This is the Email presentation at the Oak Point Computer Club meeting of September 8th, 2008. As the members are a mixed bunch, some with no email experience at all and others having used email for years, the topics range from very basic to fairly advanced. There should be something here for everyone.

Please remember: I'm happy to help any Oak Point resident with any computer problem but because I do that for free, it's on my terms when I have the free time to help you. If you can afford to pay someone, Hank Levesque lives right here at Oak Point and is both knowledgeable and reasonable.

When did Microsoft invent Email?

Microsoft didn't invent email. The beginnings of email go back to 1965; Microsoft didn't even start connecting to the Internet until the mid-90's and Outlook didn't exist until 1997!

By early 70's, "joe@somecomputer" was in use. I had an Internet email address in 1991 (apl@world.std.com), as did many other early computer users.

How do I set up email to begin with? I don't have an email address!

If you have Internet access, you have an email address. Ask your Internet provider what it is. It might be POP, IMAP or Webmail, but you will have something (more on the differences later).

But.. you may not want to use the address they give you. You have "maryjones@netzero.com", but what happens when you decide to go with Comcast instead? They'll give you "Maryjones7734@comcast.net" and you'll have to tell everybody to start using that. That's annoying, so take the time now to get a permanent email address with someone like Gmail, Yahoo or MSN. That's easy to do: just type "get google email" or "get yahoo email", "get msn email" into your browser search box.

Note that if you were using dialup AOL and have switched to Comcast or Verizon, you can still keep your AOL email account and access it through the web at aol.com.

If you aren't using Webmail, setting up an email account in Outlook or any other email client is fairly painless. You'll need to know a few things:

• Your Incoming POP IMAP, or (rarely) Exchange server
• Your Outgoing (SMTP) server - often the same as the incoming
• Your Email address

If there are other things you need to know, your ISP will tell you. Often they have a web page with detailed instructions and usually their tech support people can help you set up your account.

What the heck is webmail, and why does it make everything confused?

Webmail is Browser based - you use your web browser to read it and to send new mail. Your mail is stored on the mail server at Comcast or Verizon or Google, Yahoo.. it's never transferred to your computer. That has a lot of advantages: you can get to your email from anywhere - your house, your kid's house, and while on vacation in Hawaii.. and if your computer goes belly up, your email is still safe on the server. When your computer gets fixed (or you buy a new one), your email is waiting for you.

But if your ISP (your Internet Service Provider) also offers POP mail (Verizon, Comcast), this can cause confusion, The reason is that POP retrieves mail from the server, brings it down to your computer and then deletes it from the server. If you then go look with Webmail, that email is gone! That's confusing..

There's more confusion caused by POP being unable to see folders created on the Webmail server. Those emails are just completely invisible to POP.

There are two ways to fix that. One is to tell POP NOT to delete mail until you delete it on your computer. That solves part of the confusion, but there's a better choice, and that's to use IMAP, which works just like Webmail and will let you see the "missing" folders.

What is a "Draft"?

A Draft is just a message you haven't sent yet. Most mail clients can save these for you so you can work on your email over time before sending. Unfortunately, some webmail providers are very bad about this: you can lose everything you typed if you don't save frequently.

Better clients (Gmail) save automatically - it's much harder to lose anything.

What is the difference between CC, BCC, and Forwarding?

What are all those ">>>"'s doing in my mail?

All email clients today can send cc's (carbon copy) or bcc's (blind carbon copy). The BCC's just aren't seen by other recipients - they don't know who you sent the mail to. When you forward mail to someone, the original sender doesn't know you did that either.

When you forward, or when someone forwards to you, you may see a lot of ">>>" characters. These are added by SOME email clients when forwarding. You can get rid of those: see Tech Tips: E-Mail Fast (and Clean) Forward.

It's also possible (and often a better idea) to forward emails as an attachment. That makes for a clean message that will look just like it did when you first saw it.

Depending upon your email client and upon how an attachment was sent to you, attachments may or may not be included when you forward to someone else. If you have that problem, one fix is to save the attachment locally and then re-attach it to your forwarded message. (See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=236432 for a common Outlook bug).

