinc­ing and even moti­vat­ing. For­tu­nate­ly, RMail will catch a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of these attempts for users of Out­look and Microsoft Office 365. But again, the best prac­tice is to make your pay­ments sep­a­rate­ly from any email you receive. (See Chap­ter 16 for more on this.)

Custom Features

If you need cus­tom fea­tures for your small busi­ness, ask RMail ser­vices for what you need. There might be some inex­pen­sive off-the-shelf fea­tures that RMail can read­i­ly install for your use.

The cus­tom fea­tures, how­ev­er, are direct­ed at enter­pris­es that are much more like­ly to need them than small busi­ness­es. If you desire to inte­grate RMail ser­vices into your enter­prise email sys­tem but require spe­cial fea­tures, con­tact RMail to see what’s avail­able. RMail has hun­dreds of off-the-shelf cus­tom fea­tures that you can use to make the RMail sys­tem work for your com­pa­ny.

Plug-ins

As set forth in Chap­ter 7, there are plug-ins for Microsoft Office 365, Out​look​.com, Hot­mail, and Gmail. These plug-ins put the RMail but­ton right in the email pro­gram mak­ing it con­ve­nient for users to use RMail ser­vices (see the RMail web­site at Rmail​.com).

Thus, right from inside Microsoft Out­look, Out​look​.com, Hot­mail, and Gmail, you can send email using any of the RMail ser­vices.

All of these have dif­fer­ent inter­faces which if cov­ered by this book would make the book much longer and per­haps con­fus­ing. But by becom­ing famil­iar RMail ser­vices, you should have no trou­ble using any of the user inter­faces.

Although these plug-ins enable you to use RMail ser­vices inside your favorite email pro­gram, remem­ber you can always use RMail Inbox or RMail Web in your web brows­er too. There is an RMail plug-in for the Google Chrome brows­er. But that plug-in is just a book­mark, and you don’t real­ly need it. You can eas­i­ly set up your own brows­er book­mark to access RMail Inbox or RMail Web.

iPad App

There is an app for iPad that enables you to send email and use RMail ser­vices. It’s send-only (like RMail Web), and does not receive email.

The Button

It’s not only the plug-ins that pro­vide the RMail ser­vices but­ton, but many enter­prise pro­grams make the but­ton avail­able, if request­ed. For instance, Sales­force can include the RMail but­ton as can IBM Notes. But there are oth­er enter­prise busi­ness pro­grams that can pro­vide you with the RMail but­ton too.

If you ask, and your busi­ness soft­ware provider can­not give you the RMail but­ton, ask the provider to con­tact RMail and incor­po­rate the RMail ser­vices but­ton into their soft­ware for your use. This is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a cus­tom request on your behalf. Once a provider inte­grates the RMail but­ton into their email soft­ware, they can make it avail­able as an extra fea­ture to all their oth­er cus­tomers.

The but­ton is also avail­able from ISPs. If you use your ISP’s email pro­gram, it may already have the RMail but­ton. If not, your ISP may be able to pro­vide it upon request. If that’s not the case, request that your ISP incor­po­rate the RMail but­ton into the ISP’s email soft­ware. Again, this is not a cus­tom request. By inte­grat­ing the but­ton into the ISP’s email pro­gram, an ISP has an extra fea­ture to gen­er­ate rev­enue and pro­vide to all its cus­tomers.

Free RMail Services

For those of you who don’t use RMail ser­vices much, you can use RMail ser­vices up to five times each month with­out a charge. For every instance of use over the five-a-month allot­ment, you will be charged at the post­ed RMail rates (on the RMail web­site), which you will find very rea­son­able and a sig­nif­i­cant cost sav­ings over oth­er ways of enact­ing busi­ness com­mu­ni­ca­tions. And you pay as you go; there is no month­ly charge. For heav­ier use, there are oth­er pay­ment plans.

Monthly Accounting

You are encour­aged to keep track of your email just as you would any cor­re­spon­dence. RMail helps you do this by issu­ing a month­ly activ­i­ty report con­sist­ing of all the email mes­sages you sent using RMail ser­vices. This may suf­fice as a gen­er­al index to your email account­ing sys­tem or as an audit­ing tool.