April 4, 2010

GMAIL & OUTLOOK

To set up your Outlook 2007 client to work with Gmail:

  1. Open Outlook.
  2. For new setups, select Do not upgrade.
  3. Click Yes.
  4. Enter your display name, email address (including '@gmail.com'), and password. Google Apps users, enter your full email address, e.g. 'username@your_domain.com.'
  5. Select the 'Manually configure server settings or additional server types' checkbox.
  6. Select Internet E-mail.
  7. Settings: name, full email address (including '@gmail.com' or '@your_domain.com')
    • In the Account Type dropdown menu, select IMAP; enter the incoming is generic viagra real and outgoing server names shown below.
    • In the 'User Name' field, give your full Gmail address, including '@gmail.com' or '@your_domain.com.'
    • After creating these settings, clicking Next takes you to the end of the setup.

  8. In the Tools menu, select Options then Mail Setup. Under 'Email Accounts,' click E-mail Accounts.
  9. Select an account, and click Change above the list of accounts. Click More Settings, then the Advanced tab.
    • Incoming server must be 993, and must use SSL encryption.
    • Outgoing server can use 587, TLS encryption.
  10. Click the Outgoing Server tab. Make sure that 'My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication' is selected. The radio button 'Use same settings as my incoming mail server' should also be selected.
  11. Click OK > Next > Finish > Close > OK.
  12. Check our recommended client settings, and adjust your client's settings as needed.
Permalink • Print • Comment

April 22, 2009

Using AutoText in Outlook 2003 as a Sales Tool

Do you find yourself typing in the same familiar email to your prospects and clients again and again? Whether it’s boiler-plates, generic thank you messages or directions to your business, there is a tool in Microsoft Outlook 2000/2003 – AutoText – that can help you automatically insert text into an email with minimal effort.

Whether you need to automate a paragraph or a three page email, I will show you how you can use AutoText to help save time so you can spend more time selling.

There are four easy steps to create an “AutoText” Entry

1. Type your email into the email body area.

2. Highlight the text you want for your AutoText Entry.

3. Once the text is highlighted… click – Insert > AutoText > New… Or you can simple hit Alt+F3 (Function Key – Not F then 3)

4. Name the AutoText and click OK


Using your AutoText Entries:

1. In a new email start typing the name you gave the AutoText name

2. When the yellow box appears as you type (above), simply hit the “Enter” key. Your AutoText will then automatically be placed into the email body text.

Option Two: If you can’t remember what you named one of your AutoText entries, you can use the Insert AutoText Option.

1. Click – Insert > AutoText

2. Find the name of your AutoText
1) Click the name can you buy viagra without a prescription of the AutoText
2) Click “Insert”
3) Click OK

Permalink • Print • Comment

February 21, 2009

More email security tips

    side effects cialis class=”postData”>

  • Date: November 11th, 2008
  • Author: Chad Perrin

Email security is about a lot more than just using a good password on your POP or IMAP server. Perhaps the most important part of email security is ensuring you don’t shoot yourself in the foot.


In February this year, I listed five basic email security tips that everyone should employ. The following is a list of five more good pieces of email security advice:

  1. Turn off automated addressing features. As communication software accumulates more and more automated convenience features, we’ll see more and more cases of accidentally selecting the wrong recipients. A prime example is Microsoft Outlook’s “dreaded auto-fill feature“, where it is all too easy to accidentally select a recipient adjacent to your intended recipient in the drop-down list. This can be particularly problematic when discussing private matters such as business secrets.
  2. Use BCC when sending to multiple recipients. It’s a bad idea, from a security perspective, to share email addresses with people who have no need for them. It is also rude to share someone’s email address with strangers without permission. Every time you send out an email to multiple recipients with all the recipients’ names in the To: or CC: fields, you’re sharing all those email addresses with all the recipients. Email addresses that are not explicitly meant to be shared with the entire world should, in emails addressed to multiple recipients, be specified in the BCC: field — because each person will then be able to see that he or she is a recipient, but will not be able to see the email addresses of anyone else in the BCC: field.
  3. Save emails only in a safe place. No amount of encryption for sent emails will protect your privacy effectively if, after receiving and decrypting an email, you then store it in plain text on a machine to which other people have access. Sarah Palin found out the hard way that Webmail providers don’t do as good a job of ensuring stored email privacy as we might like, and many users’ personal computers are not exactly set up with security in mind, as in the case of someone whose MS Windows home directory is set up as a CIFS share with a weak password.
  4. Only use private accounts for private emails. Any email you share with the world is likely to get targeted by spammers — both for purposes of sending mail to it and spoofing that email address in the From: field of the email headers. The more spammers and phishers spoof your email address that way, the more likely your email address is to end up on spam blocker blacklists used by ISPs and lazy mail server sysadmins, and the more likely you are to have problems with your emails not getting to their intended recipients.
  5. Double-check the recipient, every time — especially on mailing lists. Accidentally replying directly to someone who sent an email to a mailing list, when you meant to reply to the list, isn’t a huge security issue. It can be kind of inconvenient, though, especially when you might never notice your email didn’t actually get to the mailing list. The converse, however, can be a real problem: if you accidentally send something to the list that was intended strictly for a specific individual, you may end up publicly saying something embarrassing or, worse, accidentally divulging secrets to hundreds of people you don’t even know.
Permalink • Print • Comment

