Monday, September 5, 2022

Why small businesses protect customer data better than large corporations.

Dear Friends!

It's been awhile since we posted anything here. We've been busy writing code, expanding our service and helping out customers. Thank you all who messaged us in Facebook and via E-mail asking how we weathered the Covid time. We not only survived, we in fact expanded our Cloud footprint substantially - both programmatically and geographically. And the best part is that we did not leave sunny Florida. We expanded into other areas digitally with the help of the Amazon cloud platforms and services.

Today let us chat a bit about data privacy and security. We will stay short and down to the subject, so please don't scroll down too far :)

We hear a lot about big companies who fail in protecting their customers' data. We read news too. Have you ever thought why? We think we know what may cause the problem. No, it's not because of employees' skills or experience. Most people who work there are like you - they have bright minds and great skills. In fact, the problem is not in the people at all. The problem is in the size of those companies. The lack of data security and protection is caused by the classic pitfalls of big corporations: overstaffing and conflict of responsibilities.

We work with big companies for years and we know the IT specifics inside and out. The idea of building wide organizational units expecting them to remain secure is erroneous and fragile. How can you trust so many eyes to keep your data secure? We've seen it many times: you type your SSN and other personal information, click Submit, then it gets sent across dozens if not hundreds of very diverse teams of people who see and process the data before storing it in a digital dumpster. Many of those people are not even company employees, they are contractors. Who knows where else your SSN went to? How many times has your data been copied? Where is it now? India? China?

Small businesses like ours are naturally devoid of those pitfalls. They employ smaller workforce, and their workflows are more tight and secure. Small businesses are and will always be more efficient by automating internal processes and workflows instead of hiring more people. The software they use is better taylored to solve very specific tasks. Many of the workflows don't need people to look at the data. The data is handled by programmatic functions and microservices. It has a compact footprint and the storage is efficient.

Small business owners have much better knowledge of their teams. The management and employees are better incentivized to preserve and expand the customer base. Small businesses are more dynamic in responding to market shifts and they have better leverage of the resources they have. The customer data is their most precious and valuable resource. It's the core of their business. Guess where your data will be more valued and therefore more protected?

In the 11 years of our EmailLargeFile service existence we have never sold or gave out any of our customers data. We never fulfilled any request to sell even a single e-mail address or a message. We received numerous requests to insert sniffing and marketing code into our website or messages, but we ignored all of them. We received dozens of requests to 'get paid to use 3rd party code' in our mobile app, but we never responded to that scam. During our datacenter times there was only 1 support engineer who had access to the data, and only during support sessions. Currently, your data is even more protected as it stays encrypted at AWS with zero public access. Even Amazon employees can't read the encrypted data.

Our infrastructure is even more fool- and hurricane-proof now. Since our full migration to AWS in 2019, we no longer have any computing hardware to maintain. We no longer need to juggle the backup disks and buy new hard drives every 2 years. There are scheduled tasks that run at AWS that do backups of all the databases and files and replicate the backups into another geographic region within the continental US. Your data is safer now at AWS. It can withstand a nuclear attack, let alone a hurricane or an earthquake.

Thursday, December 1, 2016

How to get notified via text message or SMS

June 2020 Update: some pictures in this article are outdated as the Service has been completely redesigned in 2020.

How to enable notifications via text message or SMS.
Besides e-mail, there is another and somewhat quicker way to get notified when a file package is successfully delivered and opened. If you have a cell phone (who don’t?), you can choose to get notified via a text message when your file package is opened by the recipient.
Step 1. Add cell phone number.

First, you need to add your cell phone number to your Account information. If you already did that, skip to the Step 2.
To get to the Account info, log in to EmailLargeFile.net, then click on the Account icon up top:

Scroll down to the User Information section.
Pick the Country, then enter the cell phone number.

Click the [Update User] to save it before moving to the next step.
Step 2. Confirm your cell phone via PIN.

