Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with email

Alternative for SpeedFiler Outlook Plug-In?

webhund — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:13:50 -0800

(Semi)-Automatic Email Filing Alternative to SpeedFiler that works with nested public folders? No rule- or filter-based solutions need apply. I have been using the SpeedFiler Outlook plug-in for a couple of years. It's great and saves lots of time. But it doesn't seem to work with nested "public folders" in Outlook/Exchange, which is now a must-have feature my work. SpeedFiler only grabs the top level of public folders and won't drill down to sub-folders like it does beautifully for local folders in Outlook 2003/2007.

My googling for a replacement brings up a lot of noise and hasn't led anywhere productive. The beauty of SpeedFiler is that it "guesses" where the email (and reply, if any) should be stored based upon the recipient and/or subject line. Rules and filters don't accomplish the same thing and SpeedFiler fills the gap.

Anyone know of any alternatives to SpeedFiler that will work with nested public folders?

Is Outlook the Best Option?

Bunglegirl — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:13:50 -0800

What email program should my older mother use on her new Windows machine? My 65 year-old mother's computer died and her new one arrived a few minutes ago. It's running Windows XP Pro, I believe. She uses it to look at her money on Quicken, play casino video games off of CDs and check email.

She was using some very old version of Outlook before. It always had problems that she had trouble with like non-clickable links and not loading images or opening images. It's interface was cluttered with all kinds of functions she doesn't need. Her email consists of maybe 10 messages a day, mostly forwards from her friends which often include images. She doesn't use a RSS reader, calendars or any Office programs. She's gotten pretty good on the computer for someone who only started a few years ago (she's not hunting and pecking anymore) but I think a simpler interface will help her.

I'm a Mac person and, although I am often forced to help her on Windows, I don't really know what I'm doing. What email program should I tell her to use? I am in charge of setting it up so whatever I tell her is "email" she will use. I simply switched her default browser to Firefox and she didn't care. I'm thinking of Thunderbird (she doesn't like webmail or web applications) but have no experience with it. What email program should I install for her or will whatever comes with it be fine and un-complicated?

Bonus question: She insists on having Norton and Spysweeper on there. I tried to get her to use something else less bloated/horrible and she refused. Those programs crippled her last computer (but it was super old and pieced together by my dad). She just paid for new subscriptions so are there any steps to make it work well but not kill this new machine? I've read a lot about it but could stand to do some more research for specific steps.

Can you tunnel via SSH to access Gmail via IMAP in Outlook when the ports are blocked?

izicwe — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:47:40 -0800

I like to think of myself as somewhat of a power user when it comes to mail servers, SSH, Gmail, and Outlook, but this one has me stumped! I use Outlook for both work and personal e-mail, but while on the network at work our ports are pretty locked down. How might I access my Gmail account via IMAP in Outlook while on a locked-down network? Ports 25, 110, 143, 587, 993, etc., are all blocked. In order to access personal e-mail, I connect via SSH (PuTTY) to my DreamHost mail server and tunnel POP/SMTP (ports 110 and 25) traffic over that SSH session. Is there any way I could use that SSH connection to tunnel to Gmail's servers for IMAP access as well? If not using that tunnel, is there another way? I can access Gmail through a web browser, but my objective is to be able to collect all my e-mail in Outlook as well. Thanks!

Is this cultural miscommunication, or am I being scammed? How to proceed?

Anonymous — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:57:59 -0800

Looking for advice about how to handle a cultural misunderstanding...or possibly a scam. Not sure how to reconcile the experience and associated feelings, and especially unsure about how to deal with the situation in the most sensitive and informed way. I met and lived with an amazing family in Mexico recently. We shared stories and spent meals together and laughed a lot. I was looking forward to returning again the next year. A few days after I arrived home in the US, I received an email (in Spanish, but I am not fluent) from one of the family members, "Mary" (mid-30s, mother). She asked how I was doing and then launched into a story. Mary explained that she was walking around with a large sum of money (we're talking the equivalent of thousands of US dollars) and she was either robbed or lost the money. She went on to explain her financial problems, and also asked that I not say anything to her mother (giving the explanation that her heart was too delicate and she couldn't handle such news). Mary never outright asked for money, but her sharing of this info was awkward because we weren't THAT close to begin with.

