It is a good idea to change your email password every now & again. In many ways, control of your email account is the key to a lot of other things, such as recovering a ‘forgotten’ website password. So you want to make sure that your email password is not easily guessed either by humans nor machines. You also want to be sure that your email password has not been stolen somehow from the server or any other way.

The topic of passwords themselves is a whole ‘nother article. There are still some people who use the same password for everything, which is a bad idea. Some people say you should make a really complicated password that is difficult to remember. Bleh. A great way to make a new password is to use several words or a sentence that you can easily remember, but is long enough to be difficult for a machine to guess. For example; “Katie goes to school at 8″ . That is a nice  long password, but still easy to remember. Or another idea; “dougsphonenumberis3105551212″. If you already know Doug’s phone number, I bet you have already memorized this one, and yet at 28 characters it is VERY difficult for anyone or any machine to guess.

Let’s change your email password!

The first step will be to visit the email server & change it there, then we can go forward & enter the new password into your Apple Mail, and iPhone or iPad.

I’m using DreamHost hosting, and so is the SBAMUG. Maybe you are too. We are going to start there by signing in to the server so we can officially change to a new password. This must be the first step. The server needs to know about it first. If I am doing your web hosting,  the link to change your email password may be http://mailboxes.yourdomain.com  you can give that a try & see.

http://mailboxes.SBAMUG.com

After we successfully sign in, we can change to a new password. Enter it twice, then click “Change it” to save.

Ok! That’s it! the new password is set! It may take a few minutes before your email app notices & complains that the old password doesn’t work anymore, but let’s go ahead and enter your new password into Apple Mail.

HOW TO ENTER A NEW PASSWORD INTO APPLE MAIL

These screen photos are of Mail for Mac OSX Snow Leopard, and yours will probably be fairly similar.

Start by pulling down the Mail menu to Preferences, and click the toolbar button for “Accounts.” We will start by entering your new email password for the incoming POP or IMAP server.

Not too difficult for you? Good! That part is done!

Next step is to change the password for your Outgoing SMTP server. It is sort of hidden. Click the pop up menu for Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) and choose the very last item on the menu.”Edit SMTP Server List…”.

Click the tab for “Advanced”, and we see the window where we can actually enter the new password.

Click OK to save the changes, close any extra windows, and we’re good to go! Hooray! We win! 

With the blustery winter weather comes the occasional power outage. Most of which are just a few seconds. I’m a well prepared techie, so I have 8 UPS Battery Back Ups in house to protect; my computer, another computer, database server, cordless phone, alarm clock, internet modem, router, wireless router, Tivo, etc. All very good, and it’s a nice feeling that my equipment is all protected against power failure…. Until the power actually goes out and the whole house starts beeping buzzing & alarming. Usually at night when I’m sleeping!

Why do I need to know the power is off? I don’t. Really, I’d rather stay sleeping unless it is an actual emergency. A power outage of less then a few minutes is certainly not an emergency around here, especially because I have all these UPSs. The biggest problem is the beeping!

Some UPS models can be adjusted in software to not beep, but that is less then reliable, and sometimes it needs to be reset after a power outage. When I tell something to not beep, I expect it to always not beep until I tell it to beep! Not all UPSs have this feature, and we have a variety of UPS units, made by different manufacturers.

Sufficiently annoyed, I set to remedy the situation by physically disconnecting the beepers in all 8 UPSs. Originally I was going to just clip the beeper wires to permanently disable them, but I thought that it would be even better if I could occasionally turn the beeper back on to hear what it had to say. Disabling the UPS beeper is fairly easy if you know what to look for.

After opening the UPS, look for a round thingy with a hole in it, usually about a half inch diameter to 1 inch diameter. That will be the beeper. Usually there is nothing else that could be mistaken for the beeper.

There are times when it might be useful to hear the little communication from the UPS, but so far I’m not impressed with the language. I especially don’t like this model of Belkin UPS because during a power outage long enough to use 80% of the battery, it completely shuts down power to the protected devices to save the battery. Lame! Wrong priority! Even worse, it won’t turn back on when power is restored until you push & hold the power button for 15 seconds. Really Lame! Oh, and even though it has a dedicated indicator light to communicate when it is time to replace the battery, that apparently doesn’t work. I didn’t know that it needed a new battery until the power blinked off for 15 seconds and this Belkin UPS died and wouldn’t turn back on. So if it is not even going to beep nicely when it needs something, I really don’t need to hear it beep to wake me up. That was the last straw.

