gHacks technology news » mail

Yahoo Mail Integrates Drop.io To Support 100 Megabyte Attachments

Martin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:22:13 +0000

Big companies are not only currently competing with each other in the search engine niche but also when it comes to webmail. It’s actually the same three companies – that is Yahoo, Microsoft and Google – that provide both search engine and web mail services. One of the latest areas of interest for web mail providers is the attachment size race. Google Mail recently raised the maximum attachment size for Gmail users to 20 Megabytes which was shortly thereafter matched by Yahoo Mail.

Yahoo Mail today announced the integration of the Drop.io service as an application into Yahoo Mail. Drop.io is a file hosting service on the Internet that can be used to upload and share files on the Internet.

The Yahoo Mail solution adds a one-click solution to upload attachments with a size of up to 100 Megabytes. Users who receive emails with attachments that have been uploaded this way will see a link that is pointing to the uploaded files. Recipients have then options to view online or download the attachments to their computer system.

Yahoo Mail users who do not see Applications in the left sidebar need to visit the Yahoo Mail Applications page to enable them. The Attach Large Files is then available from the applications menu. The feature makes it a bit easier and more comfortable for users to share larger files although this method can be easily replicated manually by users who use different online email services like Gmail.

Tags: drop.io, Email, email-attachments, mail, yahoo mail, yahoo mail applications, yahoo mail attachments, yahoo mail drop.io

Tinymail Email Protection

Martin — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:41:45 +0000

Do not publish your email on the Internet. That’s is one of the first lessons to learn when you start using the Internet. Once your email has been cached by a search engine it will sooner or later be discovered by bots that crawl the Internet for this valuable information.

All kinds of protection have been created to prevent this from happening. Some suggest using images instead of text, many obscure their emails in the hope that the bots will not be able to identify the right one and others are not publishing their mail at all.

Tinymail steps in and tries to be a barrier between your email address and the Internet. It does that by linking your email address to a Tinymail webpage which becomes your profile page. Instead of publishing your email on the web you embed the Tinymail code that is created after linking the email to a Tinymail email address.

The Tinymail code is showing part of the real email address and a link to the profile page which is only accessible if the user enters a captcha. If he does that he can take a look at the real email.

The idea itself is nice but it has two flaws in my opinion.The first is that it adds another step to the contact process. That might not be a problem if you desperately are trying to contact one but it is definitely a problem for other forms like providing feedback on a product. Users might give up in frustration and prefer to spend their time elsewhere.

The second is the captcha protection. Captchas have been broken in the past and once it is broken it could become a haven for a email collector who stored all those Tinymail emails in a database waiting for the right moment to decipher them all.

It would be nice if the email link could be deleted again after usage for a certain time, maybe even let it run out automatically after x days where x is a figure that the user can define in the options.

Tags: Email, email protection, email spam, email websites, mail, spam, tinymail

Quickly check mails without downloading them

Martin — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:17:18 +0000

Retrieving all mail headers from the emails that are currently stored on the mail server can be necessary for several reasons. The first is that it is possible to delete mails without having to retrieve them completely. This can come in handy if mails with huge attachments are blocking the retrieval of other emails which can be nerve wrecking especially on slower connections. Very helpful if you use your mobile phone to go online with your notebook and pay by the amount of Kilobytes that have been downloaded.

A second application would be to fight spam before it is retrieved and downloaded to a local PC. Pal Mail is a tiny secure application that can retrieve the mail headers of an unlimited number of accounts with the main option to delete mails right on the mail server. Retrieved are the mail headers and the messages but not the attachments of the mails.

Every mail can be marked for deletion which effectively deleted it from the mails server. The consequence is that your primary mail client will not retrieve the messages that have been deleted before.

Pal Mail is a standalone application that does not require any dlls or other files to run. This makes it an idea software for a portable device.

Tags: Email, mail, mail server, pal mail, software, Windows

Mails sent with BCC did not reach recipients ?

Martin — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 14:01:27 +0000

Emails can be send to several recipients at once by using the CC or BCC fields which send a Carbon Copy or Blind Carbon Copy to the recipients listed there. Using the BCC option is useful if you want that every recipient is only able to see his email address and not the email of everyone else who receives a message.

This is also a privacy issues and some will be really angry if you do not send mails to multiple recipients this way. It happens however that not all messages receive the recipient listed in the BCC field. This can be the case if you did not add a recipient in the TO field as well.

Some mail programs and filters block messages that have no TO recipient. The easiest workaround is to add your own email address to the to field which should take care of all the mail filters and programs that filter the mails otherwise.

Tags: bcc, Email, mail

Retrieve Emails from other accounts with gmail

Martin — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 07:26:06 +0000

There have been two drastic changes to Googles Gmail service in the last week. The first will probably make most users happy, gmail is now available to everyone. That is right, no more begging for invites, just visit the gmail site and signup for an account if you need one.

