MaconMacGuy.com:

Putting the tech pieces together
for Macon & Middle Georgia
for "a good while now"

I have a client – who is slowly migrating from using 4 different email services to using the webmail that comes with his hosting (SmarterMail Enterprise) – ask me about sending out one email to a bunch of his contacts. He couldn’t figure out an easy way to do it.

As with most things, this required him to do some setup before it would actually work. In this case, I shot a video of how to do it because that’s how my client best learns new information (typing up a long email with instructions isn’t of much help).

I suggested he setup an Excel spreadsheet and have his assistant type in all of his contacts (which are seriously scattered between several machines and webmail services like hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.). She would then save the file as a CSV, which SmarterMail can import.

The key bit o’ info was that you can add a category to each contact in SmarterMail. After adding a category (“mail list”) to the desired contacts, it’s easy to select all of the contacts in a specific category when typing up a new email.

This took a bit of research, but is a prime example of one of the services I offer my clients. I take an existing situation and try to connect the dots – showing them how to take advantage of the technology they have, or offering some alternative methods (In this case, I listed MailChimp as an option). There is often a “cheaper than inexpensive” service online that you can use to accomplish something.

Check with me an ask about what I can do for you!

I have a client who called with some computer issues, and their situation serves as the inspiration for this entry.

This is a small business, with a couple of people in the office taking care of “just about everything”.

So, if you want to keep your office from working well, do these things:

1) Put the absolute minimum of RAM in your computers. (One machine has 260K for the OS – Windows2000). This will make your office personnel spend most of their time WAITING for their machines to do anything.

2) Never train them in anything. That way they won’t know anything about tools that will help them do their work – like Outlook, or web browsers, or….

3) Don’t share ANYTHING, even though they are on a network already. This way one person will have to wait until the other machine is open to get anything done.

4) Never backup anything. That way you’ll REALLY be hosed when (not if) a machine breaks down!

5) Don’t setup any standard communication lines – like a REAL email address based on the business’s domain. That way no one will know how to contact anyone – they’ll all be using yahoo, or hotmail, or…….

6) Don’t crosstrain – don’t let anyone know what anyone else is doing, especially in terms of websites, usernames, and passwords!

7) Don’t setup guest accounts on your machines – that way anyone who walks by can mess around with the machine.

So how is YOUR office doing? Need some help? Contact the MaconMacGuy for some mostly intelligent help!