You decided to export your Outlook data to a new computer only to realize that all Outlook categories have not been exported. Instead of manually creating those categories again you decided to search for a solution to backup the categories on the old computer and add them again to the new pc.
Data synchronization is one of the most important features of software that you have to use on more than one computer. If a software does not provide a way to synchronize data between computers users normally find a way and use applications that synchronize folders and files automatically.
The Internet community has been pestered with yet another wave of spam mails containing fake membership information and e-cards. The spammers use two attack vectors if you click on the ip that is listed in those emails. They try to convince you to download a so called Secure Login Applet which is nothing more than an infected executable named applet.exe and also try to use several known exploits.
Don't you hate it when someone sends you an email containing links or other email addresses that are so long that your email program uses several lines to display them ? This is apparently a matter of how the email client in question is handling urls and emails that are to long to be displayed in one line.
If you have to use Microsoft Outlook on more than one computer you might want to keep the data synchronized to be able to work with the latest emails. This is something that can't be accomplished in Outlook which means that we have to rely on third party tools to synchronize the mails between several Outlook installations.
Thunderbird, the email client from the Mozilla team, was in the news just a few days ago with the announcement that a separate Thunderbird will receive an independent organizational setting allowing the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.
Several of my friends rely heavily on the excellent Calendar function in Microsoft Outlook to organize their work routine. The Outlook Calendar does have a serious disadvantage if you compare it to a normal paper calendar though because it is not visible all the time. A paper calendar is always visible and Outlook does not offer this functionality unless you use Michael Scrivo's Outlook Desktop application.
I have been getting lots of emails lately that have most of the time no text whatsoever but a pdf attachment with titles such as report.pdf, article.pdf or bill.pdf. Those are real pdf files and if you open them you see that they contain - you guessed it already did not you - spam.
Some of my friends still use Outlook because they need the excellent calendar functionality and I'm forced to live with it at work as well. I guess a lot of other users have to work with Outlook as well that is why I thought it would be a nice idea to write about the software Advanced Security for Outlook.
Spamato is a free software that was developed in Java which can be used to detect and delete spam found in many popular mail clients such as Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook and others. Several clients have specialized versions for them and all others can use the standalone version which acts as a mail proxy that sits between the mail client and the mail server.
I'm currently tweaking the new theme which takes more time than I thought. I just want to apologize for the lack of articles in the last days. Once the new theme is published I will have more time to write articles again.
I have been writing about temporary (disposable) email services before which can be used to register to certain web services without revealing your true email address. This is great if you do not want to risk that the website is selling your email address.
This is however a security risk if you do register at a service that is sending passwords to the email again if you have forgotten them. Everyone who knows the email that you have registered with could use the forgotten password request to get your password.
You can bet that every tiny bit of new information about Google or one of their services will make headline news in a matter of minutes after it was discovered or announced. This time it was the discovery that the maximum attachment size for emails on gmail has been raised to 20 Megabytes.
While a 100% increase may seem nice it raises some questions about the usefulness of such an increase. Many mail servers will not accept emails of that size and bounce them back. It should also be noted that emails were never supposed to be used for large file transfers in the first place.
The Contacts Sidebar extension for the email software Mozilla Thunderbird displays the address book - or books - in the sidebar of Thunderbird beneath the mail folders. A real beauty is that this sidebar can be enabled and disabled with the F4 button which means that you only need to display it when you need the address book. All the possibilities of the address book are given in the sidebar as well, you can edit properties of your contacts or quickly choose a contact that you want to write a mail to. Here are some highlights taken from the description:
It happens sometimes that you find duplicate mails in your inbox in Thunderbird. This could happen for instance when you pull new emails from the mail server and get disconnected during that process. It could happen then that those emails will be retrieved again when you check for mails. Thunderbird has a nice hidden variable that defines how it should treat duplicate mails and I'm going to tell you how to set it correctly so that duplicate mails are removed automatically.
I have been using the anti-spam software Spamihilator when I was still using Opera Mail for my mail accounts. Spamihilator basically sits between your mail program and the Internet mail server analyzing all incoming mail. Spam mails will not be send to the mail client but remain in Spamihilator where you could delete them or mark them as free of spam. One great feature of Spamihilator is that you can install plugins that add functionality.
I have added a "send attachment" entry to my right-click context menu when I perform that action on files. Adding attachments to emails was always sort of a burden for me because it was really uncomfortable to open the mail program, click on the attachment button and browse to the file on the hard drive of the computer. A far better way is to right-click the file and select an entry that would automatically open the email program. All that was left to do from this point on was to fill out the email address and write the mail.
Many Internet users do not realize how dangerous Phishing can be. They receive a email which claims to be from their bank and they blindly trust everything that is written in that mail and will click on any links that are displayed in that mail to "update" their security software or passwords. They are usually redirected to sites that password fish their passwords and use them to make online transactions. I'm always astonished by the amount of users that want to do online banking for instance on the Internet but lack basic security knowledge.
If you want to make sure that no one is able to eavesdrop on your mail traffic you should use encryption. The problem with most encryption services is that setting them up and talking others into setting them up as well is a problematic task. Encryption only works if both the sender and the recipient use the same service to encrypt the emails. One of the easiest ways to setup a service that encrypts your emails is the encryption software Ciphire. Ciphire is a program that is available for Windows, Linux and Mac and can be downloaded for free from the developers homepage.
