email

Seek allows for ‘faceted browsing’ of email and looks, pretty much, like the coolest thing to hit email since the @ symbol. It’s Thunderbird only, though. At this point I don’t know if it would be possible for me to abandon Outlook. The email functionality I could take or leave, but the address book and calendar are so entwined in my life there’s no way to chunk them. I need to be able to synch with my iPhone … mumble grumble … <rolls up sleeves> … must to do something …

I installed Akismet here at the beginning of the Fall of 2006. I really don’t know how I lived without it. I emptied the queue about seven hours ago, and when I got to the office this morning there were already almost 1500 comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks flagged as spam.

Akismet has protected your site from 380,243 spam comments already, and there are 1,471 comments in your spam queue right now.

Zeldman does a spectacular job explaining why I hate when people use Word as their email editor.

One of the world’s worst, most-annoying spam-prevention systems is the one in my current version of Outlook — Microsoft® Outlook® 2003 (11.8002.6568) SP2. I’d say about one out of every three times I attempt to click on a link in an email, I get a warning telling me that all links in the message have been disabled to help protect me from ones that may be “harmful”. As far as I can tell there is no way to globally deactivate this, so I have to continually enable links before I can click anything. It is obnoxious and insulting and I hate it.

My mom and dad both love taking photos with their cell phones and then texting them to me. As much as I enjoy receiving them, I hate the way they take for-freaking-ever to display on my phone. I also hate having photos on my cell phone. (You can’t do anything with them there!) Today I had an idea. “I wonder if you can send camera photos via email instead of only via SMS?” I gave it a shot and it works! I don’t know about all carriers, but if you have Cingular, you can text a cell phone photo to an email address instead of to someone else’s cell phone. That is extra cool.

Click “Store”, then “Send in Message”. Instead of selecting a name from your address book, just enter an email address. It’s that simple. Now I can save all these pictures of my dad golfing and my mom’s cats on my computer. I can Photoshop them and crop them and send them to my friends and archive them and treat them just like … well … real digital photos. All I have to do is convince them to do this …

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I receive an incredible amount of spam. I have a dozen or so email accounts and I manage about two dozen websites. Plus I run the IT department at my office. I get about 500 spam comments and 1500 spam pingbacks and / or trackbacks on blogs each day, and that’s with Akismet and a captcha installed. If I had to guess I’d say I get somewhere around 1500 spam emails each day. I have both Outlook’s internal spam-catcher and SpamBayes running, but some still slip into my Inbox. I’ve gotten quite good at scanning and realizing instantly if something is for me or for the trash.

This morning a piece of spam managed to make it into my Inbox and it momentarily shocked me. I hardly ever look at the subject line of email these days. The part that I noticed said, “This is not meant to be an insult or anything but people are talking at work about your weight.” Whoa! I mean, I’m not carrying around a spare tire or anything, but I’ve been knocking back M&Ms and Almond Joys like a madman since Halloween so when I saw that I freaked. Sure it was only for just that millisecond before my brain realized it was spam, but still. Talk about a way to catch someone’s attention!

I really don’t understand how this particular message is supposed to fool anyone. I don’t have anyone at my office named “Mark” and even if I did there’s no way he’d mail me at the completely obscure alias of a domain nobody at work even knows I own. This guy must be sending millions of these if he expects to get any sort of response.

amspay otsbay ogay erehay

Trust me. You want to go get HideOutlook from r2 studios. This little app is great! It lets you minimize Outlook to the system tray instead of the taskbar. Click the icon in the systray and Outlook pops open or closed; right-click it and you can create new email messages, appointments, etc. Very hep. And it’s free!

A few people have asked me how I got that little “eMail this entry” link on my posts. I wrote a little tutorial on my projects blog describing how I did it. Enjoy.

Several people have asked me how I did it, so I wrote a tutorial on how to create a pop-up ‘eMail This Entry’ window in MovableType. Here it is.

PLEASE NOTE:
This tutorial is based on MovableType Version 2.1 only. If you have upgraded to Version 2.2 I advise you to wait until I have had a chance to update the tutorial!

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Wow! Bloglet looks cool as heck. It allows readers to subscribe to your blog as an eMail service. At the end of each day, it will eMail subscribers all of your posts (or excerpts!) from that day. Currently it only works with Blogger, but I am hoping that Ben and Mena will add support to MovableType in a future release. I think that it’s definitely something I would use.

Q. Is there any way to work around the Outlook security update?
A. Way One Way Two Way Three

This article, Setting Up Form Mail, was a tremendous help in my latest project. Soon you will be able to send any MT entry via eMail. How cool is that? Check out my Hemingway blog! Each individual post has this feature in place. w00t! I am an excited nerd now!

If you’re looking for a really insulting and / or offensive eMail address or web site, look no further than datapimp email and hosting services. The original is still the best.

*Note: I actually think anothermartiniplease.com is kind of cool. I don’t like martinis, though. Yech.