Basic e-mail security tips

  • Date: February 25th, 2008
  • Author: Chad Perrin

There’s a lot of information out there about securing your e-mail. safe cialis Much of it is advanced and doesn’t apply to the typical end user. Configuring spam filters such as SpamAssassin, setting up encrypted authentication on mail servers, and e-mail gateway virus scanner management are not basic end-user tasks.

When one can find end-user e-mail security tips, they’re usually specific to a single mail client or mail user agent such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, or Mutt. This sort of information is of critical importance to many users of these applications, but there are few sources of more general security information for e-mail users that aren’t specific to a given client application.

The following is a short list of some important security tips that apply to all e-mail users — not just users of a specific application. They are listed in the order one should employ them, from the first priority to the last. This priority is affected not only by how important a given tip is, but also by how easy it is to employ; the easier something is to do, the more likely one is to actually do it and move on to the next tip.

  1. Never allow an e-mail client to fully render HTML or XHTML e-mails without careful thought. At the absolute most, if you have a mail client such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird that can render HTML e-mails, you should configure it to render only simplified HTML rather than rich HTML — or “Original HTML” as some clients label the option. Even better is to configure it to render only plain text. When rendering HTML, you run the risk of identifying yourself as a valid recipient of spam or getting successfully phished by some malicious security cracker or identity thief. My personal preference is, in fact, to use a mail user agent that is normally incapable of rendering HTML e-mail at all, showing everything as plain text instead.
  2. If the privacy of your data is important to you, use a local POP3 or IMAP client to retrieve e-mail. This means avoiding the use of Web-based e-mail services such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail for e-mail you wish to keep private for any reason. Even if your Webmail service provider’s policies seem sufficiently privacy-oriented to you, that doesn’t mean that employees won’t occasionally break the rules. Some providers are accused of selling e-mail addresses to spamming “partners.” Even supposedly security-oriented Webmail services such as Hushmail can often be less than diligent in providing security to their users’ e-mail.
  3. It’s always a good idea to ensure that your e-mail authentication process is encrypted, even if the e-mail itself is not. The reason for this is simple: You do not want some malicious security cracker “listening in” on your authentication session with the mail server. If someone does this, that person can then send e-mails as you, receive your e-mail, and generally cause all kinds of problems for you (including spammers). Check with your ISP’s policies to determine whether authentication is encrypted and even how it is encrypted (so you might be able to determine how trivial it is to crack the encryption scheme used).
  4. Digitally sign your e-mails. As long as you observe good security practices with e-mail in general, it is highly unlikely that anyone else will ever have the opportunity to usurp your identity for purposes of e-mail, but it is still a possibility. If you use an encryption tool such as PGP or GnuPG to digitally sign your e-mails, though, recipients who have your public key will be able to determine that nobody could have sent the e-mail in question without having access to your private key — and you should definitely have a private key that is well protected.
  5. If, for some reason, you absolutely positively must access an e-mail account that does not authorize over an encrypted connection, never access that account from a public or otherwise unsecured network. Ever. Under any circumstances.

Be aware of both your virtual and physical surroundings when communicating via e-mail. Be careful. Trust no one that you do not absolutely have to trust, and recognize the dangers and potential consequences of that trust.

Your e-mail security does not just affect you; it affects others, as well, if your e-mail account is compromised. Even if the e-mail account itself is not compromised, your computer may be if you do not take reasonable care with how you deal with e-mails — and that, in turn, can lead to affecting both you and others adversely as well.

Don’t be a victim.

Permalink • Print • Comment

February 20, 2009

How do I… Archive Outlook e-mail without a PST file?

Takeaway: IT consultant Erik Eckel shows you how to effectively store old e-mail while maintaining accessibility to archived messages.

