Cruzio Newsletter - Number 66, July 22, 2003
1. Online Stores at Cruzio Now Can Deploy PayPal
2. Ecommerce Brown Bag This Thursday
3. Cruzio Blocking More Viruses
4. Ads in the Bottom of Email
5. Spam? Serious Measures
6. Mail Filtering Means Be Careful, Some Good Mail Can Be Filtered
7. Cruzio DSL -- Another Sale Coming in August
8. Cruzio Projects in the Works
9. Buddy Bucks: Sign Up a Friend for Cruzio Credit
10. Avoid Late Fees, Bring Cans
11. About This Newsletter
12. How to Reach Cruzio (dial-in or tech support)
1. Online Stores at Cruzio Now Can Deploy PayPal
Cruzio offers ShopSite to our customers at a steep discount
from retail price. It's a tool for creating online stores,
one of the most popular in the country for small-to-medium-size
businesses, and we highly recommend it.
Cruzio recently updated ShopSite from version 6.1 to 6.3.
Many features have been added, but perhaps the most outstanding
is PayPal. Using PayPal, sellers can accept online credit card
payments without needing a merchant account at a bank. That makes
it much easier to get started in the online sales business.
Paypal can be used in all levels of ShopSite, from the
$15.95/month Starter to the $25/mo Manager to the $40/mo
Pro versions. Existing stores can use PayPal if they are upgraded
to a recent version (if you have an older ShopSite store, and
haven't yet upgraded, this is a good reason to do so! There is
a fee for some upgrades.)
For a list of other new features in ShopSite, please see:
http://www.shopsite.com/help/6.3/en-US/new-features.html
To see more general information about ShopSite, check:
http://www.cruzio.com/services/ecommerce/
2. Ecommerce Brown Bag This Thursday
Join Cruzio for a brownbag workshop: "Selling Products Online
Using ShopSite" July 24th, 2003 from 12-1:30pm, at Cruzio,
903 Pacific Avenue in downtown Santa Cruz.
The brownbag will be hosted by one of our most popular speakers,
Cruzio Marketing Director Kathy Bisbee, whose experience ranges from
building online stores, to creating whole Web sites, to troubleshooting
and maintenance. It's a great chance to learn what's involved with
setting up an online store.
Cost for the event is $10, and a Zoccoli's bag lunch is available
for an additional $7. To register, go to www.cruzio.com, or call
the Cruzio events line at 459-6301 ext. 247 and leave your name,
email address, phone number and lunch preference.
3. Cruzio Blocking More Viruses
Cruzio has improved our firewall to stop well-known viruses that
spread via the Web, like the Nimda and Code Red worms, from entering
and exiting our network. That means it's less likely that your
computer will be infected, and less likely that any Cruzio customer
will infect friends' or colleagues' computers. Many thanks to
perspicacious Cruzio engineer Mark for setting up additional virus
protection!
4. Ads in the Bottom of Email
Have you noticed that friends with accounts at large Internet
Service Providers (ISPs) often have advertisements for those
ISPs added to the bottom of their email? Rest assured Cruzio has
no plans to make our customers into vehicles for our advertising.
Your outgoing email contains only the content you place in
it -- we add nothing.
5. Spam? Serious Measures
All Internet providers, large and small, are beset with spam.
Unfortunately it's become part of the business. The longer you've
had your email address and the more you've used it, no matter
who your provider is, the more spam you're likely to get.
Cruzio's spam filter is the best protection we've found to keep
spam out of your mailbox, and we revise and improve it frequently.
Our next improvement will attempt to catch spam which comes in
graphics instead of text (the spammers' latest tactic.) To learn
more about spam and your free spam filter, please see:
http://www.cruzio.com/support/email/junk_mail.html
But no filter blocks 100% of spam. If you have tried filtering,
and still aren't satisfied, you may want to use a new email
address as a last resort. By starting anew, setting up and using
a fresh address carefully, you can maintain an email box which gets
little or no spam. (Please see our May newsletter for more tips
on methods for "Avoiding Spam":
http://www.cruzio.com/about_us/archive/99903.05.20 )
Please call Cruzio Sales if you are at the point where you feel
you must abandon your old address, and remember that all Cruzio
email customers already have 5 extra mailboxes available free of
charge. We will be happy to help you.
6. Mail Filtering Means Be Careful, Some Good Mail Can Be Filtered
Filtering spam is sometimes the only way to keep email usable.
Many of us now filter unwanted mail out of our mailboxes. But
remember, filtering sometimes rejects messages that we wish to
read -- "false positives" -- so it's important to check the
rejected messages, especially if you're expecting important email.
This also holds for friends and colleagues using the spam filters
offered by their Internet providers. Most filters work the same
way: a program guesses what is unwanted email, and puts it into a
filtered mailbox. That means someone else may occasionally miss
email from you, placed mistakenly by their filter into their
"reject" mailbox.
