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Gmail – Fast & easy way to set-up multiple signatures inc HTML, RSS etc via Bookmarklet in any OS or browser http://bit.ly/56nraY @geekfg

Some of us may have been following the whole ‘OzCar’ affair amongst our Federal politicians. (see Turnbull denies passing on fake email) . Me – I couldn’t care less but I did find it interesting how technology particularly emails and their authenticity entered into the accusations.

At our recent meeting Ross mentioned it made him curious about how the email header worked in his email program and whether he could change it – and he could.

Most desktop email programs – such as Thunderbird, Outlook, Outlook Express or the updated version called Windows Mail or Windows Live mail – will allow you to specify to specify a ‘From’ address with some even doing so on a per email basis. The details you write in the From address don’t have to be the actual address you are using, that is they don’t have to correspond with the address that your Internet Provider or email provider (if you use a Yahoo, Gmail or other address) has given you. This sort of spoofing of addresses is an old way of sending spam which of course looks to come from someone other than the real spammer

The secret is not in the sender but in the receiver because all of the details of the email are contained within the ‘Header’ of most any email message and it isn’t hard to see them if they aren’t shown by default.

Below is an excerpt from an article at MakeUseOf.com that discusses the information contained in every email and the ways in which you can find it for yourself.

How To Trace Your Emails Back To The Source

Most people won’t notice this, but emails actually arrive in your inbox with a ‘receipt’, which contains a lot of information about the sender. In order to find the sender’s identity, we only need to retrieve an IP address, but inside the email header we can also find the originating domain, reply-to address and sometimes even the email client, for example Thunderbird.

Why would you want to find out the identity of the sender? Well, you may have heard of shady email scams or emails supposedly from Paypal inviting you to re-enter your personal information. Now, you can determine if an email is truly from the authentic source.

Accessing the email header is different for every email provider or email application, and sometimes, it is even hidden. In most of the cases however, the option to reveal the full header will be somewhere in the area where the subject and sender name are provided.

So read the article and next time you get a suspicious looking email you can check it out. You never know – it might be from Ross!

Seems there was a small slip up with the Spam filters at Gmail HQ today.
More info at the Gmail Blog

I like the tone of these notes – sort of first person, friendly and helpful. Not what you expect as an official correspondence from a big company.

if you are a Gmail user like me then you should check your spam folder to make sure no ‘good’ messages went in due to the error. If you use Gmail through a desktop client (like Thunderbird) this means logging into the Gmail website to check. Probably not a bad idea to do that regularly anyway. Spam is deleted every 30 days so a quick check twice a month ought to keep you safe. Unless you are expecting something important that didn’t arrive!
No spam filter is perfect but in my experience Gmail doesn’t get many wrong either way. Not only is it the best spam filter I have ever used but it is also the best email system I have found – and it’s free! Even my custom email addresses are free using Google Apps for Your Domain.

If you do use Gmail online through your browser (and not through a desktop client) did you know that offline access is now available using Google Gears? It allows your email to work right in the browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome) even when you aren’t connected to the internet. It’s very handy and makes giving up Thunderbird or Outlook very easy now.

More details: Gmail Blog explains how it works and Lifehacker explains How Offline Gmail Decides Which Messages to Download

At Mullies we have recently discussed RSS feeds as a way to keep up to date with websites and articles of interest. Here’s the link to the last item RSS – It’s really simple

For those who prefer their news in an email/newsletter format below is a way to subscribe to feeds and have them delivered to you via email. I know some of you like to hoard, I mean archive, all your articles and storing the pdfs would be a great way to do that.

To use this service you will need to copy the url/address for the feed and paste it into the service at the Tabbloid site.

So if Google Reader or another RSS reader application doesn’t float your boat you might prefer this – give Tabbloid a go

 

RSS Feeds are probably the best way of receiving updates from favorite websites and services. They are however still more of a thing for the technical inclined Internet users and largely ignored by the average users. They do have a few other limitations like only being viewable in applications that support RSS News Feeds.