I haven't responded to the email and I am not sure how to proceed. I certainly won't be offering any financial help, but I feel as though the relationship is now irrevocably damaged. Unless I am missing some nuance or cultural difference in this situation, I think this is an attempted scam. It breaks my heart, because I am now unsure whether its wise to keep in contact with any of the family members, and am questioning whether I should go back next year. I feel especially bad for the mother, if she is unaware of this behavior, and I would hate to lose the bond I (thought I) built with her (and Mary). I also wonder if this has happened to other guests, and if something should be mentioned or done about it? But most of all, I feel as though my wonderful, heartwarming experience of their gracious hospitality has been tainted, and this saddens me.

I have had past experiences to know that I am usually a pretty good judge of character. Mary's email comes as a complete surprise. Can this situation be repaired? How? How should I respond? Would it be foolish to think I could stay there again, or is that walking into drama?

Thanks for any insight on this situation!

Tracking tool for open source projects

wodow — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:09:41 -0800

Does there exist a web-based tool that tracks open source projects and informs subscribers (by email, RSS etc.) about major developments, e.g. when they release version 1.0? All projects are not equal! Some have a single mailing list, some have dedicated announcement lists, some have strange conventions.

I would like to be able to track a number of projects via simple view, e.g. web-based RSS reader style, like Google Reader. Or a service could provide RSS feeds directly.

Ok Sherlock, get your pipe.

anthropoid — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:30:12 -0800

Can you help me find an email address for Harriet Hall, MD - aka the "Skepdoc"? She's an author on the Science Based Medicine blog and I'd like to send here email regarding a post she wrote instead of commenting in the thread. The blog seems to have no "contact us" page, even when one registers and logs in. It just seems so odd!

A google search tells me only that she contributes to a number of blogs (also with no way of contacting her) and there's a picture of her on Flickr.

Any ideas? I'd like it to be as professional as possible, if that makes any sense.

Thank you, as always.

Signing a contract over email?

bah213 — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:03:16 -0800

What is the accepted procedure for signing a contract that will be sent back as an email attachment (.doc)? I received a contract for renting out a hotel space (HS Prom, advice earlier solicited here) via email (MS Word attachment), and can return it via fax or email. Not having my own fax machine, email would be better...but how exactly do I go about signing it? I know that some businesspeople have .jpg's of their signatures, but I can only remember seeing them used in letters, not official contracts. I could see printing, signing, and scanning in the whole page again, but that would change it away from .doc, which sounds weird.

Basically, I want to get this done in a way that makes me look like I actually know what I'm doing, following proper legal and that's-the-way-people-do-it procedures. If it comes to it, I can print, sign, and fax from a copy shop, but keeping everything through email would be easiest.

I'm in New York (City and State) if that affects anything. Thanks!

How to get mail BCC'd to me to show up on my phone.

4ster — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:32:57 -0800

My Blackberry (8703e, OS 4.2, Sprint, BIS) cannot receive email BCC'd to me. This is apparently because, while I have set up my Embarq mail to forward everything sent to me in the To: box and the CC: box, there is no option to set a filter to tell Embarq to send all BCC: mail to my @sprint.blackberry.net address so it will show up on my phone. Is there any kind of workaround for this? Is there any kind of workaround for this? Thanks for your help.

Evil UPS email...

doowop — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:22:01 -0800

Is our computer infected by that UPS email attachement that has been flying around lately? OK, so my wife got tricked by the malicious UPS email attachment that has been flying around.

Here's my question: She opened the ZIP file but DID NOT run the executable. Are we still OK? I'm five hundred miles away and I can't get on the computer myself. Would just opening the ZIP file launch the executable?

Cheapest mobile email/IM?

aleahey — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:19:36 -0800

Fiance and I need a cheap method of keeping in touch via email and/or instant message -- mobile-ly. Were considering getting a pair of Sidekicks, but we'd be open to a better solution. We literally only want to converse with each other, so, keep that in mind.

