WizGidget

I welcome feedback on WizGidget articles.  You can provide feedback using the contact form at wizgidget.com, where you can also see this and past Wizgidget articles.  I especially appreciate the feedback because that keeps me on track with topics and a technical level that is helpful to my readers.  This article was suggested by The Belton Journal’s editor Carl Burleigh.

There are a number of ways you may acquire an email account.  Many employers provide email for their employees where it makes sense.  Another source is through an internet provider such as our homegrown VVM.  Generally if you have internet access — dialup, DSL, cable, wireless or whatever, you will have an email account associated with it.  If you own an internet domain like wizgidget.com you may have email accounts with the domain.  Finally, there are free email providers on the internet, such as Google (gmail), GMX, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Zoho mail (listed in order of popularity according to About.com’s 2010 Readers Choice Awards).   Note that Yahoo’s free email is free for web-access only.  The question some might ask is, if I have an email account from my internet provider or my employer, why would I want a free email account?

One benefit of a free email account, although not exclusive to free accounts, is that they are generally accessible via a web browser from anywhere internet access is available.  I’ve heard of people who wander the world, keeping up with friends, associates, and business using web-based email wherever they can find an internet café – and these days internet cafe’s can be found just about anywhere people can be found from the jungles of Central America to the winter wonderland of Siberia.

Employees who have company email would do well to use a free email account for their private email, for several reasons.  Even though many employers allow their employees to use company email for their private conversations, I personally think this is not good practice.  First of all, the company “owns” your email which means it is by definition not really private.  Plus it seems to me that it would be better not to mix “the job” with personal life.  Web based email allows access to the account either from work or at home.  A caveat here is that some employers block access to webmail, in which case you wouldn’t be able to use it at work except maybe using a smartphone.  More on that later.

Another benefit to a free email account is that it can become your “throwaway” email account.  When the account becomes compromised and starts collecting spam, it’s easy to retire that account and get another one.  The disadvantage is you have to notify all your friends and associates when you retire an account, although you should be able to set a “vacation responder” on the old account to reply to any received emails to let them know your address has changed — like filing a change of address form with USPS.

I love getting suggestions for article topics. You can suggest a topic by submitting a comment form at wizgidget.com: look in the right column near the bottom, and click on the “Contact Form” link.  This article is in response to a request from someone who needed to configure email, specifically for Outlook Express (OE).

An email address is composed of a “username” and a “domain name”, joined by the “commercial at” symbol: “@”.   The “username” is the part of the email address that goes before the “@”, while the domain name is what goes after the “@”, for example username@domainname might be wizgidget@mydomain.com where wizgidget is the username and mydomain.com is the domain name.  Many people get email through their internet provider such as VVM, or Roadrunner (TimeWarner cable).  In those cases you specify your account “username” when you get the account.  Email addresses provided by your internet provider are usually something like wiz123@vvm.com or wiz123@hot.rr.com.

There are other sources for free email accounts that are unrelated to the internet provider, such as Yahoo!, Google (gmail), Hotmail, and AOL.  You can get an email account for free (with a caveat for Yahoo) from these by simply going to their website and creating an account.  You will pick a username for the account, which of course must not already be taken. The signup form will show if it’s available.  Then, fill out the rest of the form to get the account.  Be sure to record your username and password; you’ll need those for configuring OE later.

Here’s a couple caveats: Yahoo’s email is free for web access only — if you want to download your messages using OE or whatever, you have to pay for their “Plus” account.  The others have free “pop” access. Also, Hotmail is owned by Microsoft — and those who know me know I have a Really Bad Attitude about Microsoft.

So, now you have your email account and password, you’re ready to set up Outlook or Outlook Express (OE).  We’ll look at OE since it comes standard with recent versions of Windows, and Outlook is somewhat similar.  Keep in mind that OE may look a bit different based on your version of Windows and what updates have been installed. We’ll also assume this is a Gmail account. After you start OE, pull down the Tools menu, then pick Accounts.  Click the “Add” button at upper right, then click “Mail”.  The first entry is the “Display Name” — people you send email to will see this in the From: field of emails.  The next page gets your email address, ala wizgidget@gmail.com.  The next page is for the incoming and outgoing email servers.  Use pop.gmail.com for the incoming server and smtp.gmail.com for the outgoing.  The next page accepts your account name and password.  For Gmail, the account name is your email address, like wizgidget@gmail.com.  Leave the “Secure Password Authentication” unchecked.  Clicking “Next” will finish the setup.  You can also see these instructions at mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=76147, or this article at www.wizgidget.com/articles.

Last week we discussed how spammers collect addresses. This week I’ll cover how I cut the torrent into an occasional drip.

Once your email address has been compromised, you have two choices: filter the spam, or retire the address. Filtering works reasonably well to a point, but when you start getting several hundred a day even the filtering begins to be cumbersome and time-consuming, especially if you travel or use a dial-up connection. So, I’ve set up a system for preventing the spam, or nipping it in the bud when an addess is compromised, but still giving me the flexibility that I need. It’s somewhat draconian for the average person, but it works.

First, because I’m running my own domain, I can define throwaway addresses to be used for a specific purpose. For instance, if I give an address to a vendor or new acquaintance, I’ll usually use their name, and a date stamp, ala amazon.com_2010@mydomain.com. That way, if I start getting spam to that address, I can both retire just that address, and I know where the compromise originated. Believe it or not I’ve had an address compromised that I’d given to an internet security vendor! I use the same technique for addresses used in my domain registrations.

It’s not very convenient or even at times possible to go set up a throwaway address every time I need one, so I use a “catchall” account on the domain that I use throwaway addresses. The catchall account receives email to any username that isn’t already defined. So, Paul_2010@mydomain.com goes to me, Ann_2010@mydomain.com goes to Ann, and anything_at_all@mydomain.com goes to the catchall account, which I monitor. When I get an email to the catchall account, I add the new address to the appropriate list of aliases for either Paul_2010 or Ann_2010. Do you remember the discussion of spammers guessing addresses? That’s the problem with this technique – occasionally I’ll get spam to a “guessed” address, which naturally goes to the catchall account regardless of how poor the guess was. When that happens, I add the address to a “reject” account that simply rejects any email it receives. This takes some diligence of course, but totals only 5 minutes or so every couple weeks.

Every now and then one of the “throwaway” addresses I’ve used gets compromised. When that happens, I simply add that address to the “reject” account. If the vendor or acquaintance warrants, I’ll let them know the address has been compromised, and that they might want to examine their systems for viruses. If I retire an address I use for general email I set it up so that the sender gets a bounce message that directs them to an unlinked (security by obscurity) webpage with the new address to use. Since the spam is generally sent from virus-infected computers that don’t watch for bounces, that’s fairly safe and allows retiring an address without the bother of notifying everyone.