The Stand-up Philosopher

Joel Comm: How To Get Control of Your Email

I’ve been following Joel Comm since the time I thought I’d try to make a living as an Internet Entrepreneur. We all know how well that turned out. That is, it didn’t. I even had to drop my TypePad blog because it didn’t make sense to continue to pay for it. Now I’m back to a free blog where I write whenever I feel like it, and don’t write when I have nothing to say. I now have clarity as to where my skills and abilities serve best, and I’m back in a spot where they can be used.

Joel Comm wrote about how he’s getting his email under control. I’ve spent years reading books like Getting Things Done, 7 Habits, and blog series like Inbox Zero. I have yet to reach a point of perfection with my email, but I’m not bad. The people I work with now have 1200+ emails in their inboxes at any given time. That gives you the idea of the volume of email I’ll be dealing with once I’m up to speed and fully integrated.

Do you have control of your email? What systems do you use to keep email under control?

Gmail Will Allow Users To Turn off Conversation View

From the “I Didn’t Realize This Was A Problem” department: Gmail will soon allow users to turn off conversation view.

Apparently, some people hate the conversation view. Are you one of them? I actually like it. I used it in Outlook too. Sometimes it’s easier to follow an email train in conversation view.

Google Is On A Roll This Week

Lots of good things came out of Google recently. OK, 2 things. One is interesting, and the other should be highly useful.

One of the reasons I stick with gmail is for the storage space and the world-class spam filter. I rarely have a problem with spam thanks to gmail. I also like that I can get my mail just about anywhere: on the web, in Outlook, on my iPhone, or on just about any other device I might have. The convenience is great.

The interesting thing Google rolled out is the ability to make calls from gmail. I say it’s interesting because I’m not sure I’ll use it much. I can’t get Christina to test it with me. I called my iPhone from gmail and had the boys take it into another room, but they started fighting over who was going to hold the phone and ruined the experiment.

The next thing Google rolled out is called Priority Inbox. This is based on gmail’s spam filter and addresses a very real problem: email overload.

Gmail already has a heavy filtering system built in. You can create folders (or labels) and then filters based on those labels. I probably have 200 filters already, and it seems like I’m creating several more each week. I hate when I’m out, and expecting an email. Every time my iPhone tells me I have a new email, I rip it out of my pocket, enter the passcode, go to email, and find the whole experience anti-climactic. Rather than the important email I’m waiting for, it’s only  the 14th special offer GoDaddy has sent me this afternoon. Like I buy that many websites from them. Or it’s the AFA whining about another secular news organ being biased against Christian interests. Or it’s an automated reminder telling me my cable or cell phone bill is due in 3 weeks. Nothing important, and definitely not the email I was waiting for.

It seems that no matter how aggressively I filter my email, I still have to deal with tons of non-important “bac’n” in my inbox taking up time. I prefer to filter those into other folders then deal with them when I feel like it.

Because I handle email similar to the principles taught in “Getting Things Done”, I don’t mark an email as read or delete it (gmail archive) unless all actions required by that email have been completed. So while I’m out for a while, I can build up a ton of email in my inbox until I get home and can set up new filters so those kinds of emails will skip my inbox in the future.

I’m looking forward to the Priority Inbox. It would be nice to spend less time setting up filters in gmail.

Lifehacker: Email Annoyances

Lifehacker put up a post yesterday dealing with the worst email annoyances. I’ve dealt with my personal worst email annoyances on this blog over the years. My two biggest are Reply to All and “You’ll win something if you forward this to everybody”.

I’m not really annoyed with signature lines like “sent from my iPhone” or “sent from my Verizon BlackBerry”. It tells me the person is probably out of the office. Hopefully I can expect more information when they get back to the office, but I usually have to follow up again.

What do you consider an email annoyance?

Making A Difference: Finding The Right Communication Language

Maurilio Amorim has a post on his Making A Difference Blog about Finding the Right Communication Language. He says that over the years, he's identified 5 different communication languages. He categorizes them as follows:

    1. The Verbal Processor.

    2. The ADD.

    3. The ADD Texter.

    4. The Mental Processor.

    5. The Face-to-Face Feeler.

You can read the descriptions of each of these on his blog post.

I figure I'm a cross between The Verbal Processor and The ADD Texter. I tend to think out loud a lot while I'm processing my thoughts. This drives Christina (my wife) nuts. I also am often happier interfacing with other people (even Christina) through email and text. No, I'm not obsessive about this. I realize that a lot of communication (especially with Christina) must be carried out in person. Just this morning, I got an email asking a question, and I immediately realized that I'd be much better off meeting in person to discuss the issue because dealing with it over email would be clumsy.

If these communication languages were laid out on the Chinese Zodiac, I'd probably be warned to avoid The ADD and The Face-to-Face Feeler. I score very highly on ADD tests, and I tend to ramble off topic myself, but I don't communicate very well with others who do the same thing. I also tend to resent dealing with people who HAVE to meet in person over an issue that could be settled with 3 text messages. I had a person like that in some of my classes at the University of Phoenix. She was very smart and a hard worker, but sometimes couldn't get moving on a learning team project unless everybody dropped their lives and drove into center city Philadelphia, paid excessive amounts for parking, and sat around a coffee shop. We usually got her to settle for a teleconference, but when that wasn't possible, we could never get an early start on our learning team projects.