Fiance has T-Mobile, if that makes a difference. Would prefer a full QWERTY keyboard. Prepaid a plus.

Thanks so much.

Help get my wife's e-mail to the Gmail lifeboat!

escabeche — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 08:00:52 -0800

Escabechette has years of old e-mail stored on an old school account that's soon going to close. We want to move all this e-mail to her gmail account. Apparently this is now easy because "GMail supports IMAP." But I haven't succeeded in finding instructions (on AskMeFi or elsewhere) which are suitable for someone, like me, who doesn't know what the word "IMAP" means. Is this really easy? And can you explain to this naif how to do it? More relevant data:

* Her school e-mail client is pine -- I think this means her mail is stored in "mbox" format.
* Our access to the school account is via ssh, so whatever I would do there would have to be on the command line. This makes it hard for me to see how I could use programs like GML (which does say it supports pine.) Alternatively, if there is some giant file somewhere in her account which contains all the mail, I could scp it to my Mac and work locally, if that's helpful.
* Ideally, the transfer would preserve dates and times, the folders in which the back e-mail is stored, and so on.

HTML Email Best Practices

alan — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:38:57 -0800

I've been coerced by a client/employer to start using HTML email messages for communications with our customers. Please help me do this in the most net-responsible way possible (or tell me to burn in the special hell reserved for people who put markup on the SMTP wire) I'm looking for advice on "How to be Good" as opposed to "how to sneak around the canned meat filters"

These five things come to mind ...

1. SPF records for all our domains/servers we'll be sending from

2. Multipart email, providing both a text and HTML version

3. Host the images on our servers so we're not wasting their bandwidth

4. Unsubscribe link in the body of the message allowing people to opt out

5. Email indicating who sent the message with a physical address

Are these steps still considered standard best practices? Are there other steps I can/should take? Custom email headers that should be set outside of of "From", "To", "Reply-To"? Is there unsub info that should be put in the headers?

Any help or a nudge in the direction of a good resource on this would be appreciated.

Finally, Yes. I know. I use mutt and Mailsmith for my personal email. I'm not a fan of HTML email. That battle was lost a long time ago.

explain this email to me please

mizrachi — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:42:21 -0800

what is this email? I just received it.

Subject: To all the persons with ingenuous head and heart

To all the persons with ingenuous head and heart

If the bitch things hadn't happened to us , I won't care how dark the bitch China is . I hope my family and friends can live peacefully as you do . But all our family members were driven mad in the past, and worse now .

FYI

The Beijing bitches of our housing zone is from the worldwide famous Chinese No.1 University, the TSING HUA University ( I thought the No.1 should be the Peking University instead ) , which is the service company of our housing zone . They SERVICE us here by terrorism only since they have power as the government leaders .

Our house is new and the housing zone is new as well , I stand out organizing our House Owner Committee, asking our neibours to sign for this committee in our house , hoping to contribute something to our housing zone future . This enraged our Housing Service company , the HuaQingWuYe . Thus they arranged a dog to bite my mother !
And they note the Police to threat us , they send more than 100 bitches to our house , one by one , almost every day , to threat and disturb us , they use more than one year to arrange a complot to our Shenzhen company , they sent an agent provocateur to our company , and ask the supplier to send copied products to our company once we have new order from customers, that agent provocateur's name was also shown in the bitch sentence files , his name is Ye ZhiXuan. He has " worked " in our company for one week till all our clerks were put into prison by a secret abduction in the middle sudden night of May 21st., 2007 !

The bitch government clerks had also rob all our computers, 7pcs computer towers and 2pcs notebooks that night, as well as many goods , piratical or non-piratical !

I ask for help worldwide .
And the Beijing bitches threats to kill me .
And the Beijing bitches finally abducted me into the Shenzhen prison the same way as they did to our company clerks , on Jul. 13th., 2007 .

We were tortured into half-death by their bitch way in the bitch prison , you can't bear . You can only pray the earth to blast and kill all the bitches for you .