Be very careful with "Reply-All". Pay attention - did you really want to reply to everyone? Maybe not.. the Internet is full of stories where people got in a lot of trouble or were terribly embarrassed because of that. Be careful!

One more thing about forwarding those "you have to see this!" web page links:

Let's say that you were a nasty virus or spyware author and you wanted your creation spread quickly. Wouldn't one way to do that be to put it on a web page that had pictures of cute puppies or some guy crashing his car off an eighty foot cliff? You send the link to a few people, they forward it to their friends.. think about it.

You do NOT want to be infected by a virus. Cleaning it off your computer can be difficult and sometimes impossible. Please read Firewall Problems if you do not currently have a hardware firewall router.

There's a very geeky book by the Chief Virus Architect at Norton: Virus Research and Defense by Peter Szor. It's not something I'd recommend to most people (you need a very deep computer background to understand it) but the author admits that there may already be computer viruses that cannot be detected, period. Scary stuff!

See the section on free A/V software too.

I Can't Find an Email I Sent!

Most email clients have some sort of "search" feature. Some aren't all that good (Gmail's is probably the best) so you may need to try different search terms and spelling. There are Desktop Search programs (Google Desktop, Apple Spotlight) that will also search mail messages; these can sometimes find things faster than the built-in search.

Organizing mail by folders or tags (keywords that you label the email with) can help find things later. Again, I think Gmail does the best job with this, but some people disagree.

Creating folders (or labels in Gmail) can really help, but please don't use Trash as a storage bin! We'll talk more about why that's a terrible idea later, but really: do you store stuff you might need later in your kitchen trash bag? Trash is trash; it isn't storage for "I might need this later" stuff.

Which of the following email addresses will get to pcunix@gmail.com?

• pcunix@gmail.com
• "Tony Lawrence" <pcunix@gmail.com>
• tony@aplawrence.com
• sales@aplawrence.com
• pcunix+computerclub@gmail.com
• pcunix(hi there tony)@gmail.com

All of them.

So? Well, one use for things like "pcunix+computerclub@gmail.com" is to let automatic rules file or copy the email to specific folders. Almost all email clients have "rules" you can use to move mail around, delete it automatically, or even forward it somewhere else. I have rules that send those "aplawrence" addresses on to my Gmail account. I could have rules in Gmail that looked for "pcunix+computerclub@gmail.com" and marked those specially for me. Exactly what you can do with rules and how easy it is to do it depends on your specific email client, but you definitely should look into this.

Why is mail stuck in my Outbox?

First, is it just one email? If so, it's probably misaddressed or the recipient's server could be having temporary problems. Look at the address carefully - you may have mistyped it (comcat.net instead of comcast.net for example).

If it's more than one, start with the obvious. Is your Internet connection working? Can you still browse the Web? If not, email can't get out, so that's why it's still in your inbox.

This gets a little geeky, but sometimes it's a DNS problem. DNS is what translates names like Comcast.net to real IP addresses. That's a critical step for browsing or sending mail. Usually if DNS is broken, it is totally broken, but sometimes it's just some names that can't be translated. You can check that by using a web based "nslookup" or "dig" service to check the address - if it can find "xyz.com" but you can't (try "nslookup xyz.com" in a Dos command box), then you have a local partial DNS problem. Contact your ISP or someone like me for help.

Virus scanning software can sometimes interfere with outgoing mail. Try shutting it off. Some virus software actually changes your account setup: you had put in that your outgoing mailserver is "smtp.comcast.net" but the virus software changed that to "localhost" or "127.0.0.1". Try changing it back or try temporarily disabling the virus scanning.

You can test your POP or IMAP email outside of Outlook or whatever email client you use. This is more than a little geeky, but it's really not as hard as it looks.

We connect to the mailserver on a special "port". Specifically, to send mail, we connect on port 25 - that's the SMTP (Simple mail Transfer Protocol) port. Think of ports like telephone extensions. We ask DNS what the MX is for aplawrence.com and it tells us that it is 64.226.42.29. We connect to that address and ask for port 25.

