Washing mail and fixing your PC

RIVER BENDER - June 2002

Everybody is complaining about spam. Spam, or unsolicited e-mail, is arriving with advertisements covering about every subject imaginable. It's getting worse and so far this year I've averaged five spam messages a day. I don't even have to open messages after seeing the subject and sender's name and simply hit the delete key, which is no bother. What does bother me, however, is the time I have to wait downloading spam that is loaded with embedded graphics, not to mention all the clutter. Most spam has graphics now since mail programs began having a capability to display HTML language. But there's a solution to avoid the download delay and it is called MailWasher. It's pretty neat software. You'll have fun playing with it and washing away spam.

MailWasher is a small program you can download and try out at no cost. If you like it you might want to send the author in New Zealand a few bucks. The program is available at http://www.mailwasher.net/index.php.

What MailWasher does is put an icon on your desktop that you can click on to check incoming mail before downloading mail using your regular mail program such as Outlook Express or Eudora. After you've connected to your service provider, clicking the icon displays only the message headers at your service provider. You may then delete recognizable spam items shown on the list and have them placed on a blacklist, which you can elect to reject messages from in the future. You may also elect to send a bounce message back to the sender that your address is invalid but this feature doesn't appear to work with Coastalnet but may with your ISP. As a matter of fact, Mailwasher doesn't work with web-based mail like Hotmail or Yahoo or with AOL. The author is working on it and says it will be available in a couple months. Try MailWasher. It's fun.

How to fix your own PC I receive a lot of mail and calls from folks that are having problems with their PCs. They are desperate for help and I feel sorry for them and try to help on occasions but simply don't have the time to make house calls to everybody (I really do have another life aside from PCs). What we need in River Bend is a list of volunteer residents posted on the RB web page that might be willing to drop by and help folks with the basics either for free or less than the usual charge by professionals. If you are interested in being on such a list or have alternative suggestions please let me know. You don't have to be an expert or a guru. You'd be surprised at some of the basic questions raised.

In the meantime, here's what I suggest that one might try doing to fix their PC before having to call in a professional: (The following applies to Windows 98)

1. Go to Start/Help and type "trouble." Scroll down through the list of items under "troubleshooting" until you find an item that fits your problem. For example, there's excellent trouble-shooting for printers and modems. Just follow the instructions given and everything will be checked out until the diagnosis can go no further, in which case it will say that you may have an equipment failure that it can't repair.

2. I use the search engine http://www.google.com extensively for trouble shooting since I'm convinced that there is an answer to every question in cyberspace somewhere. All you have to do is learn how to find it and the more you search the better you'll get. After all, millions of people are using the same Microsoft software so how can anyone come up with a problem that is unique. The nice thing about Google is that you can also have it search Newsgroups instead of the Web. Newsgroups are where all the chatting is going on about every subject imaginable. You can even post your questions there.

3. Microsoft Support/Help is at http://support.microsoft.com/. There's lots of good technical information available at MS and although they continually try to improve their support web page I still have a hard time finding what I'm looking for. Often Google points me to an answer on the support page that I can't even find using Microsoft's own search engine. MS seems to respond mainly to their search words, which are available on a list. Perhaps some day I'll learn how to use MS support better and write an article about it.

Go to http://www4.coastalnet.com/nbcug/index.htm if you want to see past PC articles published in the River Bender.