Thunderbird displays only the message count of unread mails of every folder by default. I tried to find a way to display the count of all messages instead which would help me get a better overview of the amount of mails inside a folder. I wanted to make sure that the unread messages number would still be shown as well.
The option to activate the message count for all mails is kinda hidden in Thunderbird. You need to enable the "Show Expanded Columns" option first which can be done by going to Tools > Options, selecting the Advanced tab and checking "Show Expanded Columns in the Folder Pane".
If you are an early adopter and don't want to wait a few more days to download and install the email client Thunderbird you could head out to the Mozilla ftp and download it for your operating system and language right away. The Mozilla team is usually upping the latest version of either Thunderbird or Firefox on their ftp mirrors to ensure that they can serve the server load when they publish the links on the official program pages. This is indeed a good way to download Thunderbird 2 fast because the servers will not be that populated at this time.
If you have a website or blog you may have found yourself contemplating a typical dilemma: how to publish your email address for your audience to contact you without having your email address fall prey to the numerous spam bots harvesting websites for emails.
I'm not a big fan of Microsoft Outlook but I have to use it at work because of corporate policy. Next to the Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 Microsoft Outlook 2003 is having a top spot in my software that I do not want to use but have to list. Some guys at work like the Outlook software and use it at home as well while I'm happy to use Thunderbird at home feeling more at ease with this excellent email client.
I usually do not zip attachments that I send with Thunderbird, it is normally just to much work to zip the files locally and attach them to the mail afterwards. It happens sometimes that I do not zip a php file and send it to someone who gets only garbage because of the way the attachment is processed. I did find an extension for Thunderbird that is perfect for lazy people like me who do not want to go the extra mile just to zip attachments.
It seems that the big three, that is Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, always have to compete against each other. When someone introduces a new feature the others are surely going to announce a similar feature that is just a tad better than the feature of the other company. We are witnessing the race for Email storage at the moment. Microsoft has a storage limit of 2 Gigabytes for their users while Google has currently a limit of 2,8 Gigabytes. Yahoo decided to accept the challenge and give the others something to choke on, they announced today that they will offer unlimited Email storage to all of its users in the near future.
A friend of mine is still using Outlook at home and I was wondering why he did not switch to a more secure email client such as Thunderbird. His response was that Thunderbird was missing a calendar and that this was a feature that he needed. I could not deny that there was no calendar in Thunderbird - until I found the Thunderbird extension Lightning. Lightning which is still in development adds calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks..) to Thunderbird.
Spammers tend to use more advanced spam methods to avoid the dreaded spam filters that become better and better. I would like to present some examples from my personal mail folder and analyze the latest image spam trends. Many spam filters concentrate their efforts on blacklists and the text that the mail contains. Spam that is not caught immediately will be caught in the future if the user marks that mail as spam. Language and keyword filters and whitelists do their part and reduce spam and false positives.
I took a quick look at the Gspace extension for Firefox in 2005 and it happened so much that I thought it was a good idea to take another look at it. Gmail gives its users lots of space, currently about 2.8 gigabytes of it which is of course to much for most mail accounts and this is where the Gspace extension for Firefox steps in. It basically makes it possible to use gmail storage in a way to store files online which seems a lot securer in my opinion than using a file hoster. The interface looks similar to most ftp clients out there, it should not be a problem getting used to gspace quickly.
We had some reports coming in about some outages of the gmail - that is google mail - web interface which meant that some users could not access their mail accounts for several hours which seems to be a big problem for at least some of those users. In the time where customers for instance demand a fast, almost immediate, reaction to their emails it could become a matter of survival to receive and react to the mail.
Many users are still unaware of the dangers that phishing could mean for their life's. They might now that hackers try to lure unsuspecting users to fake websites hoping that their victims would try to supply login information, credit card details or social security numbers while trying to use the service. Those users already have difficulties identifying those first generation phishing websites that undoubtedly look and feel more professional with every passing day.
There have been two drastic changes to Googles Gmail service in the last week. The first will probably make most users happy, gmail is not 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.
Birthday Reminder is a sweet little add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird which does exactly what the name implies: It reminds you of upcoming birthdays of users that are in your address bock in Thunderbird. It is relatively easy to add new birthdays to the address bock which then get automatically picked up by the Birthday Reminder extension
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.
I had a situation recently where I had to extract about forty emails with attachments in Thunderbird. Doing this manually wastes so much time and I was looking for a way to extract all the attachments automatically. Thankfully genbeta posted a reference to the Thunderbird Attachment Extractor extension which does exactly what I was looking for.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The email client Thunderbird does not necessarily retrieve messages from all of your mail accounts at startup. By default the first mail account will be checked on startup and all mail accounts will be checked every ten minutes. The following user.js tweak changes this behavior in the way that Thunderbird retrieves mail from all accounts at startup as well.
You might want to import already received mails into your gmail account, one reason could be that you want to make the complete switch to gmail and never use the old email client again. There is unfortunately no import function to do that in gmail, at least none that I was able to find in my gmail account.
