E-Mail Tips

RIVER BENDER - November,  2001

E-mail is the workhorse of the Internet. Here are a few tips and comments:

Outlook Express and Viruses:

Microsoft's Outlook Express by most critics is rated the No. 1 Internet e-mail program. 63% of NBCUG members use it. But if you're tired of having to download patches from MS to plug security holes in Outlook Express why not try Eudora Mail Version 5.1 that hasn't had all the problems of Outlook Express. You can have two e-mail programs. Eudora is free and can be downloaded from http://www.eudora.com. When downloaded, it comes full-featured in a "sponsored mode" which means that you'll receive periodic ads. If you don't like the ads you have the option to omit them but by doing so you'll sacrifice a few features like spell-checking. Alternatively you may pay $49.95 for a full-featured no-ads version. Go to http://cws.internet.com/mail.html to see a web site that rates Eudora as the No.1 mail program.

Scanning an Attachment for Viruses:

I don't leave my Norton anti-virus program enabled at all times because I want to see who sends me a virus and what the virus is to inform the sender that he's infected. In Eudora, it's easy to manually scan an incoming attached file for a virus because they're all saved in C:\Eudora\Attach upon arrival. But in Outlook Express, attachments are not saved automatically, To scan an attachment for a virus you must first save it somewhere. If you don't know how to have Norton scan a file here's how:

Open Norton and select Scan for Viruses/Scan one or more files/Run now. Find the file you saved and click on it. Since most viruses mess up your System folder if you think you're infected you can save lots of time scanning only the C:\Windows\System folder instead of the whole hard drive.

Outlook Express's Preview Pane:

Viruses such as NIMDA are said to be capable of infecting your PC when a message is previewed. Preview is when you highlight a message header without opening it and the message appears in a separate pane. To be safe you can delete the preview feature in Outlook Express by going to View/Layout and making sure "show preview pane" is not checked. You may also do the same thing in Eudora 5.1 by going to Tools/Options/Viewing Mail.

Is this message really true?

I receive this question quite often from folks that receive a virus warning or a suggestion sent to them by e-mail. They usually write to me saying something like "This came from my reputable son-in-law at Harvard so it must be true." Here's my usual suggestion: If the warning or suggestion seems totally ridiculous or too good to be true then it probably isn't true. But how can you find out? The easiest way is to go to a good search engine like http://google.com and type in some key words that appear in the message. With a little patience and trying several combinations of words you'll usually come up with answers from sources like http://www.symantec.com/avcenter or http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/. Please don't forward a hoax message to everybody you know without checking it out first.

A few of my pet peeves:

I get annoyed when somebody sends me a chain letter or when somebody sends me pictures I'm not interested in, especially if they have high-speed service and I don't have it. I hate it when a message is not signed and I can't tell if it came from the husband or the wife. Who do I reply to? I'm annoyed when a message is sent to me that has been forwarded and forwarded and has pages of addresses of people I don't know. It also upsets me that my address is on the list too that other people see. Suppose someone on that list is harvesting addresses to sell to companies that send spam mail? I'm annoyed when a message arrives with so many misspelled words that I find myself devaluing the quality of the message. Some folks also send all sorts of fancy text in their messages. They don't realize that when mail is sent to a large e-mail list everybody's mail program doesn't display HTML text so some folks just see garbage. Lastly, I'm really upset with people that are so click-happy that they click on every e-mail attachment that arrives and end up infected with a virus. Worse yet, they put RBmail and NBCUG addresses in their address book and the virus is sent to all of us.

But the brighter side is that things are getting better. Folks are definitely getting smarter and my peeves are becoming fewer. I think the River Bend and NBCUG e-mail lists will survive after all.