Which communication language do you speak? Which communication language do you find yourself to be least compatible with?

I'm Bringing Back My BS Filter Outlook Rules

I'm starting to spend way more time than I think necessary dealing with what I coined as "Corporate Spam". I get way too many announcements at work about network outages in other states, pretzels available for sale, what time sodas will stop being sold, and other pointless topics that don't pertain to me. There are also tons of newsletters, announcements for obscure "heritage months", and other things.

I decided to resurrect a strategy that I used on my last job for dealing with "corporate spam". I've already created my first rules.

You're Not Going To Get Free Stuff For Forwarding An Email

I got an email from a friend today. That’s normally a good thing, and it gave us a chance to catch up on a few things. The email had the subject of “Laptop”. The text inside the email said “Hey it’s worth a shot and snopes said it was legit” (sic).

I figured he put that last line in there for me. I’m known to within seconds of getting one of these things to search Snopes.com and utilize one of the few reasons I think a “reply-to-all” is legitimate. I do this to let everybody know that the email they sent promising free stuff or riches for simply spamming all of their friends is a hoax. Nothing but a hoax perpetrated by somebody with nothing else to do with his, her, or their life (lives) but try to see how easy it is to get sheople to spam their friends and family with stupid stuff.

The email contained one attachment, an image file, appropriately named “image001.jpg (76KB)”. I attached the image below:

Figure 1- Free Laptop- How Many Things Can You Find Wrong In This Picture?

As soon as I saw that, it took me less than 30 seconds to go to Snopes.com, close the pop-up ads they have, enter “Sony Ericsson Laptop” in the search box, hit this page, and discover that this whole this is a hoax just like I suspected.

This Is An Interesting Email Tip

I might have to try this. Change your email signature (doesn't matter which client) to "Sent from my iPhone" and write 1 sentence emails. I'm tempted to change my work signature to "Sent from my Verizon BlackBerry".

To be honest, thanks to years of instant messaging, I've already reached the point where most of my emails contain just what I need to convey or ask for. There was a time when I would spend a great deal of time composing an email just like the days when we all wrote letters (honest, you kids weren't missing anything). After using IM, text messaging, and Twitter, I just can't spend any more time on an email than necessary. I try not to be too short or to appear rude, but I say what needs to be said, double check to make sure it's acceptable, then hit send.

Technorati Tags: Email

Robert Scoble on 6 Tools to Help Tackle Overflowing Email

Robert Scoble recently wrote a column for Fast Company Magazine with 6 tools he uses and teaches others to use to help simplify email. Let’s face it, email is necessary these days. You might say it’s a necessary evil, but I don’t consider it evil. I consider email a tool, as I consider many other things tools. (Considering a person a tool is a different matter ). As a tool, email can be used properly or misused. I have my personal email to a decent level of filtering, although I’m starting to build up a lot of Facebook and Twitter notifications, so I’m going to have to create a filter for those. I used to use Outlook rules, but I’ve found it’s much easier to filter my email on Gmail’s end.

I’ve posted entries on my blog about how to manage email before. I’ve been through several tools and systems over the years. One service that Robert Scoble mentions is Xobni. I’ve used Xobni in the past (It’s Inbox spelled backwards). When I first used it, Xobni was in closed beta, but it’s now in open beta. You can download and use it by giving your email address. One of the most useful features of Xobni is the ability to get a phone number from a contact if that person has ever included a number in an email to you. I also like the capability to get the address of another person that has been emailed by a contact. At one point, I needed a current email address for somebody at my church. I only had to click on one of the daily church emails and search in Xobni, and I got the current address. It was faster than emailing the church for the address.

I have dealt with ways to reduce your email frustration in the following posts. I’ve touched on email in others, but these specifically deal with the subject:

• How I Deal with Spam
• How I Deal With Corporate Spam
• Email Etiquette

Two other services that Robert Scoble mentions are Clear Context and Gist. I’m currently configuring Clear Context, and I’m waiting for my download link for Gist. If either stands out to me as a useful tool, I’ll write a post about it.

Check out Scoble’s post if you find yourself drowning in email with no Coast Guard boat in sight.

Technorati Tags: Xobni,Clear Context,Gist,Email,Email madness,Robert Scoble,Fast Company,manage email

Scheduling Contact Annoyances

While I’m on an annoyances kick this afternoon, I wanted to add one more. Today, I realized that my eyeglass prescription had changed. Because this is affecting my ability to read, I decided to see if I could move up my eye appointment. I logged onto my eye doctor’s website and found an earlier appointment that I could use. I got a confirmation message.

The next thing that happened is that I got an email from the website stating that I had an important message from my eye doctor. Obviously, the message couldn’t be contained in the email because that would be too efficient. I clicked on the link, to be taken to a page telling me that I rescheduled my appointment and should print that page for my records. Didn’t I already see that page when I rescheduled?

Don’t systems analysts think about these things when they design systems? I could see getting an email confirming my appointment reschedule, but an email that has me click on a link to get to a web page that tells me I rescheduled which I already knew is a little inefficient.