What you want to do is unsolder the 2 legs of the beeper from the circuit board, then attach a pair of wires to a switch so you can reconnect the beeper on or off easily & positively. (See diagram). Mind the polarity of the beeper, usually it has a + at one leg, and a matching + on the board. Re-solder one leg back to the board, and run the wire from the other leg to the switch, and back to the board where that leg formerly connected to. With the switch open (off) the beeper isn’t connected to the board and therefore simply can not beep. HA!

The white junk on the side of the beeper is glue. I had to use a razor blade to carefully disconnect before de-soldering the beeper.

Here is the beeper reinstalled. Note I rotated the beeper slightly so there would be a little more room underneath for the wire, and to give physical space to prevent any unintended connections.

Run the wires to the switch. My that’s a big yellow transformer!

And mount the switch so you can get to it easily. I drilled an oval hole (2 holes next to each other) in the plastic or metal housing and screwed the switch in place. In choosing the location for the switch I considered the orientation of how that particular UPS usually sits where it lives. I want to easily see the switch too.

Hooray! Now I won’t be unnecessarily alarmed!

Apparently I’m not the only person bothered by unnecessary UPS beeping!

What is the best Web Browser for an old Mac?

Opera 9.64 is the best you can get… for anyone stuck on a very OLD Mac still running OSX 10.3.9 Panther.

I know that because I had an injury earlier this year that kept me flat on my back for 2 weeks. The challenge was to be productive with nothing more than an iPod Touch & an iBook G3/700, circa 2003. The laptop (which originally shipped with a bootable OS 9)  runs too slow to realistically use with Tiger (osx 10.4) so I erased it & installed Panther OSX 10.3, then amused myself by assembling a collection of useful tools to help me be productive and tools that would run under such an old OS.

FireFox 2.0.0.20 will run in Panther, but useless because it can’t properly display most modern websites. (Just forget about watching YouTube on an old computer). Neither did that old version of Safari, but Opera 9 works pretty well, and includes a decent IMAP email client (pop3 client too, but I was using imap). Supposedly, Opera 10 is rated to work with Panther, but that was not my experience. 9.64 is it. BTW, this is when I seriously gave IMAP a try, and for those of you out there with multiple email devices, it works far better than POP3 mail – but your server needs to allow you enough server space to make imap practical.

Other OLD apps I found useful and worked with OSX 10.3.9 Panther:

Adobe Reader 7.08
ChronoSync 4.05
Comictastic 2.32
Chicken of the VNC 2.0b4
GraphiConverter 5.95
Flash Player 9
MS Office 2004
PDFPen 2.43
SuperDuper 2.1.4
TextWrangler 2.13
Timbuktu 8.6
Transmit 3.66
WakeOnLan 1.0

I used 1Password on the iPodTouch, and since DropBox is not supported on such an old system, ChronoSync can sync a local folder to a network volume that is a dropbox folder on the server. More old Mac apps at;
http://mac.oldapps.com/

Best,
Dave Nathanson
Mac Medix

Sometimes you want to send a plain text email. Perhaps you belong to an email list that requires it, or you are sending to people who are using software that prefers plain text. Perhaps you just want to send smaller, lighter emails twice as fast in a more compatible fashion. Rich Text emails are usually about double the file size of a plain text message, and they *could* include undesirables such as malware, and bad scripts.

Different email software does this differently, so let’s start with Apple Mail.

Apple Mail has some hidden features, including a toggle switch to chose Rich Text or Plain Text. One quick way to make sure your outgoing message is plain text is to pull the Format menu to ‘Make Plain Text’.

If you’d like an even easier way you can modify your Mail toolbar to include a toggle between Rich Text & Plain Text – as circled in the top picture above.  To do this;

Open a new message. Or any unsent outgoing message you can type into.

Right-Click (or control-click) in the toolbar to pop up the contextual menu.

Then drag the “Rich Text/ Plain Text” button into your toolbar, and click “Done. Ok, all set!

The “dimmed” side of this button shows you what your outgoing message is now. The bright, clickable half shows what would happen if you pushed that.

Email has gotten out of control. You probably receive a lot of it, and maybe so much that you don’t even want to wade through the mess. So much email that you occasionally miss a message from a friend or relative, leaving it unread amidst the sea of low priority commercial email that may not be spam, but it isn’t your first choice to read either. If only there was a way to easily flag or separate email from people you know versus everything else.

