project email

Oct

2013

Project Email Part 6

A lot of people are enjoying this series and I’d just like to say thank you for the positive feedback and questions so far. There have been some good comments that have prompted me to make notes and make this series better. Please keep it up as it prompts me to keep going. 🙂

Eventually I’ll move on to the bit that I know some people are waiting for and that’s broadcast email and autoresponders, and getting your email through the filters and delivered into inboxes.

But for today, I’ve created a short video that shows a small tweak to ThunderBird which I think is crucial, and I also show off the same concept that has made FireFox so popular – addons.

There are a couple which I believe are most useful and that you’ll want to add to ThunderBird when you see them. If there are any that you find that you think are worth sharing then please let me know by leaving a comment.

-Frank Haywood

http://www.frankhaywood.com/tag/project-email/ <== Click this for a list of all Project Email posts.

Sep

2013

Project Email Part 5

Project Email continues today with a short video on how to change your email password without having to log into cPanel.

This is very useful if you have clients who you’ve set up webmail for on their own domain. Now they can log in using the password you created and then change it whenever they like. 😉

Also discussed is the ability to autoload the webmail client of your choice. In essence, this means you can tell Roundcube (my recommended webmail client) to load a few seconds after you’ve logged in.

I wouldn’t suggest that you set this to 1 second for clients though as it will effectively stop them from changing their password as it will bypass the “change password” link. Watch the video and this will make sense. 🙂

-Frank Haywood

http://www.frankhaywood.com/tag/project-email/ <== Click this for a list of all Project Email posts.

Sep

2013

Project Email Part 4

My email client of choice is called ThunderBird and the good news is, like FireFox it’s also available for Mac and Linux users. (There’s even a portable version for Macs too.)

Why do I think portable programs are the way to go?

Once upon a time, all Windows programs were portable. You didn’t install them as such, in effect you just copied them where you wanted them to run and away you went.

Then Microsoft introduced the concept of the registry which is a database of all program settings and in effect tied the program to the machine you’d installed it onto. If you wanted to run the program on another machine then you had to install it on there too.

Right from day one I didn’t think that was a good thing for us users.

The worst thing about it is the Windows registry is incomprehensible.

The old method utilised a simple text based .ini file with text entries for all the settings and I reckon it was a “jolly good idea”. You could read through these entries for the program in your favourite text editor and work out what was going on. You could also apply some useful undocumented tweaks by changing “false” values to “true” and seeing what happened.

Yeah I’m a bit of a geek, always have been. 😉

Portable programs by their nature can’t use the registry to store their settings, so they typically use the good old .ini files again. This means if you use a flash drive to store and run your portable programs, then those programs can write back any settings changes you make to the .ini files.

I hope that makes sense.

So. The PortableApps program is very cool and has a *huge* amount of free programs you can install including ThunderBird, FireFox, Chrome, Opera, NotePad++, Skype and OpenOffice and Libre Office.

It even has its own built in installer and program directory. Check for new apps, tick the boxes for the ones you want to install and off it goes and does it for you.

Yeah I’m impressed with it and I think you will be too.

Okay so back to email and ThunderBird.

I used to be an Outlook Express user until Microsoft killed it. Then I had to go looking for a replacement email client as I really didn’t want to use the web for ALL my email accounts as it would have taken forever to log in and check them one at a time. The assumption nowadays by companies like Microsoft and Google is we only have one email account, and that’s never been the case for me. It might be okay for the average home user, but I need lots of accounts thank you.

Luckily, with ThunderBird you can add a LOT of email accounts and I have at least 30 in my personal installation.

And they’re really made it VERY easy to add a new email account to it, including Google and probably Yahoo although I haven’t checked.

All you need to do is enter your email address and password and Thunderbird automatically tests the server to see what protocols it supports and goes for the most secure one it can find.

IF you’re thinking of leaving a comment on this post with your thoughts, then all I’ll say is that’s a good idea and it’s DEFINITELY in your interest to do so as I’d like to later reward all contributors for their input and views. 😉

-Frank Haywood

http://www.frankhaywood.com/tag/project-email/ <== Click this for a list of all Project Email posts.

Sep

2013

Project Email Part 3

You can create a new email account in cPanel in just a few clicks, and once that account is created you can access it either by web mail or with an email client of your choice.

Today in the short video above I show you how to do these two things.

#1 – Create a new email account in cPanel.
#2 – Access one of the standard web mail tools that come with cPanel.

The web mail software I like to use is RoundCube. To begin with it’s not very friendly by default, but with a couple of tweaks I show you in the video, it looks *much* better and is far easier to use.

And… Did you know that with cPanel hosting you can easily access your web mail just by going to:-

yourdomain.dom/webmail

Isn’t that cool? It auto-redirects you to the correct place so you don’t have to remember a complicated URL in order to access your email anywhere that has internet access.

Armed with that first piece of information you can begin to wean yourself of free web based email and begin to use email off your own domain instead.

Coming shortly is how to use a free Windows client to access multiple email accounts and keep everything in one neat place – and still be able to take it with you wherever you go. 😉

-Frank Haywood

http://www.frankhaywood.com/tag/project-email/ <== Click this for a list of all Project Email posts.

Sep

2013

Project Email Part 2

As I said yesterday, today I’ve created a short video showing how you can enable email authentication on your domain with cPanel hosts. It’s very easy to do in a couple of clicks, but if you don’t have cPanel then I guess you can ask your web host to enable it for you.

Start the video then change quality to 720p and go full screen.

Why should you do this?

Simple. Email is increasingly becoming REPUTATION based.

In the past there were systems set up called blocklists which in essence were just a big list of bad IP or email addresses that were used by known spammers. Except these lists have always been rubbish and poorly maintained (the trouble is many ISPs and free email providers still rely on them).

But there’s something better now that’s been widely accepted (the chances are you haven’t joined the party yet) and that’s email authentication.

This system relies on you enabling a couple of things on your server that authenticate email coming in (DKIM) and also going out (SPF) to make sure the email is from who it says it is and not from a spammer.

The SPF part of it makes sure that the receiving server can check to see if the email really did come from you. Over time this will improve your reputation so that the ISPs and email providers are more willing to accept email from you even if the odd user marks it as spam. (A whole topic in itself.)

So this stuff is quite important to know for any small business owner – I wouldn’t be bringing it up if it wasn’t.

-Frank Haywood

http://www.frankhaywood.com/tag/project-email/ <== Click this for a list of all Project Email posts.