Pages Tagged “Email”
Reviews
- Apple Mail (macOS) ★★★★☆ No-nonsense but full-featured email application for macOS that works well with multiple IMAP accounts and Gmail.
- DreamHost ★★★★☆ Rock solid web hosting with managed VPS and good support. Hosting this page right now. Cloud computing has been less stable in my experience.
- Fossify Apps: Replacing Simple Mobile Tools Simple Mobile Tools was purchased and now does everything it used to refuse to. Fossify is a privacy-respecting fork.
- Fossify Contacts ★★★★☆ Basic, privacy-respecting contacts app for Android that works with all contacts accounts on your phone.
- Geary ★★★★☆ Really lightweight but still modern, so it’s a good choice on lower-end hardware. Basic IMAP features, good for most day-to-day email use. Needs GNOME for setup.
- Gmail (Android App) ★★★☆☆ Works well with multiple accounts and display modes, but tracks you more than it should.
- K-9 Email ★★★★☆ Classic email app for Android: No frills, no ads, no tracking. Supports multiple accounts, phone-to-tablet layouts, and dark mode.
- Microsoft Outlook (Android) ★★★★☆ It works. More stable than the desktop version. Handles mail, calendar and contacts, offers the focused/other inbox view. Tries to keep you in Microsoft’s apps. OK for work, wouldn’t use it for personal mail.
- Microsoft Outlook (Desktop) ★★★☆☆ I won’t say I’ve never liked Outlook, because the macOS version has been pretty decent for a while now (if a bit of a resource hog), but the Windows versions have always been awkward, cluttered, and quirky.
- SeaMonkey (Internet Suite) ★★★☆☆ The old Mozilla Suite lives on! Featuring web, email, news, an HTML editor, IRC client and more. Recent work has mostly been to keep it working and backport security fixes, so web app compatibility lags way behind even the ESR Firefox.
- Thunderbird (Email and Calendar) ★★★★★ Stable, capable desktop email application, works well with multiple accounts including Gmail, Nextcloud, easy to set up and use but with advanced settings when you need them. FLOSS.
- Vivaldi (Web Browser) ★★★★★ Spiritual successor to the original Opera browser, this ultra-customizable web browser can open into a full suite for email, calendar, feeds and more – but only if you want it to.
- Windows 10 Mail and Calendar (discontinued) ★★★☆☆ Not a bad email client. Snappy, works with multiple accounts. Some issues with Nextcloud calendar and contacts. So of course it’s been discontinued in favor of Outlook.
Tech Tips
- Broken HTML Email on Lucee CFMAIL on Lucee through 5.x uses an encoding that can break minified HTML or CSS when sending formatted email.
- Email Verification Best Practices More important than whether the email address exists is whether it actually belongs to the person who is signing up.
- Facebook Page Flagged for… domain_placeholder.com? Probably not! (Obsolete) Facebook sent out a suspension notice with placeholder names by mistake.
- Geary With Gmail, (Mostly) Without GNOME Install GNOME, add Gmail to your online accounts, then uninstall the rest of GNOME. But keep gnome-online-accounts!
- Gmail on SeaMonkey Yes, you can still connect it after the switch to OAuth2. You need to create a placeholder account first, and find the right settings, which Gmail doesn’t seem to tell you anymore.
- How Thunderbird’s Scam Detection Works (2005) (Obsolete) Tracking down what causes Mozilla Thunderbird to label a message as suspicious, as well as how to train it to ignore emails that you know are legit.
- How to Change the Default Email App on Android It’s not in Default Apps, so you need to clear the default preferences for your old app first.
- How to Put a Phone Extension in Your Android Contacts Use a comma for pause just long enough for the remote to pick up, or a semicolon to wait for a greeting first.
- Move Email Archives to a New Account Thunderbird, Vivaldi, Apple Mail and Outlook can move messages from one IMAP account to another. Just drag and drop! But Gmail makes it a bit more complicated.
- Thunderbird Gets a 400 Error Setting Up Gmail Normally there’s no good reason for your email client to accept cookies. Except here.
- What do GNOME Online Accounts Do? It’s not obvious which services GNOME will use from each provider. Here’s where to find it.
Blog Posts
- SubdoMailing
Interesting spam/phish technique: Look for subdomains with CNAMEs or SPF records that point to abandoned domains that you can then register…and effectively take control of the subdomain or SPF. They haven’t seen any cases where it’s been used to host a phishing site at, say, an msn.com subdomain, but they’ve seen thousands of cases where […]
- The Web Was Responsive From The Start
I’ve been meaning to write a post about email newsletters that still assume you’re reading on a desktop and send out layouts that rely on a wide screen size and end up with tiny 2-point type on a mobile phone — you know, where most people read their email these days. Then I stumbled on […]
- Hi, We’re Your Bank! (Yeah, SURE you are.)
Phishers: Hi, we’re your bank, please click on this attachment for important information. Security experts: Never click on an unexpected attachment in an email even if you think you know who it’s from. It’s likely to be malware or a scam to steal your login credentials. Actual banks: Hi, we’re your bank, please click on […]
- It’s amazing more email accounts weren’t hacked back in the 2000s
We’d walk into an internet cafe and rent time on one of their computers. Then we’d log into our primary email account over plain, unsecured HTTP.