Well if you are using Apple Mail, there is a way to do that!

This trick makes use of “Smart Mailboxes”, which are sort of like a saved search. What we are going to do here is make a new “mailbox” and have it automatically contain only mail from people in your address book. To begin, we open the Apple Address Book application (you’ll find it in your Applications folder) and make a new Smart Group.

We want this Smart Group to always include everybody in your address book, and one way to do that is specify all records that have been updated in the past 20 years. That ought to do it!

* If you wanted to make this smart mailbox only contain messages from close friends & family, you could make Address book group of those instead of the “all cards” group, and use that as your filter.

Click OK, and we are finished with Apple Address Book for now so you may Quit Apple Address Book.

Back to Apple Mail.We are now ready to make a new Smart Mailbox. Pull the”Mailbox” menu to “New Smart Mailbox”.

We want to define the criteria for this Smart Mailbox to contain only messages from senders in our address book, and I went further saying I only wanted messages that are in the Inbox and less than 3 weeks old. You can change this to suit your own needs.

There you have it! Now instead of being overwhelmed by all that mail in your inbox, click & read your mail in this smart mailbox instead. It will be a lot more manageable, and you can peek into your main Inbox when you have time.

Here are some more ideas for Smart Mailboxes:

This was done with Leopard version of Apple Mail that comes with Mac OS X 10.5.x. Also works with other versions of Mail.

PS: If you get a lot of email, you may also be interested in this article I wrote about how to let your email app automatically file your emails into folders for you. http://www.nathanson.org/davesays/2009/07/email-in-box-management/

Did you know you can send a text message to/from email? The trick is to address it correctly so the cellphone carrier’s gateway will route it to your friend’s cellphone as a text message. You’ll just need to know the cellphone number and which company is providing the cellphone service. In all cases, you can send an email from pretty much anywhere to be converted into a SMS text message by addressing an email to the 10 digit cellphone number as below. Do not use any dashes nor other punctuation other than the @.

In most cases, the cellphone SMS user can send a reply which will be routed back the way it came. Remember that these must be SHORT messages, because anything over 140 characters will either be truncated, or split into several messages (which is sort of annoying, and may incur multiple message charges to the cellphone user). Another tip: when sending from email, you should omit the subject line – it counts against the total character count and is unnecessary for text messaging.

Here are the email addresses to SMS for most cellular phone carriers. Note that some carriers use a different address for text or picture messages.

ATT text: 10Digit@txt.att.net
ATT picture: 10Digit@mms.att.net
Verizon text: 10Digit@vtext.com
Verizon Pictures: 10Digit@vzwpix.com
Boost Mobile: 10digitnumber@myboostmobile.com
MetroPCS 10Digit@mymetropcs.com
NexTel: 10Digit@messaging.nextel.com
Sprint: 10Digit@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Sprint pictures 10Digit@pm.sprint.com
T-Mobile: 10Digit@tmomail.net

Alltel: 10Digit@message.alltel.com
Cingular: 10Digit@mobile.mycingular.com
Cingular: 10Digit@cingularme.com
Cricket picture 10Digit@sms.mycricket.com
Cricket text 10Digit@sms.mycricket.com
i-wireless (Kroger): 10digitphone@iwirelesshometext.com
Ntelos 10DigitNumber@pcs.ntelos.com
Qwest: 10Digit@qwestmp.com
Simple Mobile: 10Digit@smtext.com
Virgin Mobile 10Digit@vmobl.com
Virgin Mobile pictures 10Digit@vmpix.com

All internet communications issued from your business should be easily identifiable as truly being from your company. You are trying to build trust with your customers, and teach them to trust you, not trust the whole internet. One simple way is to make sure that all your outgoing emails actually originate from a domain name that is either your usual domain name, or a subdomain of your usual domain name.

Let’s say that my company owns the website http://www.BigCompany.com . So my official domain name is BigCompany.com . So the best email address is me@BigCompany.com .

When I send an ordinary email, I use the my mail server; mail.BigCompany.com . If I am sending out an email blast that is so big it needs to be sent via a listserve or email vendor, then it may sent from the server named blast.BigCompany.com . This is good and proper.

What is a Sub Domain?
The way this works is that I own the domain name BigCompany.com . As the owner, I can (at little or no charge) set up as many sub-domains as I want. A sub domain is named something-dot-BigCompany.com . Generally, a subdomain represents a host computer or server and it is added to the left side of the domain name, separated by a dot.