One option that has become popular in recent months is to create pdf documents out of RSS News Feeds which solves the accessibility problem. Tabbloid is a relatively new Internet service that can turn RSS News Feeds into pdf documents and send those news digest right to the user’s inbox.

This is done by pasting RSS News Feed urls into the form on the main Tabbloid website. The service will check the feed, display a preview of the last news items that have been posted and ask the user to accept or reject it. If the user accepts the feed it gets added to the list of feeds that will be processed.

It is possible to add multiple feeds which would then all be used to fill the pdf document. Options exist to generate the pdf right at the website or set delivery options to receive the pdf document in the inbox. The possible intervals are hourly, daily or weekly.

Source: Get Magazine Style RSS News Feeds Delivered To Your Inbox
Site: http://www.ghacks.net/2008/11/04/get-magazine-style-rss-news-feeds-delivered-to-your-inbox/

Don’t know what RSS is? It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it lets you read all your favourite blogs and news sites from one place by pulling content from them. That means you don’t need to keep visiting tons of websites to check for new content.

RSS Feeds have rapidly replaced the old ‘email newsletter’ as a way to communicate with people who are interested in your website. And they work as an update announcement every time you add or change something on a site – For that reason they work particularly well with sites that have content in small chunks like blogs etc

Here is a short video that explains RSS in plain English and helps you get started:

RSS Feeds have rapidly replaced the old ‘email newsletter’ as a way to communicate with people who are interested in your website. And they work as an update announcement every time you add or change something on a site – For that reason they work particularly well with sites that have content in small chunks like blogs etc. Really savvy operators, like say the Mulligrubs website, offer a way to subscribe to updates via either RSS or email

Subscribing to RSS feeds will be discussed at this weeks Mullies meeting along with lots of other items of interest plus the usual Q&A – See you there

Notes:
Idea for the post and initial text and video link found at the Digsby Blog

A more technical description of RSS from Wikipedia

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video – in a standardized format.^[2] An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed",^[3] or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favoured websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based or desktop-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s URI into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

The initials "RSS" are used to refer to the following formats: "Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)", "RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90)", or "Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)".

RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats. Although RSS formats have evolved since March 1999,^[4] the RSS icon ("") first gained widespread use in 2005–2006.

I use Google apps for the hosting of domains and email for my Domains. Considering it is completely free (there is a paid Pro version) it is amazing functionality. As we have a fair few subscribers to emails for a small list I was wondering how many emails I can send per day. Most email hosts have some limits in force – mostly to stop abuse by spammers and the like.

Below is details of what Google Apps allows. Again for a free service I think this is excellent.

Details from this Google Group Page

Here is a list of some of the sending limits in place on your account:

- 500 messages per day (i.e., you can hit ‘Send’ a maximum of 500
times)
- 500 unique recipients
- 2000 total emails (for example, you could send one message to a
group of 500 people four times)

Please note that there may be additional factors which slightly raise
or lower these limits, but this should be a good general guideline.

Sincerely,

Joanna
The Google Apps Team

Joe asked me a question at the Mullies meeting this week.

Hi Matt

Further to our conversation at Mulligrubs, I have forwarded the email in question.

It was sent to me via Outlook Express and as you suggested this may not be suitable to on forward via Thunderbird. When I have sent this particular message previously in the same circumstances, the message follows the text as well as being sent as an attachment.

Joe’s email has an animated picture attached to it which is the punchline to a joke. The email is sent as html which is the same language that webpages are written in.  So just like webpages can have embedded graphics, animations and the like the email can too.

The problem comes when the person opening the email has a different program than the person who sent it. As I discussed with Joe in some instances Thunderbird doesn’t show the email the same as Outlook Express or Outlook would. This is the same sort of program difference that causes poorly written webpages to look different in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

One solution to Joe’s problem is to save the email as an external file and then attach that file to an email for forwarding. This is often a good idea as it gives you a brand new clean email to write in without forwarding all those friends addresses, maybe to a spammer or infected computer.

