November 2004
GL
BAL
NEWS
10 Things to Know About
(in no particular order)
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1 Backup. Like everything else that’s important on your computer, you must backup important e-mails and contacts. There are features in Outlook and other e-mail clients that will do this for you.
2 Protection. You can get viruses via e-mail, and you can be scammed. Make sure you have virus scanning that is capable of scanning e-mails – don’t rely on your e-mail provider to do this for you!
3 Reliability. E-mail is similar to regular mail in the fact that sometimes your mail won’t arrive or send. Check that your mail is not just sitting in the outbox.
4 Sizes. You need to check the size of e-mails, are you trying to send a huge attachment and it’s taking hours to leave? Or is someone trying to send you a huge attachment that grinds your internet connection to a halt?
5 Online viewing. Most Internet Service Providers (ISP) offer online web mail – you can go onto their site and check your mail. This is useful for deleting those e-mails with huge attachments and for viewing your e-mails from any computer in the world with an internet connection.
6 Offline e-mail. You don’t have to be online to type out your e-mails if you use programs such as Outlook. You can type out your e-mail, attach a picture maybe, and send the next time you log on or download your e-mails, disconnect and read them offline.
7 Accounts. Your ISP will provide you with an e-mail address, or multiple e-mail addresses and you can use Outlook Express (or similar) that will download your e-mail for you. You can also use the web to get good free e-mail accounts such as MSN Hotmail. These accounts are completely free and have contact lists and folders to store e-mails in too.
8 Management. Leaving many old e-mails in your inbox will make it very slow, especially if you have e-mails with large attachments. Hitting delete on an e-mail doesn’t delete it, it puts it in the deleted e-mails folder. If it is taking a long time to access your inbox, delete e-mails or store them in other folders (you can create folders to hold e-mails) and make sure you clear your deleted e-mails folder.
9 Spam. You can get programs that allow you view your e-mail before you download it onto your computer. These programs allow you to view your e-mail and delete them straight from the mail server. Some also allow you to ‘bounce’ back e-mails to the sender, especially useful for bouncing back spam mail.
10 Awareness. If you have Microsoft Windows, you will have Outlook Express, a program that can get e-mail for you already. If you can dial into the internet, an e-mail account is available for you and you can send/receive e-mails.
If any of these topics are confusing, talk to your local Computer Troubleshooter to make sure you use e-mail effectively.