Verify that the Country code is correct (+1) and your cell phone is correct, then click the [x]Allow SMS/Text checkbox.

Important: you may get charged for receiving text messages by your mobile service provider. If unsure, contact your mobile service provider. Make sure you are fully aware of your cell phone plan fees and options.

Once you clicked the checkbox, wait for a few seconds until you receive a text message on your phone AND the Enter PIN prompt shows up on the screen:

If you didn’t receive the PIN message, check if your cell phone number is entered correctly. If it’s entered correctly, but you still don’t get the verification message, let us know!

Once you received the text message with the PIN, enter it in the box (your pin will likely be different):

Click the [Update User] button to accept the changes and confirm the PIN.
Step 3. Receive delivery confirmation via text message.

Now you are ready to receive text message notifications about package delivery.
When composing a new e-mail submission, check the [x] Text Message box next to the Return receipt. This will turn on SMS notifications when the submission is received and the package is opened.

You can always turn off the SMS notifications for the particular Submission via the submission details screen.
For that, click on the particular Submission under the Package on the tree view, then click on the text notifications button on the right to toggle.


Tip: via the Submission Details, you can also turn On or Off text message notifications for earlier submissions.
The text message you receive when the package is first opened would look like:

(Of course, the package name will be different from the pictured.)

Same as with the e-mail notifications, the text message is only sent to you once per recipient, and only when the package is first opened. Subsequent opens or downloads will not trigger notifications, but you will be able to see the package activity via the Reports page.

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Email Large File Android app updated

If you use our free EmailLargeFile app for Android (former File Transfer Free), you may have noticed that it had been recently updated. If you haven't updated it yet, please do.

The new version works on Jelly Bean and KitKat much better. These would be 4.3 and 4.4 versions of Android OS, respectively.

As usual, here is some story behind this update.

About 3-4 months ago, some of our users started sending us support requests to resolve issues with our app after they updated their Android phones with the new OS. Interestingly, the app didn't have issues with many devices, even those with 4.3 or later.

We started investigating the problem. What was happening is that the 4.3.x added a new permission to access files on the SD card, while our app originally designed for 2.6 did not acknowledge. Of course, once we realized that the problem was with the app permission, we immediately modified the Manifest file. That however didn't immediately resolve the problem. After some more digging we figured out that the new bump on the road was in fact caused by the new security model of 4.3. Here is some info on that from CNET news.

By the time we fixed our code, and our new digitally signed package has been approved and published on the Google Play Store, Google decided to take away that security feature from their Android OS, calling it Beta version.

So, our code seemed not need any fix at all, it would just work the same way on 4.4.x as it worked before 4.3. Thankfully, this Google's switcheroo let us fix a few bugs in our code, including the one with Address Book, when the address book would open once and sometimes crash on one of the next open attempts. (Our app opens the address book to let the user pick an email address to send files to, and for that purpose only).

We also added the option for the user to pick a From address from any of the accounts set up on his/her device. This however happens only once during the app install, and is not available again via Options. To pick another From address, you may need to uninstall then reinstall the app.


Our Email Large File Android app allows you to send full resolution photos, videos, or other files from your Android device via email bypassing e-mail restrictions on file size. It's totally free at Google Play Store


For our iPhone aficionados, there is an Email Large File app for iOS too! Check out iTunes app store.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

CryptWit published by Download.com

Great news!
Our free email encryption product CryptWit has been approved and published at Download.com.

Visit Download.com to download and rate it!

Get free CryptWit from CNET Download.com!

Saturday, August 10, 2013

How to send encrypted email via Outlook.

Another secure email service is now available for free.

This is for all of us who use Outlook to send and receive email messages. The software is called CryptWit for Outlook and it comes as a free add-in with perpetual license, which you can use for all your needs.

The great thing is that it does not need any special software on the other end, which means your recipients, even if they use Gmail or Hotmail, can still decrypt and read your secure message.

