Posts Tagged ‘email’
March 6th, 2010
Using Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Live Mail or a similar email application? Do you have problems seeing or opening attachments in emails sent from Outlook? Join the club!
Unfortunately some of the non Microsoft Exchange dependant email clients such as Microsoft Live Mail and Thunderbird are unable to process (open) attachments sent from Outlook via Exchange in Rich Text format (RTF). What Outlook/Exchange does is create a dat file which includes instructions with the outgoing email regarding the formatting of RTF emails and attachments. Unfortunately some of the widely used and awesome non-Outlook email clients are unable to ‘understand’ the dat file and therefore don’t show the attachments or formatting on these unprocessed emails (in Thunderbird you’ll see the attached dat file however in Windows Live Mail the application will tell you that there is an attachment however you won’t see or be able to open it).
Unfortunately your only solution is to either use an email client which accepts the dat file from Outlook/Exchange or ask the Outlook sender to send emails in plain text or html formats (both Thunderbird and Microsoft Live Mail work very well with plain text and HTML emails).
P.S. I have tested this on Google Gmail (Online), IBM Lotus Notes, Hotmail.com (Online), Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Live Mail. Gmail, IBM Lotus Notes, Hotmail.com and Microsoft Outlook are able to process and display the RTF messages and attachments with no problem whereas Microsoft Live Mail and Thunderbird are unable to process the messages or attachments correctly.
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January 26th, 2010
Back in 2006 I started using an email account with the free email provider icmail.net. I always used the icmail.net account as a secondary email address and stopped accessing the email about two years ago.
I recently had a need to access my icmail.net email messages however found that icmail.net is extremely unstable these days and I couldn’t login to my email account from www.icmail.net using Internet Explorer 8 nor Firefox. After much searching on Bing and Google and then some experimentation I have found that connecting via an email reader such as Windows Live Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird does the trick (I’m sure that access via Gmail, Hotmail etc. will also work although I haven’t tried).
Here are the necessary settings to extract your email from icmail.net:
Incoming Mail Details:
Type: POP3
Port Number: 110
Enable ‘Logon using Clear Text Authentication’
Incoming Mail Server: mail.icmail.net
Email Username: this is your email address without the @icmail.net e.g. if your email address is smooth.operator@icmail.net then your username is smooth.operator
Outgoing Mail Details:
Just copy the settings from an existing account i.e. don’t try to send through icmail.net but rather send using an exisitng account that you send through.
Diagrams of icmail.net Email Settings (POP3)
In the pictures below, getting email from icmail.com using POP3 with Windows Live Mail is shown:
1. The first property screen when adding a new email account for icmail.net in Windows Live Mail:
2. Ensure you have ‘My incoming mail server is a POP3 server’ entered and mail.icmail.net entered in the ‘Incoming Mail (POP3)’ field. For the ‘Outgoing mail (SMTP)’ settings just copy the settings from any other email account set up (you don’t need to send through icmail.net). The other necessary details are per the picture below (obviously the ‘E-mail username’ with be your unique icmail.net username):
3. The ‘Incoming mail (POP3)’ port number is 110:
Good luck!
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November 16th, 2009
If you have ever put your email address on your website you will know how quickly spambots get your email address and email huge numbers of messages to your address. There are various scripts (mostly javascript) available which attempt to fool spambots (i.e. hide your email address from spammers) however these scripts are largely ineffective. Spamming is very big business for those involved therefore employing a team of developers to counter masking scripts makes a lot of sense and this is exactly why email masking scripts generally don’t work.
Luckily there is a very good and effective solution. reCAPTCHA Mailhide is provided free of charge by the same team who provide the hundreds of millions of reCAPTCHAs served each day. Most of us have seen and used reCAPTCHA when filling in online forms or subscribing to content. reCAPTCHA helps to distinguish between humans and robots as the text provided in the CAPTCHA is unreadable by robots (actually Optical Character Recognition / OCR software).
reCAPTCHA Mailhide is effective in that your email address is masked (hidden) and only shown when the CAPTCHA is entered correctly i.e. robots are unlikely to be able to read the two words provided in the CAPTCHA. All you need to do is go to the reCAPTCHA Mailhide website and enter your email address. You’ll then be given some HTML to place on your website which will mask your email address until the CAPTCHA is correctly entered.
Below is my email address as displayed using the code provided by reCAPTCHA. Click on the address to reveal the CAPTCHA which must be correctly entered before my email address is shown:
g…@eckstein.id.au
P.S. As you may have noticed I disclose my email address in the footer of this Site without masking it. I am a firm believer in microformats and my email address is part of an hcard. I use two spam filters to weed out junk mail however still manage to get a number of lottery scams and other unsolicited email.
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Tags: CAPTCHA, email, email address, hcard, html, junk mail, lottery scams, microformats, OCR, reCAPTCHA, spam, spam filters, spammers, spamming, unsolicited email | 
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July 2nd, 2009
Google has very many products both in development and actively being used by huge numbers of people and organizations. Google is mostly known for Internet search however one product used by tens of thousands of organizations (as well as Google’s Gmail) is Postini which provides ‘email security’.
Yesterday,‘Q2 2009 Spam trends’ information was posted by Google. The magnitude and various types of spam are described in the post and it is well worth reading. Publishing the information as contained within the Google post makes people more aware of what to look in relation to email spam so thanks to Google for raising spam awareness.
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May 29th, 2009
Almost everyone is affected with email spam. Spam detectors / email filters have improved substantially over the past few years but unfortunately the skills of the spammers have also improved. It is not just businesses involved in the fight against spammers but also governments; The Australian government, for example, is taking spamming and the negative consequences very seriously.
What? Spam isn’t exclusive to Email?
Beyond email there is another very relevant form of spamming; comment and trackback spamming. This form of spamming affects the millions of blogs on the Internet. Most blog posts are open for comments. This means that people are able to comment on the content of the post (look below this post and post a comment if you so wish). Whether using Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, TypePad, Blogger or Read the rest of this entry »