What does it talk to on port 25? A mailserver program. That might be Sendmail, Postfix, Qmail, Kerio (that's what I sell) or one of many others.

Testing SMTP Server (sending email)

(everything you would type is in bold).

You'd replace "aplawrence.com" with your assigned SMTP server and
"aplawrence.org" with just about anything.

Windows:  Start->Run, type "telnet yoursmtpserverver 25"

Or open Command and type telnet command as shown.

Vista has  two problems

Start->Run disabled: 
   1.  Right-click on the Start menu and choose Properties;
   2. Select the Start Menu tab and click on the Customize... button;
   3. Ensure the "Run command" option is checked.

Telnet disabled:

1. Open "Control Panel"

2. Select "Programs and Features"

3. In the left column, select "Turn Windows features on or
off"
4. Check the box next to telnet to enable it.

 

telnet aplawrence.com 25
Connected to aplawrence.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 vps.pcunix.com ESMTP SMTP Ready; Fri, 8 Aug 2008 15:12:09 GMT
HELO aplawrence.org
250 vps.pcunix.com Hello pool-71-184-234-68.bstnma.fios.verizon.net [71.184.234.68], pleased to meet you
MAIL FROM: tony@aplawrence.com
250 2.1.0 tony@aplawrence.com... Sender ok
RCPT TO: pcunix@aplawrence.com
250 2.1.5 pcunix@aplawrence.com... Recipient ok
DATA
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
Date: Aug 25, 2008
Subject: Test message

Hi there

.
250 2.0.0 m78FCoC86720 Message accepted for delivery
QUIT
221 2.0.0 vps.pcunix.com closing connection

If you have been using some other SMTP server (not your ISP's server), you may suddenly find that you are no longer allowed to use it. Why? Nowadays many ISP's block port 25 going anywhere EXCEPT to their mailserver. They do this to help prevent your computer being taken over by a virus and being used to send spam. That virus isn't going to use Outlook to send mail (though it may look in Outlook for people to send to). It will try to send directly because it doesn't want to go through any filtering your ISP may have and it also wants to send messages very quickly - lots and lots of messages. Blocking port 25 can at least slow it down and your ISP may be able to notice your infection more easily.

Why can't I receive email?

The same as above: Virus software, Internet connection, DNS. But there is another possibility too: your Inbox might be too big. Early versions of Outlook have a flat 2GB limit on the size of your Inbox (and that includes Trash and other folders under Inbox!). When it reaches that limit (easy to do with big attachments), that's it. Worse, your mailbox may irretrievably break - yet another reason to use IMAP!

You can test getting mail too. This time we connect on a different port:

Testing POP Connection (Getting Email)

telnet aplawrence.com 110
+OK POP3 server ready <2971299840.1219332685@MacBook-2.local>
user apl
+OK please send PASS command
pass my_secret_password
+OK 2 messages (2237 octets)
list
+OK scan listing follows
1 1185
2 1052
.
retr 1
+OK message 1 (1185 octets)
Return-Path: <admin@localhost>
Received: from [127.0.0.1] ([127.0.0.1])
	by MacBook-2.local
	for tony@localhost;
	Wed, 21 May 2008 14:41:55 -0400
To: tony@localhost
From: Administrator <admin@localhost>
Subject: after move
Message-ID: <20080521184155.52c329b5@MacBook-2.local>
Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 14:41:55 -0400
X-User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US;
rv:1.8.1.14)
	Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
	boundary="-----------43b721f4f8359ad980636bf7c859ac08"

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

-------------43b721f4f8359ad980636bf7c859ac08
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

after move

-------------43b721f4f8359ad980636bf7c859ac08
Content-Type: text/html;
	charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN'>
<html>
<head>
 <meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html;charset=us-ascii'>
 <style>BODY{font:10pt Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif;}</style>
</head>
<body>
after move<br></body></html>
-------------43b721f4f8359ad980636bf7c859ac08--

.
quit  
+OK POP3 server signing off

Testing IMAP (getting email)

