I, along with many of you, receive countless e-mails from agents containing attachments.  These attachments can be in an image format such as Bitmap (.bmp), JPEG (.jpg), GIF (.gif), TIFF (.tif); or, in a document format such as Word 97-2003 (.doc), Word 2007 (.docx), Publisher (.pub), Excel 97-2003 (.xls), or Excel 2007 (.xlsx).  Your Word or Excel documents could also contain Macros which would result in the 2007 versions of Office adding an “m” to the file-extension (i.e. .docm and .xlsm, respectively).  The older versions of Office did not differentiate between Macro-enabled and standard documents with an alternate extension.

For those interested, Macros are small programs written inside Office documents that perform certain functions on the document.  They are predominantly found in large corporate documents, but can occasionally be included in smaller documents, as well.  I have written a few, in the past, for some of my clients.  However, while they are useful in controlled and trusted environments, they should never be used for public, shared documents as they are another means of transmitting viruses.

As I teach in my e-mail marketing class, while it may be convenient to simply attach and forward, you should never send any of the above attachments if you should hope that your marketing efforts are to be successful. More...

As enter into the Spring season, we are already seeing warmer temperatures that will bring the great spring weather we enjoy here in Georgia.  One thing that usually accompanies all these spring wonders is spring rain.  Unfortunately, roof leaks are a usual accompaniment of this spring rain.  This is the most common time of year for homeowners to identify roof leaks.  One of the areas of focus for our certified home inspectors is water flow and control. More...