Technorati Tags: Email,email notifications,email annoyances

What Am I Missing?

Last week, Merlin Mann posted about “email sabbaticals”. I have a decent sized volume of incoming information, but very little of it is personal in nature, so I have a lot of trouble understanding the “email sabbatical” of which he writes. I have trouble imagining somebody getting so much email that it can’t be dealt with in one way or another. I especially have trouble imagining somebody with a livelihood that somehow or other depends on getting personal email from people who suddenly decides to ignore it all and delete it.

I’m wondering if I should share this, but I am hoping to set a goal for the coming year to somehow form relationships with real people. I’m talking the kind of relationships where people call me and invite me over for more than “my computer doesn’t work. Can you look at it?” (I don’t mind those, and will continue to respond to them) and I will feel comfortable calling them to get together without fear of the usual “I’m busy. Maybe another non-specific or non-committed time”. Occasionally my wife and I get invited to a birthday party by a family with children roughly the ages of ours, but for the most part we’re left alone. Our invitations to other people are usually ignored or responded to with a polite decline. I admit I am slightly introverted, and so is my wife, but we really don’t have many friends. I know a lot of people that I enjoy talking to at work and church, but that’s about it. I don’t know if it’s because we worship at a “freeway church” and everyone is more spread out so getting together isn’t very efficient and consumes a lot of time in travel. We’ve considered finding a more local church in the hopes that we might make friends and church events will be more convenient to attend. I also can’t help but wonder if it’s just because we live in New Jersey and I really don’t feel like I fit in here. I’ve had a very hard time making friends since I moved here, and I don’t remember that challenge anywhere else I’ve lived (I’ve lived in a lot of places). I’m not like the other people here. After almost 10 years, I have to wonder if it’s more of a fit in issue than maybe I’m just socially defective.

Anyway, even though I have a lot of information coming in, very little of it is personal. I subscribe to several email newsletters, and I somehow got on the list of others and it’s easier to just delete them all at once than to individually try to cancel them. I can safely ignore or mass-delete most of my email without missing anything if I so choose. I also feel free to ignore incoming calls. If I don’t want to take calls, I shut my phones off. (I have a BlackBerry from work).

Can somebody explain to me what it’s like to get so much email that you have to auto-reply to everyone that “I’m sick of all this email, so I’m taking time off. If you took the time out of your life to email me, that’s just tough and I’m going to ignore it because I get too much email.” Services like gmail come with very powerful labeling and filtering capabilities, so it’s very easy to route email into labels accordingly so it can be dealt with later. I currently get by with my Inbox and 2 labels: Read-Review and Updates-Sales. My newsletters and such are shuffled into Read-Review and email updates for various reasons go into Updates-Sales. It’s very easy to do. When I notice that I get email notifications for too much random BS, I add to my filters again. It takes very little time at all and I read it when I’m able to set aside time.

Microsoft Releases SMTP Patch for Windows Mobile 6.1

I've been waiting for this. Microsoft got around to patching a well known bug that caused me to write this post. Now it appears that the patch has been developed and realeased, so if you have a Windows Mobile 6.1 device, you should download and install it. Since getting my Epix, I've been using FlexMail 2007 which seems to get around the issue well enough. I still use Pocket Outlook on occasion, but I definitely prefer FlexMail because it displays images automatically and is able to format html email for the small screen. Flexmail 2007 is not available. The current product is Flexmail 4.

Is This the End of the Road (for me) on Windows Mobile?

I think I’ve laid out my qualifications and experience with Windows Mobile extensively on my blog. I could use some better reader statistics, so if you don’t believe me, go back through my archives.

I’ve been meaning to post for a while about my new phone. My wife has had trouble with AT&T since we jumped from the old AT&T Wireless to Cingular in 2005 to be bought back to AT&T a few months later. She’s been through 5 phones and still kept having problems. Since we reached a point of both being eligible for an upgrade, and I was near the breaking point with my iPaq 6945 and the total instability of Windows Mobile 5 and HP’s and HTC’s implementation of WM5, I gave my wife an idea. I told her that her problems *could* have been caused by always going with the cheapest phone possible. My Pocket PC phone had enough problems, but those weren’t AT&T network; they had to do with being a Windows Mobile product that was implemented by HTC for HP branding. I find the faults to lie with all three companies. In any case, I told her we could spend the money to get halfway decent phones, and if her problems persist, we can return the phones, sit out our contract, and jump to Verizon or T-mobile. I never really saw the point to Sprint.

While I did drool over the iPhone 3G, my wife picked out the Samsung BlackJack II, which impressed me also so we went with it. I found out a Windows Mobile 6.1 upgrade was available for both phones, so I upgraded them the first day. All along, I was impressed with the BlackJack II. After all of the Windows Mobile devices I’ve had over the years, this was the most stable, powerful, and easy to use I’ve ever had. Sure, it had an issue or two, like for some reason I can’t sync it with my work laptop, but I was able to overlook that.

