I’m sure you, like me, have seen the articles over the years. They come around every so often, with headlines saying “<IM TOOL> is THE email killer”, “Death of email spelled by <IM TOOL>”, and “<GENERATION WHATEVER> says no to email, yes to <IM TOOL>”. I’ve seen these headlines for the better part of two decades. And yet – curiously – email is still around, while many of these tools aren’t. There are a number of reasons why this is so. Some of them are deal with the different paradigms of communication, while others hinge on technological differences
(more…)Tag: email
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Would I like to link to your spammy article? Let me think…
Hi there! You are most likely here because I sent you a link to this post in response to an email from you which probably sounded something like this:
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#TBT: Why Webmail rocks my world
This post originally ran in May 2008. I am reposting it now, as part of my throwback thursday project, to give some of my older quality posts some love. With smartphones, tablets, and computers at home and work, webmail is still relevant; arguably more so than ever before.
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Suppressing email addresses
A few months ago, I was asked about the possibility to suppress what email addresses an email had been sent to. The case was as follows: we needed to send out an invitation to a list of over 50 recipients, but didn’t necessarily want them to get everyone elses email address.
Simply put; there are two ways. The first one is rather obvious, and also rather time consuming. It involves sending a separate email to each recipient. Now, while it would solve our problem, it would take way, way, way too much time.
BCC to the rescue! Wikipedia defines BCC as: (more…) -
Taking MailTo to the next level
If you’ve ever written a website in HTML, you are probably familiar with the MailTo-command, used to automatically start a new email message when the link is clicked. However, you can do so much more with the command. Here are some examples:
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Understanding email addresses
A while back, an acquaintance of mine asked me to explain how email addresses work. Although the concepts are easy enough to understand, he’d never really “got it”, and so asked me for help.
Email addresses are built up from three parts; a recipient, a server and a top level domain node (TLD). The address is formatted much like this: recipient@server.tld. If this was an address for regular mail, it’d look like this:
Recipient
Server
TLD
It’s easiest to think of the server part of the address as the street name and number, and the TLD as the zip code. -
Reducing spam – the advantage to having a top level domain
I post comments in many blogs, and for a while, I had a serious problem that whenever I posted my comment with my emailadress, I’d soon see a marked increase in spammail. This all really cleared up when I actually got my own top level domain, razumny.no, and here’s how:
Once the domain was up and running, I started setting up my email accounts. What I did was create one adress, and then set that up as a catch-all adress, so that anything ending it (at) razumny . no would go to my main adress. Once that was done, I started setting up adresses wherever I’d leave a comment, so that when I commented at RennyBA’s Terella, the adress would reflect that.
The point to all of this is elegant in its simplicity; whenever I get an email sent to one of the catch-all adresses, I see which one it is. The practical upshot of this is that if I see an increase in spam to a specific adress, I’ll just block that one adress. This way, I don’t have to set up loads and loads of adresses, and I still keep spam at an absolute minimum.
Another advantage to this setup is, of course, that whenever I spell my email address out to someone, it doesn’t really matter what they put in front of the @-sign, it’ll get to me. -
Why Webmail rocks my world
I’ve been using email since 1998, and from the get-go I’ve been using various webmail-clients, in addition to locally installed clients such as Outlook Express (urgh), Outlook (Yum-yum), Lotus Notes (Oh-so-bloated) and Thunderbird (Weighed, measured and found wanting). My first email address was a hotmail one, and although that specific incarnation of my online presence no longer exists, I still have a hotmail address.