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

I’ve been hearing a variety of discussions lately about changes in technology and the changes that are coming around as part of generational changes. I’ve heard from numerous parents that tell me their kids don’t email anymore. They communicate via text messages and Facebook and twitter, but email is old school and too slow.

Email too slow?
Is email too slow? I don’t really think so, but it’s clearly not instant in the timing that’s provided by twitter and text messages. I find myself texting messages to people more lately instead of making a phone call. One of those reasons is …read more

I’m hitting a little bit of a theme with my posts. Can you tell it’s that time of the week when I go through my spam filters and check for false positives? That’s what I’m doing and I’m reminded of something that to me is extremely easy to identify. I’m not sure why messages fitting this scenario aren’t immediately flagged as spam and never seen by the user.

I don’t know how many times I’ve gone into my email and noticed messages with a weird date and time. In my opinion if an email is sent to me with a …read more

I manage a number of email addresses on a daily basis. Some of the servers have great spam checking filters while others get legitimate emails caught in the filters by mistake on a regular basis. Regardless of the filters I setup or whitelist and blacklists I edit and update, I find myself scanning my junk mail folder for some services at least weekly.

I will regularly sort my Junk Mail folders by "Subject" which for me makes it very easy to scan through subject lines that are usually very similar and the only difference is the spoofed email address they’ve …read more