Tag: e-mail | Scottie's Tech.Info

Why webmail is just a really bad idea

I’m always amazed at how many people these days still use webmail.

From Gmail to Yahoo Mail, it seems everyone enjoys the convenience of no crappy e-mail program, easily accessible e-mail from any device, and free data storage In the Cloud^TM.

In the case of Gmail, you can even use the same e-mail account on your smartphone. Yay, even more data for Google!

Naturally, there are huge drawbacks to the webmail approach, the biggest of which is privacy.

From Day One, webmail has been hoovering up all kinds of data. Recently, the world discovered that – duh – it’s worse than we think!

Dude, your e-mail’s been hacked!

You’ve got an e-mail address, and you’ve got friends. So far, so good.

Then one day, you get an e-mail from Debbie telling you that your e-mail account has been hacked. She got a spam message that appeared to come from you!

Johnny got one, too.

Sweet mother of mercy, it must be the end of the world! Your e-mail’s been hacked! Maybe your puter’s been hacked!

Not so fast…

Why Yahoo is Rejecting Your Mail

Oh frabjous day!

At long last, I have managed to figure out why Yahoo enjoys rejecting lots of mail that is sent to its users.

You have probably encountered this problem before, especially if you happen to manage any kind of mailing list that sends HTML messages to even one or two people with Yahoo e-mail addies.

Yahoo bounces messages back at you with the message, “554 Message not allowed – [PH01] Email not accepted for policy reasons.”

What gives?

An Intro to Mail Servers and How E-mail Works

Everybody uses e-mail. It’s great.

Not everybody understands exactly how e-mail works, and even fewer people have ever tried to set up a mail server. For those of you who have, I can pretty much guarantee you that you’re doing something wrong.

Even if you aren’t setting up your own mail server, you really should understand the limitations of e-mail, especially in terms of security.

So, in this post I’ll try to give a simple and quick intro to e-mail and mail servers

If you are an admin looking for a postfix or exim “quick answer” that you can copy and paste, you must read this more than anyone!

How to “Search in Message” in Thunderbird 3.1

With the advent of Thunderbird 3, searching messages became a bit more sassy in the old bird.

There is one little problem: it is not readily apparent how one actually searches for text inside an open e-mail.

It used to be that you could just type Ctrl-F and the little “Find” bar opened at the bottom of your message pane/window. Type in some text, and all instances of that text would be highlighted in the open message.

In the latest Tbird, that doesn’t work in certain cases. In fact, searching in an open message has become downright annoying, and nobody seems to know how to make it work. Several people even filed bug reports about it.

This situation was obviously intolerable, so I finally managed to solve it!