The second change might be interesting to users that have to work on different computers. Gmail now offers the option to access mail accounts that support the pop3 protocol from within gmail making it easy to use gmail as the central platform for all your incoming and outgoing emails. This new feature does not seem to be available to anyone yet, just check your settings in the gmail account and click on accounts.

If the option Get mail from other accounts: is visible you can add other accounts to your gmail account. I’m however not really convinced to use gmail for my mail consolidation and administration. I have the same objections when it comes to online storage devices.

I do not trust companies enough to have important mails or files stored online on a server. There is always the possibility of misuse and I don’t want to take any risks. Maybe I’m a little paranoid about this whole thing.

Still, I will continue to download my mails from gmail using Thunderbird and I’m happy with the solution. Mainly because I only work on one computer. I can see the advantages if you work on more than one in different locations.

Tags: account, gmail, gmail-signup, google-mail, mail, online, pop3

Reduce the folder size of Thunderbird

Martin — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 19:03:02 +0000

I experienced some troubles installing files on my system and discovered that my partition with Windows was having only 50 megabytes of free space. This was astonishing because it is a 10 gigabyte partition with only Windows and some tools that occupy no more than 3 gigabytes. A quick check revealed that the mail folders from Thunderbird would occupy more than 3 gigabytes of space in the application data folder on the partition.

The folder size of my Inbox for instance with 100 mails was more than 500 megabytes which could not be true at all. I remembered that Thunderbird did not delete the mails even though they would have been deleted in the trash. This was the cause for the discrepancy between the meager amount of mails and their size and the big huge mail folders on my c: partition.

The solution nevertheless is pretty easy. All that needs to be done is compact the folders which removes all deleted mails immediately. I was able to reduce the folder size of my Thunderbird folders from more than 3 gigabytes to 300.000 kilobytes freeing up valuable disk space on my main partition.

Just right-click a folder and select compact this folder to remove all deleted emails and keep only emails that are visible in Thunderbird. You could check the Disk Space option to automatically compact folders if that saves a defined amount of kilobytes. (You find the option under the advanced tab and offline & disk space tab in the Thunderbird options).

Tags: compact-mail, compress-mail, folder-size, mail, mail-folder, mozilla, reduce, thunderbird

Recover deleted or corrupted Thunderbird messages

Martin — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 12:02:50 +0000

It sometimes happens that I delete a mail by accident because it does look like spam or a message that I do not longer need. Thunderbird does not display that message anymore if it is completely deleted from the mail client. Unknown to many Thunderbird does not delete the messages but flags them only which means it is relatively easy to recover corrupted or deleted mails. This method only works if you have not compressed the mail folders because compressing removes deleted messages from the mail files.

Open the Thunderbird Application Data folder which is located in your document and settings folder in Windows. Select the appropriate Thunderbird profile if there is more than one and click on Mail in that profile. You get a listing of all your email addresses. If you setup Firefox to have different mail folders for every email address you have to click in the folder of the email address that received (or send) the message. Otherwise Local Folders is the way to go.

The important files are those without extensions (Trash, Sent, Inbox ..) – locate the one that contained the mail(s) that you have deleted or are corrupted (do not show up anymore). Open it in an text editor, you could use notepad2 for instance for this purpose. Some folders might be rather big so choose a text editor that can handle large files. Thunderbird should be closed completely while editing those files.

All mails are basically stored in that file. The important part for us are the lines X-Mozilla-Status which defines a certain state of a message such as Read, Unread or Deleted. Search for the message(s) that you want to recover and edit the X-Mozilla-Status: XXXX line into X-Mozilla-Status: 0000 for unread or X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 for read messages.

Recovered messages will appear at the bottom of the folder and should be there after you startup Thunderbird for the next time. You sometimes have to delete the .msf file to make this work. If you edited the file Trash you would delete the file Trash.msf afterwards if the mails do not re-appear after a new start of Thunderbird.

source (and additional information)

Tags: delete, Email, mail, recover, thunderbird, trash, unread, x mozilla status

Back Up Your Gmail

Martin — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 06:52:09 +0000

Recently some news emerged on the internet that some gmail users lost some or even all of their mails that have been in that account. There is no obvious way to backup the mail that exists in your gmail account. You could probably forward the important mail to another account but this solution is not really that practicable.

Chris Brogan described another method which should be fine for most purposes. He suggests to create a pop3 account for gmail to be able to download all mail that is new in that account. Once downloaded you could backup the mailbox file and schedule the mail client that way that it is downloading mails from gmail regulary to reduce the chance that you lose mail. The steps to backup your gmail mails in detail:

Create a new pop3 account for gmail

Create a new acount in your mail client

Download the mail from your gmail account

Locate the gmail mailbox file and back it up

It is probably not necessary to backup the gmail mailbox locally. You could create a backup of all of your mail profiles instead which would be a better way I think.