Then yesterday hit. Suddenly, I couldn’t send email through my gmail account. I couldn’t tell at the time if the problem resided with Windows Mobile, AT&T, Google, or some combination of the three and their associated applications and services. Since the cat woke me up early this morning, I decided to search on Google before I left for work, and found out that Windows Mobile 6 (including 6.1) has a KNOWN but dealing with SMTP. For those not educated, smtp stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. Exactly, it’s very simple and should be the staple service of any device calling itself a “smart-phone.” Not being able to send email through an smtp service is not very smart.

I tried a few hacks that I found around, but none worked. I deleted and recreated my account several times. I was able to send two or three emails at the most before my email sends started to error out. I installed Windows Live Mobile in and effort to use my MSN email account for sending, but that developed a problem.

At this point, I’m giving serious consideration to taking the BlackJack II back to AT&T and getting an iPhone. Sure, the iPhone doesn't natively handle Outlook tasks, which is going to suck because I use them heavily. I'll have to buy yet another licence for Pocket Informant (had to buy a cross-grade license when I switched from WM Pro to Standard). On the other hand, even though an iPhone won't do as much, at least I won't have to spend endless hours hacking on it to get it to perform a basic function like sending email.

Technorati Tags: Windows Mobile 6.1,Windows Mobile,iPhone,iPhone 3G,AT&T,Samsung BlackJack II,Windows Mobile smtp bug

Using Thunderbird for University of Phoenix Newsgroups

Thanks to the folks at My Blog Log, I now have access to some very basic statistics about my blog. I can see the last ten searches or links that led visitors to my blog. I noticed that yesterday, somebody was searching for some keywords involving Thunderbird and the University of Phoenix's newsgroups. I have some experience with this, so I thought I would write a brief post with advice.

I am no fan of Microsoft's Outlook Express. I do use Outlook as my mail client, not so much because it's the best out there, but because it is the best integrated PIM (Personal Information Manager) that will interface with my Pocket PC. Outlook Express was originally (as I recall) delivered under Windows 98 as a built-in mail client. At the time, I preferred Netscape's mail client, which I used heavily for many years.

The University of Phoenix requires students to use Outlook Express, which is about the only product they officially support. Their tech support will also support Mozilla's Thunderbird. Because I don't like a lot of the UI and operation of Outlook Express, I have tried many other options, but I always end up back at Outlook Express. OE doesn't do a good job, but it does what I want slightly better. I don't like the fact that every time Outlook Express runs, it has to call up Windows Messenger no matter how hard I try to uninstall or disable that useless program. Microsoft may run a monopoly on operating systems and office suites, but they have a long way to go to write a decent IM client.

I have configured Thunderbird 1.5 for the University of Phoenix's newsgroups on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. That is the biggest advantage to Thunderbird; cross-platform capability. That's one of the things I love about Firefox as well. With Del.icio.us bookmarks and Google Notebook, I can work as effectively on any computer I happen to use. When I found that Thunderbird 2.0 is out, I decided to try it as well.

Two of the biggest problems that I have with Thunderbird involve my own workflow habits. Outlook Express allows the user to not have any message marked as read until the user is done with the message. I haven't found a way to do this with Thunderbird, but I have found a decent workaround: I set the "Mark message as read after..." timeout to 10,000 seconds. This is an idiosyncrasy that I picked up from the influence of David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, although it is not exactly orthodox GTD because I don't always act on the message the first time I read it. I don't mark a message as read in email or my UOP newsgroups until any action associated with that message is completed, whether that action is read, respond, or follow up on a comment or link contained in that message. If a message is marked as not read, that is my visual cue to do something with the message. This way, if the instructor asks a question deep in a thread or a student makes a post I want to follow up on, I can find it again because that is the message I haven't marked as read. This morning I discovered another work around that was holding me back from Thunderbird: marking a message as read. In Outlook Express, you can right-click and select, "Mark as read" or press the k key. You can also hit the context menu key (right of the space bar between Alt and CTRL) and k. In Thunderbird, the context menu requires the user to go to one level deeper in the menu, as in Mark -> As Read. I just discovered this morning that pressing the m key with a message highlighted will mark the message as read.

Another nag I have with Thunderbird is that I constantly get a pop-up alert saying "An NNTP (News) error occurred: No Permission". It gets to be a pain, and I don't get this with Outlook Express. I have no idea how to overcome this error. I've tried changing my time-out, but that doesn't seem to help.

I also tried Windows Live Messenger Desktop Beta, which seems to be the replacement for Outlook Express on Windows XP. I found it to be too unstable for use. I liked the UI, however, and when the finished product is released I may use it. Windows Mail, which is included in Windows Vista, did a great job with my UOP newsgroups as well. I would recommend it for you Vista users. I have no idea if UOP supports Windows Mail yet. I don't think they support Internet Explorer 7 either. As I wrote in a previous entry, the UOP seriously needs to  be brought into the 21st Century.

Thunderbird configures easily enough. I found it much easier to configure T-bird than to manually configure Outlook Express. UOP does offer an automatic newsgroup configuration script in their online classroom, but that script will only work in Internet Exploder 6. Once I upgraded to IE7 beta 2, I had to learn how to manually set up my newsgroups. If you already have Outlook Express set up, Thunderbird will automatically detect and import your IMAP email account from UOP.