To break it down you read the domain name in chunks right to left; so to read  www.webmail.BigCompany.com you would say that this is part of the
com (commercial) section of the internet, belongs to the
BigCompany organization, is in the BigCompany group of
webmail, and the computer name is
www. The dots are separators. It is common to have 2 or 3 chunks, but 4 or more is perfectly legal as well. At any rate the name to the left of the last dot (in this case www) is always the name of the computer.

This is set up in the DNS records and it takes about 2 minutes for an IT person who knows what they are doing and has the correct authority.

Sub Domain Name Examples:

• www.BigCompany.com
• ftp.BigCompany.com
• mail.BigCompany.com
• webmail.BigCompany.com
• www.webmail.BigCompany.com
• blast.BigCompany.com
• list.BigCompany.com
• mail.mydepartment.BigCompany.com

Do you see the pattern? Good. So any domain name that ends in .BigCompany.com  can be trusted to officially belong to your company because it is a sub-domain of your domain name. Any domain name that does not end with BigCompany.com may or may not be related at all.

The Basic Problem:

Companies send out blast emails to thousands of customers, but they don’t know what they are doing. Many business administrators don’t understand what we just discussed above. They hire a 3rd party email company to handle  some mailing list management & sending. Not having control of the domain DNS, the 3rd party emailers can’t send the email blast from an official company server that ends with the usual company domain name (.BigCompany.com). So they send the email blast from a 3rd party and unknown server name like for example; BigCompany-mail.com or BigCompany.3rdPartyService.com  or even worse; UnRelatedCompany.com.  Does the customer have any reason to trust email coming from BigCompany-mail.com? No, they don’t. Anyone could spend $10 and register yourcompanyname-mail.com . There is a very big difference between a dash & a dot. The difference between
BigCompany-mail.com and
mail.BigCompany.com
as we discussed above, we know that I own BigCompany.com and all subdomains. We don’t know anything about BigCompany-mail.com . That is a different domain name. Anybody might own that, so we have no built-in reason to trust mail from it. As you may have noticed, spam filters may not trust it either. So e-mailings that originate from 3rd party domains and link to 3rd party domains can get tagged as spam as never reach their intended destination. I’m assuming that your company does not send unwanted email spam, but is trying to stay connected with your customers and readers.

The problem of Tricky crooks and spammers:

Don’t be fooled by tricky spammers that add your company name somewhere in the URL.
BigCompany.com.spammer.com Break it down! Starting from the right and working backwards we quickly see that it is a subdomain of spammer.com and is obviously to trick your customers as being from you.
http://BigCompany.crooks.com/BigCompany.com/login Also bad! Working backwards from the last chunk of the domain name we see that this belongs to crooks.com and they have a web folder named BigCompany.com/login. Tricky!

The point here is that there are crooks and spammers out to trick your customers. It is your responsibility to teach your customers to trust only your official domain  & sub-domains, and not be tricked. Just for fun, look in your own email junk mail folder right now & see what crooks are doing to try & trick people into giving up their paypal passwords. Look carefully at the url links so you are not fooled too.

The Solution

When hiring a 3rd party email service, tell them that you require all outgoing business communications to originate from a sub-domain of your business’s domain name. Put them in touch with your IT dept and say that if they need to create a new sub-domain of your company’s domain and point it at the 3rd party mailing service’s mail server, that is OK, and they have your support.  Your flexibility is in naming the subdomain, the part to the left of the last dot. You might choose blast.BigCompany.com or list.BigCompany.com . Your IT dept can either host that server, or point the DNS at the mailing company’s mail server anywhere in the world. Whatever works better for the mailing company. However, it is under your control, revokable if necessary.

One More Thing

This also goes for web links in your email communications, web tracking links, and linked graphics. You want to avoid sending emails with a bunch of links to 3rd party web servers, as that is suspect and may well get tossed in with the junk mail by the recipient’s spam filter. Your email should only have links to your website, or your subdomains. In other words, every single server name and URL in the email needs to end with YourCompanyName.com .

If you are using 3rd party vendors for email tracking, tell them that only official subdomains of your business may be used in the email blasts. Host your own linked graphics at an official subdomain of your business, or if you need the metric company to host those graphics, have your IT dept set up a subdomain for those as well. Maybe call it metrics.BigCompany.com . Again, this is easy & only takes 2 minutes for an IT person who knows what they are doing and has the property authority.