(each command must be preceded by a unique string.  I used "abc(n)"
here)



telnet 10.1.36.248 143
Trying 10.1.36.248...
Connected to 10.1.36.248 (10.1.36.248).
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK e-smith.pcunixx.com IMAP4rev1 v12.264 server ready
abc1 login linda AFr54Tui8
abc1 OK LOGIN completed
abc2 select inbox
* 1 EXISTS
* 2 EXISTS
* 1 RECENT
* OK [UIDVALIDITY 1020929003] UID validity status
* OK [UIDNEXT 1020929444] Predicted next UID
* FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Draft \Seen)
* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS ()] Permanent flags
* OK [UNSEEN 2] first unseen message in inbox
abc2 OK [READ-WRITE] SELECT completed
abc3 fetch 2 body[text]
* 2 FETCH (BODY[TEXT] {25}

This is just a test

)
* 2 FETCH (FLAGS (\Recent \Seen))
abc3 OK FETCH completed
abc4 close
abc4 OK CLOSE completed
abc5 logout
* BYE e-smith.pcunixx.com IMAP4rev1 server terminating connection
abc5 OK LOGOUT completed


  

Why can't I open the attachment Mary sent me?

First of all, it might not really be an attachment. Those "eml" attachments you may have seen are Microsoft "stationery" files - they are just decoration for other Outlook users. See Unable to Open EML File Attachments in Outlook Express.

It's possible that Outlook or Outlook Express could be stopping you:

Tools->Options->Security "Do not allow attachments to be saved or opened that could potentially be a virus"

Uncheck that.

Unfortunately, some versions of Outlook are much more stubborn. It gets worse: Microsoft Outlook (version 2000 SP3 onwards) absolutely prevents the opening of certain types of attachments. Isn't that nice? See Outlook E-mail Attachment Security Update and Outlook attachment security search results.

You may just not have the program you need to see the attachment. For example, many people got Microsoft Works free with their computer. If they send you a "Works" attachment, you won't be able to open it if you use Microsoft Word. There is a conversion program you can get from Microsoft that will let Word read Works files, but you have to download it. If you don't have either, you may be out of luck.

By the way, you do not need Word or Office to open Microsoft documents. Google Docs can open almost all of them and so can many free alternative "office suites". Try searching for "free word processors" to find them.

It's also possible that you have file associations set incorrectly (Microsoft). See Changing a File Association, Repairing broken File Associations for an example of that.

I sent email to Bob but it can't be delivered. Why?

Again, it may just be misaddressed - check what you typed. I often see things like "mary,@gmail.com" - that comma shouldn't be there.

You could be "blacklisted". That's where the receiving server thinks your email server is guilty of sending spam. This sometimes happens with Gmail, Comcast, Verizon.. they'll get it fixed very quickly, but it can be very annoying. Usually (but not always!) you'll get a message back saying that you were blacklisted.

Bob's spam filters or mail rules may have misfiled your email. That's mostly Bob's problem, but there are things you can do to help being misclassified as spam.

• DON'T TYPE IN ALL CAPS.
• Don't use HTML for mail (there's always a setting that says something like "use plain text").
• Don't send big attachments - you might be exceeding Bob's size quotas!
• Don't leave the Subject line blank.
• Don't CC 500 other people.

These are all things that can cause your email to get blocked or seen as spam. One alone might not do it, but combine them all and you are heading for trouble.

If your computer is infected, Bob's virus scanner may block you. If you send certain types of attachments (.exe, .com), you may be blocked.

Bob may have a mail quota for the number of messages or their total size. You might get a return email telling you that, but you might not.

Finally, Bob's email server might just be down right now. You'll almost always get a message from your SMTP server if that happens. Sometimes that message just tells you that there's a delay and your message will be attempted later, sometimes it tells you it has given up. If it gave up, and you know the address is correct, try it tomorrow.

How do I automatically send an "On vacation" message?

That is entirely up to software client you are using. There's almost always a way to do it; see this for an example: How to Set Up a Vacation Auto-Response in Windows Mail or Outlook Express.

How can I find someone's email address?

There is no real way. Try to Google their name, or guess.

I was not able to sign in to Outlook Express. Is there any reason I should use it?