Assuming that you have to configure Thunderbird for UOP access yourself, here is a brief procedure:

1. 1. Open Tools =>; Account Settings
2. 2. Name your account anything you wish. Put in your name and UOP email addresses in the appropriate fields.
3. 3. Click Server Settings. Enter the server name as emailxx.phoenix.edu, xx being whatever server you happen to be on. Enter your username in this format: ols\username.
4. 4. Select Add Account. This will be a newsgroup account. Fill in the requested information.
5. 5. Under Server Settings, make sure that SSL is enabled and the server is set to port 563.
6. 6. Outgoing server should be emailout.phoenix.edu, port 465.

When connecting, enter your ols\username and password, tell Thunderbird to remember, and go to town. Thunderbird 1.5 never seemed to remember my username and password, but it looks like Thunderbird 2.0 will, so I may be using this from now on.

Now to get newsgroups, click on File => Subscribe. Select whatever you named your UOP Newsgroup account from the drop down menu (mine is named Flexnet). Under "Show items that contain:", enter a search term for your class or program. I typically search under XBIT, which gives me the newsgroups for my program.

I wrote the subscribe procedure after several nights of my youngest not sleeping, so if it needs to be overhauled or clarified feel free to leave me constructive comments and I will revise it accordingly to make it easier for others to follow.

This procedure should work the same on Linux and Mac OS X.

Labels: Email, Linux, Mac OSX, Microsoft Windows, U of Phoenix

Norton Strikes Again

I got a call from a friend of mine yesterday with a tech support question. He had last used his laptop on a wireless network while traveling, but once he got home and tried plugging it back into his router, he couldn't get anywhere with Internet Exploder. He said the laptop was connected but IE would not connect to anything. He had already called HP and was told it might be a driver problem. It's too bad tech support desks don't hire people with real experience to offer tech support. Of course, how many of us with real experience could stand to do that kind of work for that kind of pay?

I walked him through some of the basics (does the network icon in the system tray have an x on it? etc). Then the answer came to me. I asked him if he was running Norton Internet Security. He said yes. I told him to right click on the Norton IS icon in the taskbar and select "Close" or "Exit". He did. Wouldn't you know that suddenly IE could connect to websites?

I'm not sure of the technical issues behind it. I can pretty much sum this up with "Norton sucks". I can't say I've ever had pleasant experiences with Norton's security products. Several years ago, I was given a copy of Norton Internet Security 2003. The first thing I noticed is that it sucked more than half of my computer's performance capability away in the resources it consumed. I ran it for a couple of weeks before I got home from work to a message that Norton AV had crashed and needed to be reinstalled. I reinstalled the product. Then I started getting messages from Norton Anti-Spam that some emails had been deleted. Funny, this was about the time that my mom started calling me to ask when I hadn't replied to a question she asked. Then Norton IS crashed again and had to be reinstalled. I used the products for a while because don't you know how insecure Windows is? I got tired of emails being deleted with no chance of retrieving them, and I got tired of reinstalling both applications every 3 weeks. I finally shelved the product.

My laptop that I got last Christmas came with Norton Internet Security and a 90 day subscription to Norton Anti-Virus. This time it was the 2005 version. I didn't bother with Norton Anti-Spam for long. I don't think anti-spam programs are very effective and you can read my strategy for dealing with spam here: http://emuelle1.blogspot.com/2006/06/how-i-deal-with-spam.html.  I found Norton Internet Security to be about as painful to use as always. I had one program I liked to use that for some reason I could not get Norton to allow. Any time I tried to manually input this program into Norton's allow menu, Norton locked up and I had to force my laptop to shut down and then reboot in order to recover. Whenever I wanted to run this program, I had to manually shut Norton down. When my subscription for Norton AV ran out, I happily uninstalled the suite.

Norton lately is bitching and complaining that Microsoft won't make it easy for users to switch their security center over to Norton's. I see this as a good thing. With the pains that I've been through with Norton's 2003 and 2005 suites, trust me, you're better off with the built in security center in Windows Vista. At least Windows won't suddenly start blocking Internet Exploder for no apparent reason.

If you suddenly find a your web browser not connecting, but Windows says there is a network connection, and you have Norton installed, try shutting down Norton. Then uninstall it.

Labels: Security, Software, Spam

How I Deal With Spam

I wrote a post last week about how to deal with corporate spam, which is the same thing as regular spam but with fewer carbs. Just kidding on that part. Spam is a worldwide epidemic that is making telemarketing seem less annoying by comparison. It is disgusting to me to think that spammers sell lists of our email addresses back and forth to each other for millions of dollars. Spam is taking over the web. Spammers are starting to put up blogs and visit discussion forms. Another blog of mine, http://czigan.net/cblog routinely gets spam trackbacks from spam blogs on Blogger. I'm not sure how prevalent the spam trackbacks are, but I'm suddenly happy that Blogger doesn't have that feature.

