A TALE OF TOO MUCH MAIL

After we wrote about using Gmail to filter out spam messages, we heard from Greg, a reader who was receiving a stunning 25,000 email messages a month. Most of that was spam, of course. (According to Symantec, 78 percent of all email is spam.)

Gmail has a great spam filter, so Greg transferred all his incoming email to a Gmail account (they’re free). Almost immediately, his incoming spam dropped to near zero. Unfortunately, his outgoing mail also dropped to near zero. Greg is in the furniture business and he started getting phone calls from angry customers saying how come he hadn’t emailed them the information they requested.

Here’s what happened: It turned out his inability to send email had nothing to do with his Gmail account or its spam filter but was caused by his Internet service provider. Because he’s in business, Greg maintains his own email server. That’s a computer dedicated in whole or part to handling his email. When he transferred the enormous amount of incoming mail from his server to his Gmail account, the watchdog software maintained by the service provider identified him as a spammer. After all, from the software’s point of view, he was sending almost a thousand emails a day, and he must be a spammer. So they cut off his outgoing email — to protect us.

We talked to someone at Google, the creators of Gmail, about this problem and got some helpful information. Our contact said that unfortunately Google has no control over the email server (which was Greg’s own computer) or his Internet service provider. What they do have, however, is a service that lets companies run their web domain and email accounts on “Google Apps,” at Google.com/a. (Click on the blue box, to find the business stuff.) This has several benefits, among them industrial strength spam and email control.

Businesses that use Microsoft Outlook can continue to do so. Their email address can be their company name.  If it’s a small business, like Greg’s, there is no charge by Google and they can use up to seven gigabytes of email storage and filtering; they don’t count spam as part of that. Larger businesses can use up to 25 gigabytes for mail for $50 per user per year. They also get free tech support.

We are Gmail users ourselves, and even though we get a lot of mail, and save more than half of it,  we still use only two gigabytes of email storage. Incoming spam is moved to a special storage area at Google, and is automatically dumped every 30 days. If it were not dumped regularly, spam would accumulate like a city’s garbage and completely overwhelm the system. If you suspect something useful recently came in and was mistakenly identified as spam, you have 30 days to rummage through the trash and try and find it. If you think you know the subject, you can simply do a key word search.

Group Calls

A new free service from PhoneVite.com lets you send phone messages to up to 25 friends and associates at once, at any time of your choosing.

You don’t have to register anywhere to use this service; you simply go to the web site and click the “Start” button. Type or paste in your contacts’ numbers and leave your own phone number. You  immediately get an automated call back, asking you to record your message. You can schedule that delivery time to be up to three months away.

That’s the free service. For $20 you can send up to 420 messages, and for $100 you can send over a thousand calls. These calls do not have to all be sent at once.

Internuts

• Buy-Discount-Gift-Cards.com uncovers heavily discounted gift cards on eBay. It filters out phony ones, they say.  This is the same outfit that also has a site for companies that provide free shipping on purchases (FreeShippingOn.com) and TypoBuddy.com, which searches for eBay listings that may have been misspelled. We used the discount card site and bought a $100 restaurant gift card for $18. We were the only bidder.
• Campaign.com is oriented toward the current U.S. elections and has lots of information on voter registration and the issues. It is not limited to the Presidential candidates but covers Congressional and local elections. The site also has addresses and phone numbers for most national and local office holders, whether they running for re-election or not. You can also register to vote here.

The Blue Screen of Death

Every once in a while a Windows system will lock up, showing nothing but a blank blue screen and a small message box. This has come to be called “The Blue Screen of Death.” What causes it? Who knows? What can be done about it? Who knows? You can always reboot.

We recently came across a web site named FaultWire.com, which attempts to explain what happened. Experts at the site point out that Windows’ own messages about what went wrong are frequently wrong themselves. The real reasons are often to be found among some common errors with wonderfully cryptic names like: “IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL,” and “KERNEL MODE EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED.” Well! We thought that was the problem all along.

The web site has some suggestions of what to try to restore things to a working state. We have one as well: If you reboot in “Safe Mode” you usually have the option of selecting an option that lets you return the machine to its last known stable configuration. Safe Mode is reached in a few different ways, depending on the operating system, and you can find out the way for your system by doing a Google search on your system name, like Vista, XP, Mac, etc. and safe mode.