4 persons of a family , including a cousin , in prison , not knowing alive or dead , can you bear ?
No one of the bitch Chinese government do anything to punish their bitches and pay for their bitch actions to us till now , though I'm still asking for help worldwide !

Dear GeGe , if you still think such a bitch government is hopeful , please type out all the documents in the "http://www.firstsing.com/news_8.htm
http://www.firstsing.com/sue2007.rar "
and send to the highest court of the bitch China through the address below :

最高人民法院立案庭东城区东交民巷27号100745 85256114
The Registry Court of The Highest Court of China , Building No.27, DongJiaoMinXiang, east city zone, Beijing, China
Zip 100745 , Tel. 86 010 85256114

Don't say it's my idea .
We don't know whether the bitches will do next . They are stakeouting all our family members and friends every day .
If we can't do anything to save ourselves , they might kill all of us by their bitch way sooner or later .

PHPList: 9000 members uploaded, 0 displaying.

darth_tedious — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:54:32 -0800

I've just uploaded a .csv email list of about 9000 people to phplist... but phplist shows the list as having 0 members. (Actually, I've gotten this result twice... with two different 9000 member lists.) Any guesses as to what I'm doing wrong... or what I should be doing differently? Thanks! (Host: Hostgator)

Exporting email subjects to Excel

SheIsMighty — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:07:27 -0800

How can I export a bunch of email subjects to Excel? I have a few hundred emails that all have the same type of subject: Last name, First name, ID code. I'd really like to export these subjects into an excel file so I can sort by name and compare them to another excel file that I have. Currently, I'm comparing the other excel file I have on paper with the list of emails I have on the screen. This will get old soon. Any ideas? (the email I'm using is Thunderbird)

Microsoft Exchange Server for Epsilon Semi-Morons?

loquacious — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:39:04 -0800

How do I set up Microsoft Exchange (or Outlook) Server for a small office? I'm providing basic knuckle-dragger tech support for a small office, and one of the things they want to implement and that I want to provide eventually is an Exchange or Outlook server.

Where do I begin? What should I watch out for? What about security issues?

I will be using Server 2003 and a primarily XP client base.

Send a password over email

bjtitus — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 17:14:12 -0800

Send a password over email (to a non-techy client) without compromising its security. I have a web-design client whom I need to send a Paypal password to. I have worked to make this password secure and would like to avoid sending it in a plain text email over the interwebs. How can I send it without compromising its security?

Am I a sucker?

LiveToEat — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:26:32 -0800

Am I a sucker or will this actually make me some money? I work an entry level, boring, cubicle-confined job. I was looking at Craigslist to see if there's anything interesting I can do to make some extra pocket money and I found these sites:
http://www.dealsncash.com/
http://hits4pay.com/

I've seen a lot of these kinds of ads on CL and I can't help but be curious. Are they scams? How do they work? I figure if I can make some money while sitting around at my desk or in my free time, it might be worth it. I wouldn't do anything that required a credit card number, obviously. Has anyone else done this?

Can an email group be a chat group for some, and an announce-only group for others?

ManInSuit — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:11:17 -0800

Is there a way to make an email list announce-only for some recipients and unmoderated for others? Lots of things in my life involve organizing email lists where I occasionally send announcements to small groups of subscribers (10-75 people, say).

My guess is that some people on these lists would like to be able to reply and chat with other recipients, and some people would like to just get the announcements.

I wonder if there's some way to arrange this? I can see how a service like google groups could offer this. As a group subscriber, you could choose to receive only messages from the moderator, or you could choose to receive all messages sent to the list address.

Do you know if there's a way to do this? A mailing-group service that supports this option?

I don't think having separate "announce" and "chat" lists will do what I want. It seems like too much thinking. I'd like people to just be able to reply to an announcement, and know that their reply will only go to people who want to get it.

Our e-newsletter script went broke... need help!