Remember, this is all about building trust with your customers, and getting your message past the spam filters by looking as respectable as you are. It is important to continually earn and deserve the trust of your customers.

Dave Nathanson
Mac Medix

If you get a lot of “list mail” or “eGroup” mail, and it’s cluttering up your email InBox, you might like to know how to have those group emails sort themselves into a folder so you can look at them when you’re ready, after reading the jokes & virus warnings your friends and family send you. Here’s how for Apple Mail, other email programs are similar.

How to Automatically file your eGroup email messages with Apple Mail

If you are a member of one or more eGroups, or “mailing lists”, you may have wished that your email “InBox” wouldn’t get so clogged up with these group messages. You may wish to not see them right now, or wish to see them all together later. Some people are organized enough that they make a new folder in their email application and drag the group emails into it to keep things organized. That’s a great idea, but it takes time and life would be simpler if this was automatic. Here’s how to do it in Apple Mail for OSX 10.3, but other versions are pretty much the same.

This is what our “InBox” looks like before we get started. Note that the Group messages are mixed in with the other inbox mail.

In Apple Mail, what we are going to do is called making a “Mail Rule“, it may be called something else in other programs. But first, let’s make a folder to store our eGroup mails.

Pull the File menu to “New“, then to “Folder“.
Or press command shift n
Or command click (right click) the mouse in the folders area.

Give the folder a descriptive name. The eGroup name is probably a good choice.

Pull the “Mail” menu to “Preferences, then Click “Rules” in the toolbar, then click “Add Rule”

In the Rules Window, click the button for “Add Rule”.
Give the Rule a good name, and set it for “Any recipient” contains the group email address to perform the Action of “move message” to the mailbox (or folder, actually) that we want to keep the group messages in.

Ok, so if we got everything right, all future eGroup messages with a “To” address that matches our criteria ought to be automatically filed in the right folder.
But what about all the messages that are already cluttering our email InBox? Let’s get those old Group messages into the Group folder right now as well.
Click into the “In Box” and select all messages. You may need to click one message, then choose “Select All” from the Edit menu.
Then, Pull the Message Menu to “Apply Rules“.

Pow! All the Group messages are now in their own folder. From now on, they will jump in there themselves.
Notice that when you have new, unread mail in a folder, the folder is BOLD, so you can easily tell without even having to open it.

Hope this helps,

Dave Nathanson

Mac users can upload photos to the photo Gallery directly from iPhoto.

Note: if you are a SBAMUG member, please substitute SBAMUG.com instead of RoughWheelers.com – and this How-To will work for you too.

REGISTER

If you haven’t made an account for yourself already here’s how;
Go to the RW photo Gallery.
http://www.roughwheelers.com/pix/main.php
and click on “Register” at the top right corner. This is free and only for RoughWheelers members & friends.

For UserName & FullName please put your Handle or nickname. We do NOT need your real name! (We already know who you are).
Choose a good password, enter your email, and you’re all set.

Download & Install the iPhoto plug-in

The other one-time thing you need to do is download the free iPhoto to Gallery plug-in for iPhoto. Download from zwily
Then just double click the installer to install.

Upload photos from iPhoto

Select your photos, and/or make an album of them.
Choose “Export” from “File” menu (or “Share” menu)

Click the “Gallery” tab. And click “Add Gallery” from that menu.

Your Gallery URL is

http://Roughwheelers.com/pix/v/YOUR-USERNAME

(substitute your own username, of course!)

Choose what album you want to add to, and/or Create a new album. It’s perfectly OK to create a new album inside another album – for organization. For example, you might make an album for a Vacation, and them create an album inside for each place/family you visit. Or something like that. Albums are like folders and you can put other albums inside of them.

Export titles & comments if you want to. Actually that is a great feature, I just type my comments for each photo into my iPhoto, then they show up on my Gallery with captions!

To upload faster; choose to scale your photos no larger than 1024×1024. That’s the max size that this photo gallery is allowed to display anyway. Click Export and let it rip!

Ok, that’s it! Check your new web photo gallery & see how it looks!

Share

To share with friends, just tell them the URL (substitute your own username, of course!). That’s all they need to know:

http://Roughwheelers.com/gallery/v/YOUR-USERNAME

Hope this helps,
Dave

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