Smart Things To Do: Emails

Posted on: April 15th, 2009

I start here a little series of articles on Tips & Tricks on different subjects. The first one is: emails.

Here are the things I recommend:

Use an ISP (Internet Service Provider) independent email address, not the one provided by your ISP.
Why?
Because that way you have complete freedom on your emails. You can access them anywhere where there is internet access. And very importantly if you need to change ISP (because you have had a bad experience with them, or you moved, etc) then you won’t have to go through the painful procedure of switching email emails, notifying everyone, getting used to a new system, and so on… With an ISP independent email you wouldn’t need to do anything other than hooking your computer up to the Internet.
Use Gmail for your ISP independent email.
Why?
I found Gmail to be very dependable. Its webmail user interface is easy to use and not cluttered like Yahoo’s. Also it provides access methods to download messages by your email client software (Thunderbird, Outlook, Outlook Express). Plus it has a quite good spam filtering. And it’s free.
Try avoid using Outlook, Outlook Express or Windows Mail as you email client.
Why?
These two pieces of software has been plagued by security problems which had been exploited by malicious spammers who have sent specially crafted emails that infected computer upon just looking at the email.
Outlook uses a very unsafe method of storing your information: it puts everything in one single (usually quite large) file which has a propietary format. Because it’s large and complex chances are that it will get corrupted and you potentially lose email, contacts or schedule information.
Also transferring an Outlook, or Outlook express setup from one computer to another is a near nightmare, its configuration settings are strewn all over the place.
The best alternative to these is Thunderbird. It has excellent security, it stores emails in a plain and simple format, and transferring account setups from one computer to another is a breeze. It can also import your emails and most of the settings from your Outlook, or Outlook Express profile.
I’ve been using Thunderbird for years and I’m more than happy with it. You can download it from here: http://filehippo.com/download_thunderbird/
Of course, it might be missing some features – mainly the calendar function and syncronization features – that you might need.
Set up a secondary email for Spam catching.
Use this email account to sign up with, to websites, or to register with companies, etc where you need to expose your email address to a not completely trusted recipient. These actions will inevitably result in an increasing number of unsolicited emails. You can leave this email account alone and only check it if you are expecting a confirmation email for a sign up, or some other reason.
Keep your main account between you and your trusted contacts.
If you have a website then Do Not put your email address on any pages directly!
Why?
Because spammers use specially designed software to crawl through webpages, much like search engines do, and harvest any email addresses that they found in the code of those pages. The result is an ever increasing torrent of spam. I’ve seen it many times.
Then how can people contact me?
Simply use a contact form that sends you an email. This will prevent exposing your email address and it actually works better because the email links don’t work on some people’s computers who doesn’t have their email clients set up, or set up correctly. Contact forms will work in those cases too.

That’s it.

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