ON COMPUTERS : E-mail shift to new account flagged man as spammer
Posted on Monday, August 18, 2008
After we wrote about using Gmail to filter out spam messages, we heard from Greg, a reader who was receiving a stunning 25, 000 e-mail messages a month. Most of that was spam, of course. (According to Symantec, 78 percent of all email is spam. )
Gmail has a great spam filter, so Greg transferred all his incoming e-mail to a Gmail account (they’re free ). Almost immediately, his incoming spam dropped to near zero. Unfortunately, his outgoing mail also dropped to near zero. Greg is in the furniture business, and he started getting phone calls from angry customers asking why he hadn’t e- mailed them the information they requested.
Here’s what happened: It turned out his inability to send e-mail had nothing to do with his Gmail account or its spam filter but was caused by his Internet service provider. Because he’s in business, Greg maintains his own e-mail server. That’s a computer dedicated in whole or part to handling his e-mail.
When he transferred the enormous amount of incoming mail from his server to his Gmail account, the watchdog software maintained by the service provider identified him as a spammer. After all, from the software’s point of view, he was sending almost a thousand emails a day, and he must be a spammer. So they cut off his outgoing e-mail — to protect us.
We talked to someone at Google, the creators of Gmail, about this problem and got some helpful information. Our contact said that unfortunately Google has no control over the e-mail server (which was Greg’s computer ) or his Internet service provider. What it does have, however, is a service that lets companies run their Web domain and e-mail accounts on “Google Apps,” at Google. com / a. (Click on the blue box to find the business stuff. ) This has several benefits, among them industrial-strength spam and e-mail control.
Businesses that use Microsoft Outlook can continue to do so. Their e-mail address can be their company name. If it’s a small business like Greg’s, there is no charge, and the business can use up to 7 gigabytes of e-mail storage and filtering; spam isn’t counted as part of that. Larger businesses can use up to 25 gigabytes for mail for $ 50 per user per year. There’s also free tech support.
We are Gmail users, and even though we get a lot of mail and save more than half of it, we still use only 2 gigabytes of e-mail storage. Incoming spam is moved to a special storage area at Google and is automatically dumped every 30 days. If it were not dumped regularly, spam would accumulate like a city’s garbage and completely overwhelm the system. If you suspect something useful recently came in and was mistakenly identified as spam, you have 30 days to rummage through the trash and try to find it. If you think you know the subject, you can simply do a keyword search. GROUP CALLS A new free service from Phonevite. com lets you send phone messages to up to 25 friends and associates at once, at any time of your choosing. You don’t have to register anywhere to use this service; you simply go to the Web site and click the “start” button. Type or paste in your contacts’ numbers and leave your phone number. You immediately get an automated call back, asking you to record your message. You can schedule that delivery time to be up to three months away. That’s the free service. For $ 20 you can send up to 420 messages, and for $ 100 you can send over a thousand calls. These calls do not have to all be sent at once.
INTERNUTS Buy-Discount-Gift-Cards. com uncovers heavily discounted gift cards on eBay. It filters out phony ones, they say. This is the same outfit that also has a site for companies that provide free shipping on purchases (at FreeShippingOn. com ) and TypoBuddy. com, which searches for eBay listings that may have been misspelled. We used the discount card site and bought a $ 100 restaurant gift card for $ 18. We were the only bidder. Campaign. com is oriented toward the current U. S. elections and has lots of information on voter registration and the issues. It is not limited to the presidential candidates but covers congressional and local elections as well. The site also has addresses and phone numbers for most national and local office holders, whether they are running for re-election or not. You can also register to vote here.
BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH Every once in a while a Windows system will lock up, showing nothing but a blank blue screen and a small message box. This has come to be called the Blue Screen of Death. What causes it ? Who knows ? What can be done about it ? Who knows ? You can always reboot. We recently came across a Web site named FaultWire. com, which attempts to explain what happened. Experts at the site point out that Windows ’ messages about what went wrong are frequently wrong themselves. The real reasons are often to be found among some common errors with wonderfully cryptic names like: “IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL,” and “KERNEL MODE EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED.” Well ! We thought that was the problem all along.
The Web site has some suggestions of what to try in order to restore things to a working state. We have one as well: If you reboot in “Safe Mode,” you usually have the option of returning the machine to its last known stable configuration. Safe Mode is reached in a different ways, depending on the operating system, and you can find out how your system works by doing a Google search on your system name, like Vista, XP, Mac, etc. and safe mode. NOTE: Readers can search several years of columns at the “On Computers” Web site: www. oncomp. com. You can e-mail Bob Schwabach at bobschwab@aol. com and Joy Schwabach at joydee@oncomp. com.
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