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 either.

Has anyone else heard of this?

This would be a huge impact to a variety of users I would expect. No longer could you make use of simple aliases like questions@yourdomain.com to be auto-forwarded to a group of users easily.

Instead the email address would have to be setup with its own account password and login instructions. Then one user would have to manage that account and manually forward to a team of users or figure out some other form of distribution for the emails received.

If you’ve heard of this or have proof that there really is a risk of email hosting servers being tagged as spammers due to alias usage, please let me know.

Post from: EveryJoe

Email Alias / Forwarders A No-No?

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 person. With so many photo sharing services, you might want to send your images there. You could send to a service like this or anywhere else you can think of to send your image.

In order to setup your default email settings to work like this you need to do a couple of things. One you need to be sure and tell Snagit to NOT preview your captures in the editor first. You can access these settings in a variety of ways, but I usually right-click on the Snagit icon in my task tray and modify the settings there.

On a side-note, I found out that it’s impossible to grab a screen shot of the settings window of Snagit itself. Pretty interesting eh?

Post from: EveryJoe

Using Snagit’s Auto-Email Features

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 for each Wave.

When you first sign-in there’s an introduction video from Dr. Wave, which I’ve included above. It’s fun and they did a good job of interacting with the interface based on the position the video displays on your screen.

As I use it more and more and think about the functionality, I’m beginning to wonder how much of the features and functions could be easily migrated and integrated into the Google Chrome OS.

I was imagining my computer desktop being what I see in my Google Wave dashboard of sorts. Communication, video player, document sharing, images, email, instant messaging, video conferencing. It’s all here in Google Wave, what if Google Wave is just a sandbox for them to work out all the kinks for the Google Chrome OS?

What do you think?

Post from: EveryJoe

I’m Surfing the Google Wave (or is it the Google OS?)

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 would absolutely lock Facebook in as an ongoing provider and Internet hub for millions of users every day. Not that they’re having a problem keeping users right now, I just think it would be another great way to entwine themselves with their users even further.

If you had an email address like jasonlbean@facebook.com that would allow you to both send and receive email outside of the closed walls of Facebook, wouldn’t you jump at the chance? Would it replace your @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, @live.com, or maybe even your @gmail.com account?

Post from: EveryJoe

Free Facebook Email Account

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 to their RSS feeds. Then I saw an option to subscribe by email and thought that might be a better option these days.

You see I’m always in my email, but I’m not always in Bloglines. Would it be better to just subscribe by email for everything again? I think to do that I’d need to really think through how I’d organize my email Inbox and folder structure to support that influx of additional email. I think I’m averaging about 300 emails a day right now.

How’s your use of RSS going? Is it still the best method for you to stay current on information? Do you use twitter instead? Have you thought about going back to email as the single point of intake for information?

Post from: EveryJoe

RSS Bankruptcy

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 that be right?

Were there actually that many emails in her sent folder? Surely not.

After scanning through the folder to the end of the list, it was correct. They had copies of emails they had sent from back in early 2006. They said they started working there back then, so they’ve probably kept a copy of every single email they sent.

When I tried to select all the emails older than 2009, the computer said it didn’t have enough memory to delete everything. I ended up having to delete them in chunks, but finally accomplished the task.

I was able to determine that the number of emails wasn’t causing the email issue this person was experiencing, but I still believe deleting all of those emails is still a good move.

One of my more popular posts talks about reversing your email composition sequence. Regardless of your sequence, DO NOT store email like this. I can guarantee you that there’s no logical and valid reason to keep emails in that quantity.

Post from: EveryJoe

After 11,457 Sent Emails Later

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 the same thing. I’ve found by doing this I can usually eliminate more than 50% of my junk mail quickly. Today I started with 286 messages and after these two steps I had it down to about 120 messages left.

Looking at subject lines closer I began to ask myself exactly who’s actually looking and clicking on this stuff? That’s how it works right? If people weren’t clicking on the messages and the links included in them, spammers wouldn’t be doing it right?

Spelling mistakes, lewd subject lines, false hopes, Nigerian money schemes, and now the ever popular Acai berry. Who’s clicking on this stuff? If you’re reading this and you are, STOP IT!

Post from: EveryJoe

Is Spam Really Working… It must be right?

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 because I can send and receive messages quietly.

The irony though is that an actual phone call is the most real-time method of communicating with someone other than face-to-face conversations. It must not be the timing that makes one communication more popular than another method. So what is it?

Are these methods just popular because they’re new and everyone else is doing it? Are we merely communicating with each other as a mass crowd of peer pressured individuals?  What are we looking for in communication through technology? Are we truly interested in exchanging messages and ideas, or are we just doing what allows us to stay connected to the technology we love so much.

I don’t think email is going away, but I’m sure 10 years ago people wouldn’t have looked at the fax machine as becoming as obsolete as it almost is now. What would it take to kill-off email for good? What would take its place?

Telepathy perhaps?

Post from: EveryJoe

Is Email Dying

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 "Sent On" date prior to the Pony Express being in service, it’s more than likely a spam email. Even if it’s a legitimate email from a reliable source, I probably don’t want to see it. When they realize I’m not getting their emails or responding, then we can talk about fixing their time server on their computers.

The same would be true for any date where "Sent On" is in the future of the current date. To me those are obvious issues and could be deleted at the server level. Anyone else agree with me here?

I know you can’t clump emails sent in the wee hours of the morning as always spam, I believe they are frequently from senders you may not want to see. Perhaps these could immediately be tagged as junk and kept for review. In fact, I think some email servers already do this as a first level trigger of potential spam sources.

Post from: EveryJoe

Why Can’t Easy Filters Catch Spam

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 created from the "From" line.

It can depend on your personal preference, sorting by "From" can also be helpful sometimes, especially if you’re looking for a specific address that always seems to get a false positive identification as spam.

Both of these options work far better for me than the default sorting method of "Date".

Post from: EveryJoe

Tips for Quickly Scanning Junk Mail Folders