This article is also available as a TechRepublic download and as a TechRepublic gallery.

Is e-mail getting you down? Do administrative limits keep you pruning precious messages and attachments from your Inbox? Or worse, do you have to import numerous unneeded messages every time you must recover a single e-mail message?

There's a better way.

Organizations and employees, of course, are increasingly dependent upon e-mail. From correspondence with customers and clients to strategic communications with colleagues, vendors, suppliers, and others, e-mail has become a business critical application.

Information technology departments have responded accordingly. Back-end e-mail servers are often well-hardened, run on dedicated systems, and feature intricate remote or offsite backups. But an age-old problem remains: how to effectively store old e-mail while maintaining accessibility to those messages.

The PST file

Microsoft's answer has been the PST (Personal Storage File) file and a complex archiving dance. Redmond uses the PST file to store Calendar items, e-mail, Journal entries, and Tasks on local Windows workstations. Users are responsible for proper archiving (which requires specifying archive periods, file locations, folder and subfolder locations, etc.).

The PST file format, meanwhile, is used with the Microsoft Exchange Client, Windows Messaging, and Microsoft Outlook 97/98/2000/2002. Microsoft Outlook 2003 introduced new functionality with support for Unicode data (as opposed to supporting only ANSI text encoding), meaning older versions of Microsoft Outlook encounter trouble when trying to access or open PST files from newer editions.

The Outlook 2007 PST file, like its Outlook 2003 counterpart, is not compatible with Outlook versions 2002 and earlier. However, Outlook 2003 and 2007 can open PST files created by earlier Outlook versions.

The PST files themselves are notorious for corruption. The storage format has proven so delicate (but critical) that numerous repair utilities low cost cialis — the Inbox Repair Tool/Scanpst.exe, EasyRecovery Email Repair, EasyRecoveryFileRepair, Search and Recover, Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Professional PST Recovery Software, Repair PST, etc. — exist for attempting to correct common corruption issues.

The file format has another significant drawback: size. Outlook 2000's PST file was limited to 1.933GB. Routinely in the field, I encounter Outlook PST files in excess of four and five gigabytes.

Outlook 2003 increased the size limitation to 30GB, but the larger the file often the slower the performance. Worse, when PST files do fail irrecoverably, the larger the file size the greater the loss from lost messages, reports, attachments and other information.

Thankfully, there's an effective alternative to archiving Outlook e-mail using only PST files.

Make folders instead

Just use folders.

Within My Documents on your desktop, create a folder titled Email (Figure A). Within that Email folder create subfolders (Figure B) for each folder you've created in Outlook (beneath your Inbox). Within those subfolders, create monthly or quarterly folders (Figure C) within which you place copies (just drag-and-drop them en masse) of every e-mail message you store within Microsoft Outlook. You can also create folders for Sent Mail and, if you're truly into backing up all your e-mail, Deleted Items as well.

Figure A

To begin using the folder system to archive e-mail, create an Email folder within My Documents.

Figure B

Within the Email folder, create subfolders for each folder you maintain within your Outlook Inbox.

Figure C

Within each subfolder, create relevant subfolders (to mimic the structure of your Outlook Inbox).

Once you've copied messages to the Email folder, you can delete them from Outlook. Thus you receive an added benefit. Outlook will open and operate more smoothly and consistently, as you'll be working with a much smaller PST file (which will power only active e-mail messages, tasks, contacts, and calendar items that haven't been copied to the Email folder and deleted from Outlook). Plus, maintaining a small PST file will keep you out of trouble with the Exchange administrator (who likely implements and maintains strict mailbox size limits).

But there's more. What is the biggest advantage?

Whenever you need to revisit a specific e-mail message or (as is increasingly the case for many) a corresponding attachment, all you need to do is locate the proper folder, retrieve your e-mail, and you're done. There's no need to complete cumbersome import/export processes (that also require numerous other unnecessary e-mail messages and attachments be recovered).

Best of all, you don't even need to remember in which folder you placed an e-mail message. As mentioned previously, the rise of popular desktop search utilities (including the Windows Desktop Search engine built into the new Windows Vista operating system) makes easy work of locating an old e-mail message and/or attachment.

You can even archive messages by month, quarter, or any other period (Figure D). Just create the required folders/subfolder structures (Figure E).

Figure D

Within each Outlook Inbox subfolder, create monthly or quarterly folders to ease how often you need to manually copy e-mail. Breaking messages into dated folders also greatly simplifies recovering specific e-mail messages (although desktop search engines typically fulfill that function now).