You need to use something - Webmail maybe? Gmail? If Outlook is broken, you can download the free Thunderbird email client. A lot of folks think it's far better than Outlook anyway.

Is it dangerous if I do not SIGN OUT of e-mail? Yahoo told me it is necessary if I do not want to lose all my mail (which I did once). When I sign out I have to fill in my address and my password to get back in. Verizon requires nothing to get back in.

Wow! That is REALLY bad software. You really should check out Gmail. They won't do nasty things like that. I stay signed in to Gmail for days, weeks, maybe months at times!

When I write a long e-mail, over 20 minutes, I get cut off and my e-mail is lost. Is this normal?

No, it's not. Pretty much the same comments as above: this is bad, bad software. What's happening is that your session is timing out and they aren't saving your work - that's awful! Time to switch to Gmail, MSN or something else.

I hit "Reply-All" but Outlook says there is something wrong with one of the addresses.

Outlook is probably right. Try this: get rid of all the angle brackets, quotes and everything else and just try the "joe@wherever.com" part. You can use cut and paste to do that.

I have "mary@aol.com", "mary@verizon.net" and "mary@gmail.com".. it's very confusing!

All email servers allow automatic forwarding. Just forward all the others to the account you prefer to use. Your ISP (or any handy computer geek) can help you do that.

Is Spam and Spyware the same thing?

Well, they can be, but they usually are not. Spammers want to sell you something, spyware is designed to hurt you or steal something from you. Spyware is similar to virus infection, but by definition a virus is designed to spread to other computers. Virus infections are sometimes designed to send spam or install spyware.. it's a nasty world out there.

I get so much spam! What can I do?

One man's spam is another's lunchmeat.

I suppose some people actually want to be notified about cheap drugs and loose women supposedly searching for companionship. Is an email announcing a legitimate 4.25% no point remortgage spam? I don't know, and either does anyone else. That's what makes filtering spam so difficult.

You definitely want to filter for viruses and spyware.. but filtering spam is a double-edged sword. It WILL cause "false positives": mail you really wanted to read will sometimes go to Spam. That's just the way it is, unfortunately. The tighter your spam filters, the more false positives.

I got an email that said my mail to somebody couldn't be delivered but I never sent it. Do I have a virus?

More often someone you know has the virus. What happened was that the virus found your email in their address book and is sending out junk that pretends to come from you. If you look back at the example of manually sending email with telnet, you may have thought "I wonder if I could put a fake address in the 'From' line?". Yes, you could.

Do Challenge-Response systems prevent spam?

Yes, at the cost of annoying people. These things require you to visit some web page before the mail you sent can be delivered. I find that VERY annoying : I won't respond to anyone who contacts me and requires this for me to answer.

Don't use this for business!!

What about Microsoft Defender and other Spam/Spyware sweepers?

Sure, most are as good as any, and free is very good.. theoretically, Microsoft should know more about preventing Windows infections than anyone else, but that is arguable.

My computer guy says McAfee A/V is no good!

OK. Some other guy will say the same about Norton. They all have their good points and bad points. Consumer Reports recent review of Virus Scanners was technically bad, but still worth reading. But don't decide X is better than Y just from that.

What about free A/V software?

I wish I could say otherwise, but it's just not as good as the stuff you pay for and sometimes includes Nagware in it (Nagware is constant reminders to upgrade to a not-free version).

However, commercial anti-virus software can bog down your system more - it's a Catch-22 (which is why I use a Mac!).

The stuff that does scans from a web page can identify many infections and even remove some of those, but more stubborn situations need to be handled at the computer. You might need to boot in "safe mode" (press F8 while starting up) or even boot from a safe CD or floppy before the virus can be eradicated. Sometimes your only choice is to reinstall your operating system - possibly losing a lot of files in the process. In fact, a reinstall is exactly what Microsoft itself recommends. Don't treat virus infections casually!

I'll be updating this after the meeting if we get any questions that are not covered here.

If you simply can't get enough geekish email stuff, you might try my tech site: http://aplawrence.com/Mail/.

Crocetti's (Oakdale Packing) (Ed Lupo's son-in-law - he says it's better prices than Hannaford for meat)