Have you ever used a so called spam filter? I've tried several. I had one a friend gave me. I've tried Spam Bayes, and I even used the Norton Anti-Spam that came with my laptop (it has long since been uninstalled along with Norton AV and Norton Internet Security). I don't know if anyone has successfully used a spam filter, but I've never had much luck with them. They are supposed to be able to identify messages as supposedly spam and put them in a spam folder. They've never been very effective, however. Real spam gets let through and legit messages get put in the spam folder, no matter how many times I've told the program that anything from that email address, or even domain, is not spam. I normally uninstall spam programs and I've given up on them altogether.

I have found a way to deal with Spam that takes less time and doesn't cost anything. You can use Microsoft Outlook or not. What I've found is fairly effective. The first thing I recommend is to get Google's Gmail. Gmail has the absolute best server-side spam filter I have ever seen. I don't even use my Comcast email account anymore. Yahoo is horrible at filtering spam. I will get the exact same spam message from 1000 spammers, hit the spam button every time, and yet Yahoo still will not filter it out of my email list as it comes in 20 times a day. Gmail, however is an amazing spam filter. It's not 100% effective but it's at least 99%. One out of 1000 spam messages might get by it, and that is something I am willing to live with. You can use Gmail all by itself. When I had laptop problems from Office 2007, I couldn't download email to my laptop through Gmail's pop access so I just read my email online. I came to like this and now that I have Outlook working again, I'm not so sure I want to continue to use Outlook for email.

The next thing I do in my spam strategy is set up Outlook. This is less essential if you are using Gmail, but it it still useful. This strategy does require a little bit of patience up front but it will pay off in the end. In Outlook, click on Tools->Options and you should open to the Preferences tab. If not, click on the tab. Then select Junk-email. You can set the tolerance to any level that you like, but I've found the best way for me to do this is to click the radio button for Safe Lists Only. This is where the time investment comes in. Every single email that is downloaded to Outlook will now go into your junk email folder. When you see that you have messages in your junk folder, go to that folder. I normally use the preview pane when reading email because I don't like to mark a message as read until I'm absolutely sure that either no action is required by it or that I have taken any and all actions that are required by it. However, do not use the preview pane in the junk email folder. Turn it on and off as the message requires, for instance, if you're sure the message is safe but you want to view it to verify. If you're satisfied with the message, click "not junk" on the toolbar. You'll get a pop up message asking how you want to deal with the message. You can tell it to add the sender to your safe senders list. Once the sender is on the safe sender's list, any email from that sender will automatically go to your inbox. You can also set up rules. For some reason, some newsletters never seem to come from the same email address twice. Microsoft likes to use a different address for every newsletter, making it very hard to keep their newsletters out of a spam folder.

This strategy is not 100% effective, but over the years I have found it to be the best way to handle spam in my Outlook inbox.

Labels: Email, Spam

How I Deal With Corporate Spam

In an entry yesterday, I talked about corporate spam and mentioned that I would post about how I have chosen to handle it.  I'm still learning how best to work with uploading images to Blogger, so please bear with me if I don't have enough of if I can't get the sequence right.

As you can see on the left, the first thing I've done is to create a folder that I chose to call "BS Filter". It can be named anything that you like. This is just what I chose because it is what I think of a lot of the corporate spam that I deal with.

As you can see here, I then click on the "Create Rule" (which can also be access by Tools -> Rules and Alerts in Outlook 2003). I won't disclose a screen shot of my rules because I have some specific names in there and so I'll just tell you what I do. When the "Rules and Alerts" dialog box pops up, click on "New Rule".  When I first came to the conclusion that I should do this, I decided to go nuclear. I selected "Move messages with specific words in the subject to a folder". I used subject for a reason. Thankfully, the fools who believe that the entire corporation is interested in their particular email haven't yet adopted the tactics of professional spammers who will use subjects lines that actually sound like something you should open. I'm getting a lot of junk lately with subjects like "I'm very upset about Friday". If I recognized the name, I'd almost open that. However, they all come from people I don't know, fools who have left their computers unsecured and now they eek out an existence as spambots. Anyway, I created the rule to route emails with words such as "charity", "tickets", "luncheon", "retirement", "funeral" and a few other specifics that my corporation and the organization that my office supports continue to spam us with. I told the rule wizard to route emails meeting these criteria to the folder "BS Filter". I then realized that this might be too nuclear. I do get emails from my church with those words and I do genuinely care about them. I also get joke emails that may contain some of those words. I put in exceptions to the rule for specific people such as our minister, the church secretary, and some of my friends who are likely to send me jokes. There are a few people who do nothing but send out corporate spam, so I put in a rule that any email with them as the sender should get routed to BS Filter.

Now, this system is not perfect, and it does not stop me from having to deal with these emails. What it does is stop me from losing productive time every time an email comes in. This way all emails that meet the subject criteria get routed to my BS Filter and I can deal with them in one fell swoop. It is much faster and more efficient. I have occasionally had a good one get by. Just the other day, an email about an open position was caught by my BS Filter. It wasn't a big deal. I had time and saw a new email in there, so I went to the folder and found out a position I might be interested in was open. I applied for it. However, when that email actually came in, I was trying to get some work done. I can only imagine how much productive time I would have lost getting all excited about applying for that position in the middle of trying to get work done.