Here is how to send an encrypted email message in 40 seconds:


Sunday, July 21, 2013

How to Send Files with EmailLargeFile.net - Video Tutorial

June 2020 Update: this article is outdated as the Service has been completely redesigned in 2020.


Tuesday, March 26, 2013

How to Import Address Book Contacts From File

June 2020 Update: some pictures in this article are outdated as the Service has been completely redesigned in 2020.

EmailLargeFile.net file transfer service is continually developed and updated with new features. Recently, we have added the ability to bulk-import address book contacts from a file.

Here is how you can use it.

First, you need to have the list of contacts in a comma-separated (CSV) or a tab-separated (TXT) file. Make sure the first line of text in the file contains email,name. Lowercase or uppercase, doesn't matter. Those two words can be separated by a comma (,) or a tab character. No spaces. Double quotes allowed.
The first two words help us to determine the format of the rest of the file.

The file name (business, or personal, or general) helps us determine which of the address books to update. File extension is optional. On a Windows machine it will likely be .txt or .csv.

We assume the rest of the file is only emails and names. One record per line. The column separator character must be the same as in the header. Example of a correct CSV file:


Once you have the file ready, you can import it.
For that:
  • log in to Emaillargefile.net via https://emaillargefile.net ,
  • click on Contacts on top of the page. You will see the Manage Contacts and Recipients page:



Click the Import tab as highlighted below, then browse to the file (i.e: business.csv or business.txt).


No need to click the address book name on top of the page. Just make sure you pick the correct file: business for business contacts, personal for personal contacts, general for "all".  Then click Submit.

On successful import, you will see the following message:



The imported email address records will look like this:




How to Prepare CSV File


If you don't have the file ready, here is how you can make it.
A well-formed recipients list is a text file. You can type it in the Notepad, or you can export the list from Excel. Here is how you can export the data from Excel.

The contacts should be in 2 columns. The first column contains email address of each person or contact, the second column stores the corresponding names:



To export data, click on the Office button, then Save As-> Other formats.



Give file a name - either Personal, or Business, or General. Pick either Tab-separated TXT file, or a Comma-separated CSV file format, then click Save:



If you preview the file in Notepad, the contents will look like this:



Close both Excel and Notepad, and you are ready to import the file.




How to Format Email Addresses


Let's say, you named the file correctly, made it tab- or comma separated, correctly spelled the header, left no spaces between columns, but the import procedure still shows zero records updated:



Usually, the zero records message would mean that the imported email addresses already exist in the database. The records may have been uploaded or manually entered earlier

In other cases, that could mean the email addresses are blank or have been incorrectly formatted.

Here are some examples of the lists (including header). Notice, that the format of each record must match the header formatting. The first column of reach record is always an email, the second column is name (or empty). Spaces or special characters other than double quotes aren't allowed in email address:

Correct Incorrect
Email,Name
John_Silver@email.com,John Silver
Mary_Poppins@email.com,
,email,name
,John_Silver@email.com,John Silver
email,Name
"john@email.com","john"
Name,email
John Silver,john@email.com
Email name
mary@email.com Mary Poppins
Email name
mary@email.com,Mary Poppins
email,name
"fuzzylogic@domain.com",John Silver
email,name
<fuzzylogic@email.com>,John Silver



Limitations

  • Maximum imported file size is 1Mb,
  • Maximum number of imported addresses is limited by a plan you are subscribed to.



Tips and Hints


If you delete a recipient from one of your address books, then import the same email address from a file, the recipient will be restored in the address book, rather than re-created as new.

Duplicate emails are omitted. Records with empty email addresses are skipped.

Existing recipient with matching email address but a different name in the imported file, will not be renamed in the address book. (This is the current behaviour of the import procedure, which we may review and change in the future.)

For Professional and other multi-user accounts, address books of different users under the same account are not merged or shared between users.

Recipients with the same email address or name, if imported into different address books (business, then personal) will not be merged into 1 record, they will stay as multiple records, one per each address book. Exception: General (all) list.