Tags: backup, gmail, Google, mail, pop3

Change the way Thunderbird handles quotes

Martin — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 11:16:33 +0000

Thunderbird changed the way quotes are handled. If you have been using a different email program before you may found the way Thunderbird handles quotes irritating. Take a look at the screenshots below and you know what I mean. The first shows the general way most email programs handle quotes. The second shows the way Thunderbird handles quotes usually.

The Thunderbird add-on Quote Colors is able to change the way Thunderbird handles quotes. You can change the way back to the default way quotes are handled or change it into the way that the picture below shows.

So, if you do not like the way Thunderbird handles the way quotes are displayed you can change it easily by installing the Quote Colors add-on.

Tags: add on, e mail, Email, firefox-extensions, mail, mozilla, quotes, thunderbird

Get Notified in Firefox about new mail

Martin — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 09:55:59 +0000

I don’t keep Thunderbird, my email client, open all the time and don’t like to visit websites of webmail accounts as well. It is a pain in the *** to visit gmail, hotmail or yahoo mail to see if there is new mail in the inbox. I was using the gmail firefox extension to get a notification if new mail did arrive.

Mailman is a firefox extension that is able to get that information from gmail, hotmail, yahoo and pop3. Mailman adds itself to a toolbar and displays a message if new mail did arrive. You will have to add your login details to the extension to be able to do so. I do understand that this raises security concerns but this is the trade off.

Mailman has some additional nice features. Once you see that new mail did arrive you may click on the link and will be directly taken to the mail account using an auto-login feature. Right, you do not need to login a second time. You may define the update frequency and add sound alerts if you like. (I would never use sound alerts because I would hear a constant sound then, with all the spam that is flodding my mail boxes.

It also offers a search function to search your accounts from within firefox. Some users seemed to have problems with hotmail. I do not have a hotmail account, maybe someone else could verify if problems exist ?

Tags: firefox, firefox-extensions, gmail, hotmail, mail, mozilla, pop3, thunderbird, yahoo

Fix for missing mails in Thunderbird

Martin — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 21:57:03 +0000

The current version of Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 has a major bug that causes some mail that is downloaded from the server to disappear. Thundebird displays the number of new mails that is in a folder but if you click in that folder the new mail that should be there is not. The first time I have read about this message was on the mozillazine forum where a user named soulek described the problem that he encountered after upgrading to Thunderbird 1.5.0.8.

One solution would be to downgrade Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 to a prior version which should fix this immediately. A better solution would be to download a nightly build of thunderbird and use that. The bug was fixed and all coming nightly builds should contain the bug fix as well. This nightly build for example contains the fix.

Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 which will contain the fix will most likely be released sometime in December which means the only way to fix this bug now is to either downgrade or install a nightly build.

You will have to do the following no matter if you downgrade or install a nightly build:

Backup your Thunderbird profile folder which is located C:\Documents and Settings\your username\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\random.default
Uninstall Thunderbird.
Go to the Thunderbird profile folder and delete every msf file. Don’t worry,Thunderbird will rebuild them once you click on such a folder in Thunderbird.
Install Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 or the nightly build

The missing mail should appear. Everything seems to have reverted back to normal for me using the above nightly build. Let me know if you encounter errors or if this method is not working for you.

Tags: 1.5.0.8, downgrade, firefox, mail, mail-client, missing-mail, mozilla, nightly-build, software, thunderbird

How to get Yahoo Mail Beta

Martin — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 17:55:02 +0000

To get Yahoo Mail Beta, just switch your content preference to Germany, Frence or UK. Then you will be asked if you want to join the beta when you log into your Yahoo Mail. Say yes, and join the beta. Then from the options menu, change your content preference what it was before. Then go to Yahoo Mail again. You should still see Yahoo Beta. If you don’t see it, go to options and click “Try Beta�? button. That’s all.

How to change your content preference:
* log in to Yahoo Mail
* click Options
* select Account information from the left panel
* go to Member Information, General Preferences, Preferred Content
* select, for example, Yahoo UK
* click Finished
* go to Yahoo Mail
* you’ll see a page that says “It’s the New Yahoo! Mail Beta… and you’re invited.”
* click on “Try Beta Now”.

If you need to enter a valid zip here are some for Germany: 45130 Essen, 12159 Berlin, 16356 Berlin

[tags]yahoo beta, yahoo, mail, mail account, yahoo mail beta[/tags]

Tags: Email, mail, yahoo mail

gHacks technology news » mail

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