Your needs may be much lighter. At my last job, there was only one person who sent out corporate spam, so I made a simple rule that any email from her was to be routed directly to my Deleted Items folder. In 5 years on that job, I don't think I ever got a single email from her that was relevant to me in any way.

Have a fun and happy time creating Outlook rules to suit your own needs. Rules can also be created to organize email from specific people. I have a rule that any email from my wife goes to a folder.

Labels: Email

Email Etiquette

Our program manager sent an interesting email this morning. It had the subject line of "Email Etiquette" and contained the usual list of bullets that you would expect in such an email. I would love to reproduce it here, but it contained the line at the bottom "Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited." I hope I can at least reproduce that line without permission.

I would like to add my own version of email Etiquette, and I do wish my program manager was reading this because it does point a finger at him.

When you work for a large corporation, you tend to get a lot of what could best be considered spam. When your corporation supports another large organization, the "All Hands Spam" grows exponentially. Here is Corporate Email Etiquette according to Eric:

* If a message comes out on the corporate "All Hands" distribution list, don't forward it to that same "All Hands" list with the addition of "FYI- in case you didn't get this". If I didn't get it the first time it went to the all hands list, what makes you think that by forwarding it to that same list in the global address book I would get it that time? Why do a minimum of 2 or 3 layers of management believe that they have to forward every all hands email back to the all hands list with that subject line? Again, if I didn't get it the first time, I wouldn't get it the second, third, forth...

* I know you appoint 6 Vice Presidents a week in varying capacities "downtown" at corporate headquarters. I don't care. I don't know any of them, I'll never meet any of them, and in a week when they advance and get replaced by another VP, the same applies.

* Everyone in the company does not know everyone who is retiring, leaving, or sadly has passed on. Is it necessary to send more than 1 email regarding the party, luncheon, or, sadly, funeral? Do we need to remind everybody 4 times a day about this?

* The same applies to barbecues, baseball tickets, NASCAR tickets, formal dinners, or any other activity. You don't have to remind the entire organization 12 times a day about these things through email.

* My company has a "15 Year Club", apparently made of up employees who have been with the company for 15 years or more. Every now and again, an email hits the corporate all hands list (this is a global corporation) with "The 15 year club would like to share it's newsletter with everybody". I don't know many people in the 15 year club, and I'm not very concerned about their newsletter. I read it once, and it's just a bunch of gossip about who did what and where. I work in a field office, and what goes on "downtown" really doesn't concern me.

Granted, none of this is in itself bad, but when you consider the volumes of email that people receive, please save me some repetitive strain injury by not making me hit the Delete key so often.

If I were in charge, I would mandate an all hands list for official announcements, and another strictly opt-in and opt-out for all of the corporate spam.

Maybe I'll create another post about a way that I have found to deal with some of the corporate spam that goes around in my corporation and organization.

Labels: Email

Send THIS To Ten People, or else you're a commie who doesn't love Jesus

I've been getting some really good stuff in my inbox lately.  Some of it has been in the form of inspirational stories, some are beautifully put together Power Point slideshows complete with music.  Some have been very informative such as a history lesson.  And yet, each and every one has been ruined by the end, causing me to delete it rather than to share such a lovely, well put together message with all of my friends, family, and coworkers.  Each one tries to guilt me into sharing it.  I can't explain why, perhaps because of my rebellious nature, that no matter how good one of these emails are, the second that they try to guilt me into passing them along, I simply hit the "DELETE" key and go about my business.

If you must send these emails, STOP INCLUDING THAT STUPID REQUEST TO FORWARD THEM!  I will forward them if I feel like it.  I will decide who is and is not interested among my own contact list of receiving these, and they can decide for themselves whether or not to pass them along.

This is as bad as those stupid chain emails that used to get passed around.  Are you people not able to sleep at night unless you can crank out 10 emails a day and know that each and every person that you send them to will send them to at least 10 other people or feel guilty for the rest of their lives for not doing it?

Labels: Email, Misc comments

Homer Simpson's Email Address?

I was watching a rerun of The Simpsons last night where Lisa got infuriated with Homer over not knowing anything about her. Isn't Homer a great role model for Dads? Uhmmmmmm, beeeeeeeeeer..... Homer, desperate to get his daughter's love back, hired a private detective to learn everything there was to know about her. While working out the details with the private dick, Homer gave his email address. The address that he gave was "[email protected]". Somehow I figured Homer Simson for an AOL user, that is, if fictional animated characters could choose an ISP. I got to wondering, first of all, is anyone really dumb enough to send an email to that address and of course, where does it actually go? Did the producers purchase a dead email address? Another thought I had was about how Hollywood would govern email addresses. Traditionally when a character has to give away a phone number, they'll use the 555 prefix, such as 555-1234. It's supposed to be a dead end, but some people actually dial these numbers and they turn out to be real. I wonder what industry rules will or have been set in place to govern the email addresses of fictional characters? Will they all be on AOL? Will someone make up a fake ISP similar to the old 555 prefix?

Maybe I should devote some time to thinking about things that matter. If anyone has bothered to email Homer, let me know what happened.