Figure E

Individual e-mail messages (with any corresponding attachments) are then placed directly within these folders.

You can even tap Outlook's Task or Calendar functionality to remind yourself you need to archive e-mail. Whenever the reminder appears, copy e-mail messages to your new folder structure following these steps:

  1. Open (within Outlook) each e-mail folder you wish to back up.
  2. Click Edit.
  3. Click Select All.
  4. Click Edit.
  5. Click Copy.
  6. Open the Email subfolder where you wish to archive the e-mail messages.
  7. Select Edit from the Windows Explorer or My Computer menu bar.
  8. Click Paste. The messages will be copied from Outlook to the new folder on your hard disk.

Manage identical messages

When employing the folder system to archive Outlook e-mail without a PST file, there's one item you need to watch. When you copy an e-mail message from Outlook to another folder on your hard drive, Windows creates the file using the message's Subject Line as the filename (adding the .MSG file extension). If you copy multiple e-mail messages at once that have the same Subject Line, Windows simply appends numerals within parentheses to the end of the identical filenames, thereby creating unique filenames for each e-mail message. It works great.

For example, an e-mail message with the filename Test Message will be copied to a folder within My Documents as Test Message.msg. If two or more messages within Outlook share the same Subject Line, Windows simply makes each filename unique by adding numerals within parentheses to the end of the Subject Line: Test Message (1).msg, Test Message (2).msg, Test Message (3).msg, etc.

If, however, you later add an e-mail message to a Windows folder that already holds an e-mail message having an identical Subject Line, Windows will present the Confirm File Replace dialog box (Figure F).

Figure F

The Confirm File Replace dialog box helps prevent accidentally overwriting existing messages.

Be careful in such cases to not accidentally overwrite an existing message. Instead, change the subject line of the existing messages before copying the Outlook e-mails with the identical subjects or, better yet, just create a new folder for the troublesome messages. By manually copying entire folders monthly or quarterly, this problem rarely occurs, however, as all Outlook messages are copied en masse, thereby enabling Windows to automatically create unique filenames.

Find what you need

In the past, just copying e-mail messages to document folders didn't work well, as trying to locate a single e-mail message within thousands of others proved frustrating. With the rise of Google Desktop Search, Windows Desktop Search, and Yahoo Desktop Search, not to mention the fact that Windows Desktop Search is built into Windows Vista by default, locating individual e-mail messages usually requires only that you type a keyword or two within ever-present search boxes (Figures G, H, and I).

Figure G

Using Google Desktop Search, locating specific e-mail messages is a breeze.

Figure H

You can quickly drill down within e-mail search results using Google Desktop Search. Better yet, Google's search provides you with a preview of each message. To access the messages themselves, you need only click the provided hotlink.

Figure I

Using Google Desktop Search, you can open e-mail messages directly within Internet Explorer, should you wish.

Using various available desktop search tools, you can elect to read e-mail message contents within Internet Explorer or open the actual e-mail message (and corresponding attachments) itself (Figure J).

Figure J

Within Windows Vista, the integrated Windows Desktop Search is very quick to locate and identify specific e-mail messages.

Simple, secure backups

Using an e-mail folder archive system, e-mail backups are greatly simplified, too. No longer do you need to worry about PST maximum file sizes, incompatibilities, or corruption issues. Just backup the Email folder (and all its subfolders) to your backup medium of choice and your e-mail is protected.

Restoring e-mail is equally straightforward. Just copy the Email folder to a PC or server, and messages (and their attachments) are almost instantly available (without the requirement of importing archive files and specifying new folder/file locations within an existing Outlook mailbox).

If you're worried about security, apply the appropriate NTFS permissions to the Email folder. If you're particularly paranoid about securing your manual e-mail archive, you can also elect to apply Encrypting File System protections to the Email folder. To do so:

  1. Right-click the Email folder.
  2. Select Properties.
  3. Highlight the General tab.
  4. Click the Advanced button.
  5. Check the Encrypt Contents To Secure Data checkbox.
  6. Click OK.

Summary

Microsoft's PST file format provides one method of archiving e-mail. Creating a folder backup structure, however, simplifies the process and encourages improved Outlook performance. Mated with any of the popular desktop search engines, archiving e-mail using simple folders helps eliminate many of the headaches associated with more cumbersome PST files.

Permalink • Print • Comment
« Previous PageNext Page »
Made with WordPress and the Semiologic theme and CMS • Sky Gold skin by Denis de Bernardy