I read about this tip yesterday at Digital Inspiration and when I woke up today I saw that Lifehacker wrote about it as well. The tip mainly stated that users who signed up for Gmail would not get one but two mail addresses: user@gmail.com and user@googlemail.com. The suggestion was to give on out to friends and use the other for all the other signups and conversations on the Internet.
Mails are sorted chronologically in Thunderbird by default but they are not grouped. Grouped means special folders for mails that arrived today, yesterday, last week, two weeks ago and old mail. This way of sorting mails is incredibly helpful for a better overview in my opinion.
A friend of mine called me the other day. He had troubles with a mail in Windows Mail running Windows Vista 32-bit. The mail was sort of stuck in the outbox of Windows Mail. He was not able to delete or send the email which was very unfortunate. He was prompted at every exit of Windows Mail that there was unsent mail and he was getting desperate.
If you have been a heavy contact book user you know the dread of mass entering people. You need to copy paste their numbers, email addresses, and worst of all, pictures! Personally […]
I just found a great Firefox extension while browsing Lifehacker, a small addon that will add a bar in place of the default, quite unuseful bar, and let you access features in […]
While taking my daily look at Stuff for Getting Things done, I stumbled upon an article about putting the Outlook calendar on your desktop. In fact, as I looked deeper into the […]
David Ascher has published a Thunderbird 3 Planning mail where he details so called high level points and a rough road map for Thunderbird 3. The main goal is to publish a public milestone build of Thunderbird 3 in 2008, with alpha builds in the first quarter, beta builds without calendering in Q2, beta builds with calendering in Q3 and widely useful builds in Q4, subject to change of course depending on development progress.
Spammers user thousands of computers to send spam mails, why should not thousands of users use the same technique to combat spam effectively ? That's the major idea behind a collaborative spam filter that not only learns from your input but also from the input of other users that use the same product.
I think we all have faced a situation before where we wanted to know if an email was read by a recipient. Did he / she receive the mail, was the email read ? You can't know for sure even if you added read / write notifications to the email because most email programs ask the user about those. There is no sure way to notification at all if the recipient is cautious, most are not on the other hand and these tricks will work most of the time.
I received an email after publishing the article about YPOPS that made it possible with all email clients to retrieve and send Yahoo Mail emails. If you are a Thunderbird user you might find the Webmail extension for Thunderbird a better choice. It adds support for more than just one webmailer. You get support for Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Lycos, Mail.com, Aol and Libero. By default the webmail extension and at least one additional component has to be installed to add webmailer support.
The free Yahoo Mail service is not offering Pop3 access to your mails. Pop3 access means that you can use a desktop email client like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird to access your Yahoo Mail account instead of having to use the Yahoo website. Only Yahoo Mail Plus, which costs $19.99 a year is offering Pop3 access. There are however other ways and I'm going to show you how you can access your Yahoo Mail account with desktop email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird without having to upgrade or pay for a software.
Richard from Windows Observer send me a download link for Xobni, a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that extends the functionality tremendously. I'm not using Microsoft Outlook anymore since I started using Thunderbird and quit my day job where they forced me to use it. I still think that this an interesting plugin that should be mentioned here at Ghacks.
The problem that Thunderbird is always selecting the next message in line after deleting or moving the previous one has bothered me for some time. It happened more than once that a spam mail was selected and read that way which I did not want to happen obviously.
Kurt mentioned in Daniel's PayPal phishing article how he dealt with phishing and that got me thinking about the easiest way to defeat phishing for certain accounts. The answer is virtual mail accounts. I always thought about virtual mail accounts as a way to stop spam and find out which website or service sells your email but it can also be used to defeat phishing.
You might have come upon the term Spicebird if you are following tech blogs or are a regular Digg and Del.icio.us user. Spicebird is an open-source platform for collaboration, it features an integrated email client, calendar and instant messenger in the first stage but will have additional features that are planned for Spicebird 1.0.
Let me narrate a story to you. A story of someone who has an Gmail account and a domain registered to his name. This someone checks his Gmail account regularly and visits other sites afterwards. It is so convenient to stay logged in at Gmail in case you want to check again. Maybe Gmail is open all the time in another tab for even further comfort.
Mails that have been sent to you in error can be forwarded in Thunderbird to the correct recipient of the email. This is happening regularly in companies for example. The forwarded message however does not look like the original one because it normally has the mail header attached to it. This looks pretty ugly and is not needed most of the times.
How many mail accounts do you have ? Last time I counted them I had ten. Ten private and business accounts at various webmailers and servers. Ever since then I was looking for a solution to backup all my mail accounts in one go which would include the possibility to place them in a secure location such as a CD or DVD.
If you still have an old Hotmail account that you use regularly you might be relieved to know that there is a way to update or move all of the mails from that account into another software. Well, another software is not the right term, you can move them into Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 and from there into any other mail account such as Gmail, Thunderbird or Yahoo Mail.