(bb|[^b]{2}) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:39:44 -0800

PHP List is borked, and our e-newsletter was supposed to go out this morning! Does anyone have suggestions for a similar online e-newsletter management system (preferably free or ultra-inexpensive)? Here's the downlow:

- Subscription list of roughly 2,000
- We send our newsletter once a week
- Nothing fancy, just a script that sends in basic HTML and plain text (if the client doesn't support the latter)
- We don't want something that runs as an app, we like it being hosted and run off our server

PHP List was working great, but it suddenly stopped doing so about an hour ago. I think it's time for us to part ways. Any suggestions would be great!

Email Marketing

freshwater_pr0n — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 21:31:50 -0800

I'm a dog trainer. Almost 100% of the potential clients who telephone me sign up for lessons. Far fewer, about 40% of the people who email me, sign up for lessons. The other 60% don't respond to my email. How can I get that other 60% to sign up? Most people who telephone me have been referred to me by a past client, a vet, or another pet professional. The people who email me find me through Google, I guess.

My stock response is something like,

"Hi! Thanks for getting in touch. (A sentence or two letting them know that I can help with the problem about which they've emailed me.) Give me a call at (555) 555-1234 if you'd like to set up a time for us to meet."

Then I either get a call back, and get the client, or never hear anything else from them.

Should I be sending follow-up emails? That feels intrusive and spammy to me, but maybe I should just go for it. Or should I tweak the wording of my initial reply email so that it's more effective?

Any central signature managment tools for MS Exchange?

bartleby — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:33:56 -0800

ExchangeFilter: any centralized signature/logo/disclaimer management tools you can recommend? I'd rather not go desk to desk to add a logo. OK, so I asked basically the same question two years ago; I ended up going from workstation to workstation adding a disclaimer to 40 people's signatures in Outlook. (There's a policy that no one is allowed to modify their own signature, so any changes have to be made by IT, which is me.) That involves travelling to 5 different sites, and I'd rather not do it again.

But there's a request in the air to add a logo or some other doodads to the company email signatures. Since my question was asked the first time, perhaps some advancements have been made.
Can this be done by:
1) a new Active Directory feature in Server 2008?
2) a new feature in Exchange 2007?
[we're running Server/Ex 2003 now]
3) if not, and this is still a 3rd-party-software solution, can you recommend any products? Exclaimer seems to come up a lot - any reviews?

It's not real, dammit.

Skyanth — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 05:19:54 -0800

How do you deal with friends or family sending you (and everyone else in their address book) fake virus warnings and other hoaxes? Do you tell them to do a &$(#^% simple online search before they send the thing on to everyone they know or is it better to ignore them?

And if you do tell them, do you send the mail back to everyone who was on the list (even the people you don't know), hoping that you might catch another one who was going to make the same mistake (but using the same deplorable mechanism)?

If I send to all I feel like a pedant. If I ignore it I feel like I didn't take the chance to at least stop this branch of the hoax in its tracks (and I do believe that the internet would be a better place if everyone did this because then it wouldn't become a hoax in the first place). And I've tried educating them on the nature of hoaxes, but somehow they seem to lack the "this must be fake" alarm bells that some of us were born with so that doesn't seem to have any effect.

What do you do?

Alternatives to Exchange?

keep it tight — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:40:45 -0800

Has anyone in the hive had experience with Kerio Mail Server?

Solution May Take Patience

B(oYo)BIES — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:44:23 -0800

Our company has been using Gmail’s SMTP servers without issue for the last couple years for sending our ecommerce clients emails that read “A customer has placed an online order on your web site. To access it go to https://www.sometime.com/.” - Well, this week Gmail started blocking our outgoing messages as spam. Every time we send one of these emails, or anything similar to it, we get the following response from Gmail:
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

clientsemailaddress@isp.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: Message rejected. See http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=69585 for more information.

This has been an issue for a lot of people as of late. We don’t have time to hope Gmail fixes their false positives issue, and need another solution ASAP. We send roughly 200 to 250 emails a day, to one recipient per email. We need a solution that isn’t going to blacklist us as spam before the message even leaves (Gmail) and isn’t going to be hit as spam when it hits the client’s inbox.

We have started looking into other solutions like Send Blaster and
Secure SMTP - any thoughts on these services, or perhaps a better service?

Ideas? Suggestions? Anything useful that may help us? Thank you in advanced.