- Spamfighting vs. Privacy
As a former email admin, I found this history of spamfighting from a former Gmailer fascinating. The implications of widespread encryption are sobering.
- Wrong Number (Email Edition)
Have you ever abandoned an email address? Did you make sure everyone switched to your new one? If your old provider has reissued the address to someone new, your old contacts could still be sending mail to someone else with your personal information. This shouldn’t be a surprise, but InformationWeek reports that Yahoo! users who’ve […]
- Don’t Use Third-Party Links in Email – Object Lesson: Comic-Con Registration
A click tracker that couldn’t hold up to the strain of Comic-Con registration prevented thousands of potential attendees from getting into the system in time.
- Those Sneaky Aliases
After looking through zillions of bounce messages for patterns, “unknown or illegal alias” is now my official favorite way of saying an email address doesn’t exist.
- Blast from the past: dredged up my old netscape.net address
Blast from the past. Doing some email testing & dredged up my old netscape.net address. Had to re-activate it, and the handful of messages I probably saved way back in the day were gone, and now it’s aim.com instead…but it’s still got my years-outdated contact list, including people I haven’t interacted with in a decade. […]
- If You Teach a Man to be Phished…
I’ve dealt with a couple of companies that try to plug the general lack of security in email by using a “secure email” service…that acts just like a phishing attack.
- Why Link Length Matters
Twitter writes that link length shouldn’t matter, but the zillions of URL shortening services out there show that, for now, it does. But why? There are two main reasons to shorten* a link: There’s a technical limit, such as SMS message length or email line width. You expect people to manually enter the URL. Right […]
- Inbox 50
Slowly but surely, my email cleanup continues. After paring my inbox down to 100 items in mid-January, then 75 by the end of the month, I set my next goal of getting it down to 50 by the end of February. I just made it. I managed to hold in the 60-65 range for most […]
- Inbox 75
Well, I actually made one of my goals for January. I not only got my email inbox down to 100, I got it to my secondary goal of 75! A lot of what’s left are to-do items for my Flash website. (Some reminders I sent to myself, some info people sent me.) I should either […]
- Inbox 100
My email inbox is now below 100 messages. It’s kind of sad that this is actually an accomplishment.
- Misdirected
Got a compliment on good tech support ð … but it was intended for another company with a similar name. ð I alternate between finding it amusing & annoying that I get spam for local businesses in Brazil. It’s a bit of a drive from SoCal. It’s sad to get Christmas cards for someone who […]
- No Reply Possible
Don’t you love it when your “Sorry, you sent your complaint to the wrong company” email bounces because the complainer left a bogus address?
- Email Confusion
Why do people email me to tell me email is down? WHY? What makes them think I’ll receive the message? Obligatory User Friendly comic (Jan 28, 1999): Just as confusing: A spammer sent me this urgent message: “We need to remove cupboard, come on!” Uh, yeah, I’ll get right on that…
- CentOS List Hijack
Pissed off because some a-hole with a centos.org address posted multiple copies of a racist antisemitic diatribe to the CentOS announcement list. CentOS sent an apology to lists. Said spammers forged the sender’s address to get past moderation. Look back, name doesn’t match address.
- FIB Scamming
Lame 419 scam: How likely is the FBI Director to contact someone using a GMAIL address? Update 2023: I vastly underestimated the use of Gmail by government officials, didn’t I?
- Spam Filters Gone Wild: This Is True
Waaay back in the dark ages of the Web (somewhere between 1994 and 1997) I discovered a weekly email newsletter called “This Is True.” It collected strange-but-true news stories from around the world, summarizing each in a short paragraph with a witty one-liner at the end. I subscribed to the free edition, and later to […]
- Flagging (Non)-Spoofed Mail
Following up on the PayPal anti-phishing discussion of a few weeks ago, I see that PayPal is promoting a service called Iconix. You install the program on your system, and it looks at your inbox for messages that claim to be from one of its customers. It tries to verify them “using industry-standard authentication technologies […]
- Confidential? Perhaps not…
I found a 419 scam in the spamtraps that started, in typical fashion, with an all-caps name and address, then the line: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL REQUESTING What made this funny (aside from the bad grammar) was the fact that the To: line contained over 1,200 addresses! Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word […]
- Email advice: Pick a domain and stick with it!
Here’s a piece of friendly advice from a mail server admin to companies that interact with subscribers and customers via email: Pick one domain name for your business. Just one. Don’t use any other domains in your emails, even if you want to keep order confirmations separate from promotions. If you contract out for some […]
- Man or Machine?
In the old days, we used to accept email sent to any local account. This meant that various system accounts would collect outside mail instead of bouncing it. No one was reading, say, rpm@example.com, or apache@example.com, but the mailboxes were there. Enter the dictionary attacks. An awful lot of those standard accounts are three-letter names—rpm, […]
- On to step 8
Hmm, CNET reports that spammers are starting to route zombies’ mail through the ISP’s servers. (Hmm, that sounds familiar.) I don’t know about the “email meltdown” Linford warns against, but it will require a change in tactics. And so the escalation continues…
- Blocking spam by source
A brief history: Spammers send mail directly to victims. Server admins block by source, victims complain and try to get spammers kicked off their networks. Spammers relay through third-party servers to disguise their origin. Server admins shut close relays, and block mail from open relays. Spammers relay through trojaned zombies straight to victims. Network admins […]