The problem with the net is that there isn't a sure-fire way to ensure that you will actually have access to it anywhere. If you have Wi-fi you are quite well of, but of course only near cities and towns. Even then, if you find hotspots you're fine, but otherwise no internet for you.
I introduced a Thunderbird extension to remove duplicate mails yesterday and I want to continue today by writing about a Thunderbird extension that checks for duplicates in the Thunderbird address book. The add-on handles one address book at the time currently which is a little unfortunate but the author promises to deliver the possibility to check all existing address books in a future version.
Duplicate mails can be a problem in the most advanced email applications. It does not matter if you use Outlook, Thunderbird or a self coded mail program, duplicate mails can be a problem in all of them. This can happen for instance if you merge folders in the mail program or if a server or download error has the result that the mails are downloaded twice from the mail server.
Thunderbird portable is the portable version of Thunderbird, it does not require an installation which makes it an ideal tool for USB sticks and removable storage devices. I'm using Thunderbird on my desktop computer and decided that I wanted to use Thunderbird Portable on my USB drive to be able to check mails when on the road.
OlFix is a tool that tries to repair several problems that users can encounter using Microsoft Outlook. The program is portable and does not require an installation, it should work with all versions of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. Its main features are that it can repair Outlook profiles, repair contact links, extend reminder folders, delete search folders, change message classes, find duplicates, set file extensions, start several Outlook repair command line options, repair the inbox and automatically find and delete extend.dat.
Drag and Drop is probably the more comfortable way to move emails around but keyboard shortcuts can speed up the process tremendously. That is what Nostalgy, a Mozilla Thunderbird add-on, is all about. It adds keyboard shortcuts to move and copy messages, change folders and display the folder pane.
Email spam is so common these days that it has become a part of our live to wade through the spam to identify the real emails that have been sent to our mail account. It can be a challenge for the average user sometimes while IT-professionals and experienced users identify legit and fake emails at a glance .
It can happen that you end up with duplicate address book entries in Mozilla Thunderbird and wonder how you can remove them so that only one entry per contact is visible in the Thunderbird Address Book. The current Thunderbird address book is most likely fragmented or corrupted and the easiest way to fix that is to create a new Address Book and copy the contents of the old Address Book into the new one.
It sure does have advantages to access mail accounts from a website like accessibility for instance. I never liked using webmailers that much because I did not like the thought that my mails would sit on a server somewhere on the Internet. The good news was that many webmailers such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail offered a way to access the mails using the Pop3 protocol and a mail client.
Microsoft is often not using a standard format which is the case when you take a look at how Outlook Express saves the mails that have been send and received. Outlook Express saves the mails by default in dbx files instead of saving them in the wildly used mbx format which is being used by Thunderbird, Opera and most other email clients.
It can be quite a task to run Thunderbird on more than one computer and even running Thunderbird on one computer with more than one mail account can cause some problems. Filters are one of them. Mail filters can be global filters that filter all incoming mails or mail account filters which only filter mails that are send to the account in question.
Thunderbird saves the attachments together with the mail message which means that the mailboxes can grow rapidly if you regularly receive large attachments. This slows down Thunderbird eventually and could also pose a storage problem if you use the default profile location to store your emails.
When I first read about Backup to Email I thought that surely no one wanted to backup files and folders to email. I never thought that email would make a good backup alternative for backing up large files and folders considering file size limitations and upload speeds of the own Internet connection.
Email collectors behold ! Microsoft is finally making @live.com IDs available to the public. The whole signup process is heavily interactive and Ajax like elements pop up all the time giving information and links to further information.
If you use Firebug and visit Gmail you receive a message "Firebug is known to make Google Mail slow unless it is configured correctly" which was not known by me. Google suggests to disable Firebug for the Google domain completely which should not be a huge problem normally.
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.
I had lots of messages in my Thunderbird mail accounts. More than 1200 send messages and more than 1500 incoming message. The send messages alone had a size of more than 25 Megabytes while the incoming a combined size of more than 800 Megabytes. This made my decision to clean up the mails even easier.
Google increased the storage limit for Gmail users just recently who have now roughly four Gigabytes at their disposal with the option to add even more storage that can be purchased in the account settings. The maximum amount is currently 400 Gigabytes of storage which would cost $500 per year.
Enigma, a regular visitor of my blog, asked if there was a way to stop pdf spam from appearing in his Windows Live Mail Desktop software. I decided to investigate the matter and take a look at it. Windows Live Mail Desktop is basically a mail client like Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook integrating with several other Microsoft applications such as Windows Live Messenger or Live Spaces.
Outlook blocks certain file types like exe and vbs by default giving the user no option to enable certain file types that the user would like to access. The only possible option for most users is to ask the sender to send the mail in a format that is not blocked automatically by Microsoft Outlook.
If there is one thing for sure it is that spammers are creative in finding new ways to bypass anti spam filters. They send distorted pictures, add random text to their messages, zip their spam, use excel files, pdf files and nowadays fdf files. Fdf files ? What's that again ?