To get the file and details out of a html email the easy way is to save it as a html file. Just open the email – the original one maybe attached if it has been ‘forwarded as attachment’. Drill down to the message with the joke and then:

in Thunderbird click File Menu – Save as – File – Html

In Outlook or Outlook Express Click File – Save As – Choose HTML under the File type pull down

Now you can send the html file you saved to your computer as an attachment to an email or view it in your browser (Internet Explorer / Firefox)

One of the problems with the email Joe received is that the image is an animated GIF. It’s like a cartoon – a few different frames slightly changed that give the impression of movement/animation See more about GIFs here.

A lot of picture viewer programs won’t show the image moving even if you save/extract it right. If you extract it right you should always see it moving if you open it in your browser (Internet Explorer / Firefox)

Hope this was helpful

Oh and here is Joe’s picture for you 

As we have discussed here in the past AVG Antivirus is an excellent and free Anti Virus program. In fact because of the price (did I mention free!) and the small footprint (AVG doesn’t eat up much system resources and memory) it is one of the most popular AV programs around.

I have read recently (in the Windows Secrets newsletter) that the AVG can make a mess of some emails you receive. You see AVG has an email scanner built in – which is good. It checks emails and attachments for nasties like a virus or trojan when you send and receive an email. Great!

By default though what it also does is to add a little ‘certification’ to the bottom of each email to attest to the fact that it has been scanned. A few years ago this was pretty common practice for AV programs but it is rarely seen today. Here’s an example of what it puts on:

No virus found in this incoming message.Checked by AVG - http://www.avg.com Version: 8.0.138 / Virus Database: 270.5.0/1556 - Release Date: 7/16/2008 4:56 PM

Frankly I find this pretty annoying but other people may like it, who knows?

Anyway it seems the adding of this text to emails you receive (and maybe send too) can garble the HTML code and mess up the email, even to the point it is unreadable.

But never fear I have a solution. From Windows Secrets:

To disable e-mail certification in AVG, click Tools, Advanced settings, choose E-mail Scanner on the left side of the window, and disable Certify e-mail for incoming messages. The steps are described in the AVG FAQ (scroll down the page to number 1376).

You may also want to disable “certify email for outgoing messages” too.

Please note – this does not turn off virus scanning of emails, it just turns off the last step of putting the certification on the bottom of each message.

So if you find some messages are coming in a little strange or, like me, you don’t want the little note on all your messages then just follow the steps to remove the certification. Easy!

Details found care of Gizmo’s TechSupportAlert.com newsletter

Subscriber Richard Dent writes " Gizmo, here’s a website that your subscribers might find useful. It allows anyone to send an email from any "From:" address without registering or logging on."
http://send.arrowmail.co.uk

This could be very useful if you were away from your home computer and wanted to send an email ‘from’ your own address and didn’t have access to your own email. Gmail users have the ability to send from multiple accounts from within Gmail itself although in my experience the email still arrives as being From: ’Other Address’ via ‘Gmail Address’ which is not so useful if you were trying not to show your Gmail address. Anyway – this site may be of use to some.

Spam email accounted for between 90 and 95 percent of all email in 2007, up from an estimated five per cent of email in 2001, according to a report from web security company Barracuda Networks..

The report, which analysed more than one billion daily email messages sent to more than 50,000 users worldwide, also tracked the increasing complexity of spam techniques over the past several years. 2007 witnessed the majority of spammers using identity obfuscation techniques, in which spammers send email from diverse sources throughout the internet.
Other spamming trends also include the increased the use of attachments, including as PDF files and other file formats.

Prominent spam techniques from previous years include:
2006 – Image spam and botnets
2005 – Rotating URL spam
2004 – Automated generation of spam variants
2003 – Open relays, blast emails, spoofing
“The spam war is a continuous battle between spammers and security vendors,” said Dean Drako, president and CEO of Barracuda Networks. “Security vendors now require 24-by-7 defence operations to continuously monitor the internet for new spam trends and distribute new defensive solutions immediately.”

A separate poll of business professionals by the same company found that more than half (57 per cent) of the 261 respondents, now consider spam to be the worst form of junk advertising, nearly double the 31 percent that cited postal junk mail and well ahead of the 12 percent who chose telemarketing as their chief bug bear.

Spam accounts for nearly 95 per cent of email – www.itnews.com.au

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