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The Empty Syringe: No Mail for You!

If you are reading this I know you are an email addict.
You live for the ping. You crave the pop-up notification. Your hands sweat just a little as you open a waiting communique.
How often do you check for new email?

Every day? Twice a day? Every hour? Every five minutes?

I have friends at Microsoft who — a decade ago before it was fashionable to be “always on” and “forever in touch” — set their email program to check for new mail messages every sixty seconds.
That behavior was disturbing then — and quaint now.

My how time and tide have changed!
Those who own BlackBerry devices have “real time” email where your BlackBerry tickles — and gets tickled back — checking for new messages all day every day every second of the day: The instant new mail arrives you are notified.

How many email accounts do you regularly check a day? I am currently using 15 separate email accounts.

My previous high a few years ago was 25. I manage all my accounts online via Google Apps for Your Domain Premier Edition: a 10 gig email store is an addict’s syringe!
Do you use an email program to download your mail or do you strictly use a web interface to interact with your email?

Continue reading → The Empty Syringe: No Mail for You!

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Getting Email Out of Gmail

Okay, I need some help. I want to pull 10,000 Gmail messages from one Gmail account into another Gmail account. Any idea how I can do that without a lot of mess?

I don’t want to download all the messages via POP3 to a mail client and then forward or redirect every message to the new Gmail account. I can’t seem to find a “mass forward” in Gmail. Does that feature exist?

It looks like you have to open each of the 10,000 messages to find the forward feature. Is there a way to get my new Gmail account to tell my old Gmail account to “send me everything you have and I’ll keep it over here instead of over there?” Is there a separate program that will do this for me? Help!

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Yahoo Mail Beta Disappointing

Last Friday I was finally invited to participate in the Yahoo! Mail Beta and I was immediately disappointed in the experience. From what I had read all over the internet since the Beta program was introduced, I thought the new Yahoo! Mail Beta was going to finally allow me to jump online and run all my 15 email accounts — I would settle for four — from one centralized location instead of having to use Outlook 2003 as my meter of reading, delivering and managing email.

Yahoo Mail Beta

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FastMail.fm is SuperFast

FastMail.fm is a SuperFast email system that has few rivals to match its full and fast features.
FastMail, with its 2gig IMAP mailbox on the paid Enhanced account is what Gmail should be and what Yahoo! and Hotmail wish to be: Fast, fat and full of messages!
FastMail offers free accounts and tiered paid accounts but I bought the “Enhanced” $40 a year plan and here’s why:

    2 GB storage space
    1 GB bandwidth per month
    250 MB file space (your own web site)
    IMAP/POP/Web access (IMAP includes clustered folders!)
    SSL IMAP
    SSL SMTP for sending email
    Mail forwarding
    Virus checker; Advanced spam filter
    5 Aliases
    Host your own domain

Continue reading → FastMail.fm is SuperFast

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Pobox Mail Server

The granddaddy of secure SMTP SSL Mail Relaying is Pobox and for over a decade I have been in love with their simple, robust and reliable service. Pobox gives you a “lifetime” email and website address.

They also offer mail bomb protection from Spammers and you can invoke a powerful set of filters that will allow you to better manage your mail. My favorite part of Pobox.com is their secure mail relay service. You can use their servers to send mail from anywhere. I find the Pobox mail servers are faster and more reliable than any other major or minor ISP mail server I have used.

No only does Pobox.com offer a secure SMTP server; they also provide SSL support for their SMTP server with several ways to configure port usage in case some of your mail ports are blocked by your work or ISP firewall. Being able to send SSL secure email and to know it will get to the person you want it to reach is a singular comfort and a joy in the wild world of the wicked web.

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The Dying Child E-Mail Scam

In the last week alone I’ve been sent no less than five pleas in e-mail from a dying child. These messages don’t come from the dying child directly, they come forwarded from some of my best and closest friends. These friends are well educated (one is a PhD at a major New York university), another is rich and savvy (a CEO of an international corporation), while another is online smart (works for an internet PR firm).

Hoax On Your Heart
The problem with these well-intentioned friends of mine is that they are being duped into a hoax and a scam. The hoax is perpetrated upon the goodness of their hearts. The scam comes when they quickly give over personal information for the sake of a dying child when they would never give that data to a complete stranger who asked them directly.

It’s funny that I never get “help this dying child” messages from my cranky, unkind, crabby-ass online friends — only the sweethearts get drawn in — and that’s a big loss, because their good hearts have been tested and tainted by the ill wind of bad intentions and that’s the greatest death of all. I mourn the inevitable cynicalization of their goodwill.

Continue reading → The Dying Child E-Mail Scam