Labels: Misc comments

FW: CONGRATULATIONS YOU HAVE WON CONTACT US (Lottery Scam Email)

Below is an email that my wife received regarding her apparently winning 3 million dollars in the "Universal Lottery". We don't know of any such thing, nor has she registered. I resist letting her play the New Jersey State Lottery for a few reasons, and she has not played any lotteries outside.

This is most likely a scam. How do I know? Well, for one thing, lotteries are normally run by a state or nation and require funding; hence the education budget is normally raided when a lottery is established. Lotteries really aren't run privately and they don't just go looking for random email addresses to dispense the funds to.

Another clue to the possibility of this being a scam is that this email is dated for today, 22 December 2005, yet it requires a response by 19 December 2005. Hmmmmm, oversight, anyone?

Finally, I can tell it's a scam because I found it listed here: http://www.fraudwatchinternational.com/internet/lottery_operatives.shtml .

I don't know how many people will fall for this scam. Most likely, they are after bank account numbers. Sadly, I'm afraid that many will fall for it. Scams like these prey on people who are hurting, broke, and desperate. I've fallen for scams while in similar straights. When I was in the Navy, I didn't have a lot of money. I got something in the mail for the Reader's Digest Sweepstakes, and since I needed money I sent off for it. Next thing you know, I'm getting junk mail and telemarketing calls left and right about all this money I supposedly won, I just had a pay a fee of anywhere from $5 to $400 to get it released. I actually did fall for the first couple of these.

Please, no matter how financially desperate you are, don't fall for something like this. Often we get into bad straights through no fault of our own, yet sometimes it is our fault. The obvious solution is to never live above our means. If you have, it will take time and patience to get out, but you can get out. There are ways. Anyway, here is the scam email:

--- Universal Lotto Winners [email protected] wrote:

From Universal Lotto Winners Thu Dec 22 05:22:51 2005

X-Apparently-To: ***********@yahoo.com via 68.142.200.153;
Thu, 22 Dec 2005 05:33:35 -0800 X-Originating-IP: [65.54.185.11]
Return-Path: [email protected]
Authentication-Results: mta241.mail.mud.yahoo.com
from=hotmail.co.uk; domainkeys=neutral (no sig)
Received: from 65.54.185.11 (EHLO hotmail.com) (65.54.185.11)
by mta241.mail.mud.yahoo.com with SMTP;
Thu, 22 Dec 2005 05:33:27 -0800
Received: from mail pickup service by hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC;
Thu, 22 Dec 2005 05:22:51 -0800
Message-ID: [email protected]
Received: from 196.207.13.58 by by15fd.bay15.hotmail.msn.com with HTTP;
Thu, 22 Dec 2005 13:22:51 GMT
X-Originating-IP: [196.207.13.58]
X-Originating-Email: [[email protected]]
X-Sender: [email protected]
Reply-to: [email protected]
From: "Universal Lotto Winners" [email protected]
Bcc:
Subject: CONGRATULATIONS YOU HAVE WON CONTACT US
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 13:22:51 +0000
Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 22 Dec 2005 13:22:51.0958
(UTC) FILETIME=[CF813560:01C606FA]
Content-Length: 1154
FROM:THE DESK OF MRS ROSELIN MARTINS UNIVERSAL LOTTO COMPANY

We are please to announce you as one of the 100 lucky winners in the UNIVERSAL LOTTO draw held on the 21ST of DECEMBER, 2005 All 10 winning addresses were randomly selected from a batch of 50,000,000 international emails. Your email address emerged alongside 99 others as a category 2 winner in this year's Annual UNIVERSAL LOTTO Draw. Consequently, you have therefore been approved for a total pay out of $3,000,000,00(Three Million US Dollars) only. In order to avoid unnecessary delays and complications please remember to quote your reference number and batch numbers all correspondence
1,Email ticket number: ticket # 88171/29281/57363
2,BATCH:# 742-109-527-UK43
3,The file Ref # : 920/210/4509
4,lucky # 9-21-81-91-34-45
5,lotto code # : FL09622/UK

Please contact the under listed claims officer as soon as possible for the immediate release of your winnings:
Mr. Van Grov Chief financial Director The UNIVERSAL LOTTO AMSTERDAM-THE NTHERLANDS
Email : [email protected]
For processing and remittance of your cash to a designated account of your choice. remember, all winnings must be claim not later than 19TH of DECEMBER, 2005,

After this date, All unclaims funds will be returned to the International Lotto, you should contact Mr. Van Grov about the claimant procedures, send your fax and telephone to Mr. Van Grov, this will enable his office to send the claims application form (A4)to you the Beneficiary.

Please note, in order to avoid unnecessary delays and complications please remember to quote your reference number and batch numbers all correspondence. Further more, should there be any change of address do inform Mr. Van Grov as soon as possible. Mr. Van Grov is responsible for the processing of your approved file to the bank for payment. Congratulations once again, from all members of staff and thank you for being part of our promotions program. Once again on behalf of all our staff, reply to (( [email protected] ))

CONGRATULATIONS!!!
Sincerely, UNIVERSAL LOTTO COMPANY Promotions Manager The Lotto company

__________________________________
Yahoo! for Good - Make a difference this year.
http://brand.yahoo.com/cybergivingweek2005/

Labels: Scams