Cruzio Technical Support is getting a small but growing number
of calls about missed messages that are eventually found in the
filtered mailbox. So this is a reminder: if you think you might
have missed a piece of email, try checking your filtered mailbox.
If your friend is missing mail from you, suggest they check their
filtered box!
By the way, it's easy to adjust your Cruzio spam filter to accept
mail from specific people or mailing lists so that you don't miss
their mail again.
7. Cruzio DSL -- Another Sale Coming in August
Although we are just finishing a July DSL sale, Cruzio very
recently received word of a temporary discount in new DSL
circuits starting in August and we will be holding another
DSL sale starting August 1st.
Because the news is so recent (we are subject to the changing
strategies of warring telecommunication giants,) we haven't worked
out price details yet. Please watch our home page, and the next
newsletter, for more information about Cruzio's next DSL
special.
8. Cruzio Projects in the Works
Some interesting ideas and projects we're working on right now,
in various stages of consideration or implementation:
- Spanish services
We've been supporting the Spanish-speaking community
for years with excellent technical support and sales
in Spanish. Last year we hooked up our Cruzio En Espanol
Web site, and we continue expanding. Muchas gracias to
Martin, Jessi, Gershom, Maria, Juana, Ezra, and Mario
for their excellent work.
- PHP/MySQL
Cruzio will be expanding the back-end capabilities of
our Web hosting services so that Web designers can be
more creative and make more useful sites.
- Wireless Internet
We're exploring the possibilities of high-speed
Internet access without telephone wires. We're hoping
to find a technology that's low-cost and doesn't
require climbing on your roof to install. No firm
answers yet (the technology is just emerging,) but we
have a lot of promising leads.
- Coffeeshop Access
We provide many coffeeshops in town with Internet
access for their customers. We hope to increase this
number and continue reaching out to the community with
our monthly coffee shop visits.
- Roaming Numbers
Cruzio is looking into offering more dialup numbers around
the state and/or the country so that people outside Santa
Cruz County (and our customers, if they are traveling)
can log in.
These are just some of the ideas we're working on. If you have
suggestions for new services, or would like to express your thoughts
about what's listed above, please send email to suggest@cruzio.com
(there's also a button for the "Suggestion Box" at the bottom of every
page on our Web site, http://www.cruzio.com -- please feel free to
send suggestions any time!)
9. Buddy Bucks
Recommend us to a friends, family, colleagues: if a new customer
gives us your email address, customer id number, or full name when
they sign up you'll get $10 credit to your account. If two friends
sign up, $20. Three friends, $30. It just goes on and on.
10. Avoid Late Fees, Bring Cans
If you are late on a payment to Cruzio, we will waive the late
fee if you bring 3 cans of food for our Second Harvest Food
Barrel. With this program, Cruzio provides food to local hungry
people all year long -- not just at the holidays.
11. About This Newsletter
Cruzio doesn't like to waste bandwidth with extra email, but we sometimes
have events and announcements that users need to know about. This seems
like the most efficient way to let people know what's happening. Hope
it's helpful. Please email support@cruzio.com with any comments or questions.
By the way, we would love to have a regular, predictable schedule
for this newsletter...but we simply do not send it unless there is real
news enclosed. Thus the haphazard datelines.
12. How to Reach Cruzio (dial-in or tech support)
To reach the Cruzio Information Center, for online technical and
sales information:
http://www.cruzio.com/support
To dial in to Cruzio, set your software to dial one of the numbers
below (note: we've expanded and joined modem pools, so you may be
using another number. If so, don't worry, it still works just fine).
56k: 459-9408
33.6 kbps and under: 459-6230
To call Cruzio:
459-6301............Use this number to check Cruzio's system status,
pay your Cruzio bill, find out more about our hours and location,
or to reach someone in customer service and technical support.
To send email to Cruzio, use one of these addresses:
support@cruzio.com ......for technical support
office@cruzio.com .......for billing and ordering information
Cruzio's location:
903 Pacific Avenue, Suite 101, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Cruzio's hours:
Sales hours: 10am-6pm, Monday through Friday; 10 am - 2 pm Saturday
Technical support: 10-6 pm, Monday through Friday, 10am - 2pm Saturday
System monitoring, including customer-alerted emergencies, 24 hours
per day, 365 days per year (leap years, 366 days)
Thanks very much from Cruzio:
Chris, Peggy, Julianne, Kathy, Mark, Martin, Georgette,
Tapati, Pedro, Brittany, Alec, Stephen, Paul, Gershom,
Jessi, Michael, another Chris, Maria, Ezra, James, Juana,
Krissie, Nikkie, Mike, Mario, Don, Bruce, & our fabulous intern,
Jason (the grownups); Jake, Annika, and Carly (the kids);
Jake, who's 11 years old, tells this riddle:
"Railroad Crossing, Watch Out For Cars -- can you spell
that without any R's?"
The answer, in case you do not have the benefit of frequent
congress with the under-12 crowd, is yes: t-h-a-t.
