This weekend I ended up jumping into my role of alpha-geek for my family and extended family. My mom uses Mozilla Thunderbird for her POP3 email client and she was having problems getting new email to download into her Inbox.

When I fired up LogMeIn to try and figure out what was happening with her machine, I got a little bit of a surprise.
Initially, I was impressed that she had nicely arranged her email into a variety of different folders. Then I became aware of the sheer number of folders that she had setup. I’m guessing there were about 40+ folders …read more

Have you ever wondered what it was exactly that got so much email coming into your Inbox? Was it that newsletter you signed up for years ago? Or was it the order you placed on that less than stellar website?

The idea of having a disposable email address isn’t anything really new. To some degree setting up an account on one of the free services would provide you that much. However, if you have your own domain you can do something a little better. You can start using email aliases/forwarders to get an idea of where the junk mail is coming …read more

I just received an automated email from a web service that was warning me about just tweeting my email address in a recent tweet to a friend. I knew it was something I didn’t really want to do, but I wasn’t sure of a way to really share my email address via twitter without opening it up to be harvested by potential spammers.

The Emails @ Risk website provides an option to save your email address as an image that you can share with other people on websites. That in and of itself is easy enough to do, but you can …read more

I received an email today from a hosting company that one of my clients uses saying that they were no longer going to allow usage of email aliases anymore. In the email they stated that the usage of the aliases may cause their servers to be listed as spammers.

I’ve never heard of this being an issue with servers, so it was a bit of a surprise for me. I’ve been using and recommending using email aliases and forwarders for years. I’ve never read anything else about using them causing spam or causing the email servers to be listed as spammers …read more

I expanded my knowledge and use of Snagit this weekend as I was helping someone else try to figure out a solution to one of their own computer problems. Did you know that Snagit has the ability to automatically send your screen capture to a specified email address?

Let’s say you want to automatically email some screen captures to a friend in a series of steps or events. You can specify all your basic email settings to be pre-populated in your default email program.

Recipient Name
Recipient Email
Message Subject
Message Text

You may wonder the types of situations you’d want to always email the same …read more

I finally got my Google Wave invite and I’m already playing around with the interface. It’s kind of bad timing because I’ve got lots of stuff to do this evening, which didn’t include playing around with Google Wave. I like what I’m seeing so far.
As I play around with it I’m remembering the really long video I watched when I first heard about it, so the interface is sort of familiar. The basic concept imitates what we’re using to seeing in our email interfaces. A listing for folders and inbox type stuff, our contacts, message box and then a preview …read more

If I were Mark Zuckerberg, the first thing I’d do is spend some money and buy a bunch of cool stuff. Next, I’d start offering free Facebook email accounts to users. How interested would you be in a Facebook email address?

Facebook continues to go strong. Everyone is getting used to and familiar with the interface changes for the most part and things seem to be settling down. There’s part of me though that still thinks Facebook is at risk of losing their totally cool status and being replaced by something else.
I think if Facebook offered email addresses to users it …read more

I know that RSS has made it extremely easy to stay updated on what’s new and happening on all of my favorite websites. My challenge is that I haven’t kept up-to-date on my RSS subscriptions. I’m currently looking at an updated feeds list of 5 figures. Yep! Over 10,000 unread items.

My chosen RSS reader has been Bloglines pretty much since the beginning. I probably tried one or two other ones before landing with Bloglines, but I can’t even remember what the name of them even were.
As I was working through some new sources of information this evening, I started subscribing …read more

Working onsite with a client today and had one of their staff members ask me if I could help them with an error they were experiencing with our application. For some reason they were experiencing an error when trying to send an email through the application.

The error message said something about checking the Sent folder in Outlook to confirm whether or not the email was sent successfully. By chance the user had her email sent folder view set to show the number of total items in the folder displayed at the top of the view. I noticed the number 11,467.
Could …read more

Taking care of one of my regular Monday morning routines. Doing a quick scan of my email Junk Mail folders and trying to figure out if there’s anything in there important. A very rarely get false positives in my spam filters, but every now and then it does happen so I’ve got to scan quickly.

As I’m scanning I usually do a couple of things to make legitimate messages pop-out a little bit from the rest of the junk in the folders. I’ll sort by name first and quickly delete patterns of emails, then switch to sorting by subject and do …read more