Category Archives: Email
Review of Outlook Tools
There are plenty of Outlook utilities and plug-ins, but most of them are single purpose and a lot of them are just not any good. I cannot tell you how many of them I’ve installed only to minutes later uninstall.
I’m happy to say that I cannot say that about Outlook Tools. Not only does it cover a range of functions all in one nice interface, but it is one of the few that hasn’t given me more headaches than the problems I was trying to solve.
If you are like me, you probably:
- Cannot remember where Outlook puts its data files (seems to change every version, and even on the same version for the smallest of reasons).
- Cannot remember where the ScanPST utility is on the hard drive (why don’t they provide a shortcut to it in the Start menu?).
- Cannot remember the commandline switch to clean out reminders.
- Get really annoyed at blocked attachments.
This, and more, can be addressed with this tool. It is donationware, so if any of the above describe you, I’d encourage you to try it out.
Backup Considerations 1: Using IMAP with Outlook 2010
There is no doubt that Microsoft Outlook has had an impact upon the average business user. Yes, there are other alternatives, but Outlook is feature rich and really is more of a PIM than an email client. You can get your email messages, calendar, contacts and notes all under one roof. Outlook 2010 brings even more improvements to the fore with the ability to remove duplicate emails and its handling of IMAP.
However, Outlook 2010, as does its predecessors, does not come without warts. Knowing them beforehand can save a lot of frustration (or money if you decide to go with another client).
Why Internet Message Access Protocol
FINALLY! You Can Disable Gmail Contact Autosave
Little has annoyed me more than Contact cancer. The additions of contacts that you may never ever have the need to get ahold of again has made contacts barely usable. I’m just glad that my business account is on another server using POP3, otherwise, I’d have to find some other way to organize contacts.
Fortunately, Google now allows you to turn this “feature” off. Gigaom has written a nice little write-up “Gmail Contacts Auto-Save Can Now Be Disabled” that will guide you through it.
Add-Ins I Need: Forgotten Attachment Detector
The How-To-Geek posted “Never Forget to Send an Email Attachment in Outlook”, which is something I’ve done way too many times. I think I’m going to have to give this a try.
Spamgourmet – A Different Approach to Fighting Spam
I’m still amazed whenever I run into someone who seems tech savvy but has never heard of disposable addresses. AT&T Yahoo! Mail, for instance, offers an excellent service where you can create a disposable email address to give to companies while shopping online. You give them what is essentially a made-up email address that gets redirected to your real email address so that they don’t know what your real address is. Then, if you start receiving spam from them, you can delete the address without affecting email from your regular contacts.
Compare this to the usual approaches of fighting spam. No matter how you slice it and dice it, almost all, if not all, of them boil down to filtering out traffic. The only real question is what to filter and where. Some examples:
- Outlook has a junk email filter that filters on sender or sender domain. The problem with that is most often the sender’s email address is forged, so this type of filter is next to worthless.
- Some routers can drop messages from known spam domains, and they check other more reliable fields in the messages, but even this is somewhat reactive.
- Other filters work on keywords, which is more proactive but highly prone to error. For example, filtering on “breast” may cut down your pornographic spam, but it will also filter out messages about breast cancer.
Disposable addresses, on the other hand, can cut down on your spam significantly while not affecting your usual email. It does take a little work, but in my opinion it reduces wasted time in the long run by not tying up your time deleting unwanted messages.
Implementations
There are various implementations out there, but the most well known probably are AT&T Yahoo! Mail’s disposable address scheme and Spamgourmet.com. They work basically the same way but come at it from different directions.
The AT&T scheme comes with their Internet accounts. So, I don’t believe you can just set up a free Yahoo! email account and have it work. If that is wrong, someone please let me know. You give a particular merchant your disposable email address, and if they start spamming you, you go online and remove it. Pretty simple, really. Do be aware also that it is tied to your real email address, so if you change to Gmail or some other service, you cannot take the disposable address with you.
Spamgourmet.com gets its name from “eating” emails. You give a merchant a disposable address, and if they start spamming you, you don’t have to do anything at all. It will start dropping emails automatically after a preset number that you can set. However, if you do not want it to drop emails, you must go online and tell it not to.
What this means is if you go on vacation for 2 weeks, an AT&T disposable address will still collect email while you are gone until you get back to delete it while Spamgourmet’s implementation will start dropping them into the bit bucket after a set number of emails. However, that might also mean it will start dropping wanted emails for addresses you forgot to reset online. In this world awash with spam, though, it is much more likely you will remember once you see the count (which is included in the Subject line) decrease to an uncomfortable level.
Best of all, Spamgourmet is free and transportable. It isn’t tied to an ISP, so you can change your “protected address” (your real email address) at any time.
How It Works
If you are on AT&T, you create an “address stub”. That address stub is tied to your account username, which is also your real email address. So, if I choose “spambait” as my stub, it would be tied to my AT&T account and no one else would be able to use that stub.
Now, let’s say I want to shop at Walmart online. I go to my AT&T email options (warning: AT&T is constantly changing its interface, so I apologize for using generalities here), and I set up a new disposable email address “spambait-macys@yahoo.com”. Notice that it begins with a stub and a dash, followed by an arbitrary combination of alphanumeric characters and ends with “@yahoo.com”. It is recommended that the arbitrary portion of the address somehow relates to the merchant so that you easily recognize who has given out your address to someone. Also note that even if I am on an SBC, Ameritech or AT&T address for my real email address, the actual address is still supplied by Yahoo!.
OK, so all’s well, right? Oops! Spam! Now what? Just go back online to your email account, go to your options for spam and remove the address. Done!
Spamgourmet is very similar, but it uses your account username in place of the stub. However, it reverses the order and uses a period or dot (‘.’) to separate the two. So, if I choose the username “spambait”, then I would simply give Macy’s my disposable address of “macys.spambait@spamgourment.com”. Notice I do not have to go online to create it. This is a neat feature, as you can give those silly cashier’s a real but disposable email address whenever they want you to sign up for their silly rewards cards.
Spamgourmet is also very flexible in that you can set the number of times to use a specific disposable address without going online. I advise you to go online and set the default number of emails yourself, as I found the default to be too low myself. However, there may be an exception. Well, you can also specify “macys.20.spambait@spamgourmet.com” and it will set the email limit to 20 for that address (20 is the maximum, btw). However, if you want to change any address to a “trusted sender”, then you will need to go online and set that yourself.
Kill Spam Today
All in all, both services are useful, but I find Spamgourmet to be the most flexible. Give it a try. They’ve been fighting spam for 9 years now, and I have found it to be a very useful service.
