E-mail shines in Windows 8 with radical overhaul of mail client

E-mail shines in Windows 8 with radical overhaul of mail client:

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview comes with a pre-installed e-mail client for webmail and Exchange. While it's designed with the touch-friendly Metro interface in mind, it's quite usable even in traditional desktop mode, at least for the basic tasks of reading and writing messages.

Windows 8 Mail is an alternative to the mail client in Windows Live Essentials, a free productivity suite for download on the stable versions of Windows in use today. Microsoft has not yet released a Windows 8-specific version of Outlook, the fee-based, business-class e-mail client that is part of Office. A beta version of "Office 15" is expected this summer, Office President Kurt DelBene said this week.

Verify Email with Telnet

Stolen from: http://www.webdigi.co.uk/

We have all been doing email address validation for a very long time to make sure that the email is correctly formatted. This is to avoid users entering wrongly formatted email address but still they can accidentally give us a wrong email address.

Example of a correctly formatted email address but still wrong:
mailbox.does.not.exist@reddit.com [VALID email format but it does not exist]

Above case specifically happens when you take important customer email on phone and you type in the wrong email. So is there a QUICK solution to really check the email without sending a test message to the user? Yes.

The solution
A quick & simple check below can be implemented in most programming language including PHP, Python etc. It relies on using the same SMTP which is used to send emails.
To check if user entered email mailbox.does.not.exist@reddit.com really exists go through the following in command prompt.

First - Find mail exchanger of reddit.com
COMMAND:
nslookup – q=mx reddit.com
RESPONSE:
reddit.com      MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = mail.reddit.com
mail.reddit.com internet address = 208.96.53.70

Second - Connect to mail server mail.reddit.com
COMMAND:
telnet mail.reddit.com 25
RESPONSE:
220 mail.reddit.com ESMTP Postfix NO UCE NO UEMA  C=US L=CA Unsolicated electronic mail advertisements strictly prohibited, subject to fine under CA law CBPC 17538.45.  This electronic mail service provider’s equipment is located in the State of California.  See http://www.reddit.com/static/inbound-email-policy.html for more information.
COMMAND:
helo hi
RESPONSE:
250 mail.reddit.com
COMMAND:
mail from: <youremail@gmail.com>
RESPONSE:
250 2.1.0 Ok
COMMAND:
rcpt to: <mailbox.does.not.exist@reddit.com>
RESPONSE:
550 5.1.1 <mailbox.does.not.exist@reddit.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table
COMMAND:
quit
RESPONSE:
221 2.0.0 Bye

NOTES:
1) the 550 response indicates that the email address is not valid and you have caught a valid but wrong email address. This code can be on the server and called on AJAX when user tabs out of the email field.  The entire check will take less than 2 seconds to run and you can make sure that the email is correct.
2) If email was present the server will respond with a 250 instead of 550
3) There are certain servers with a CATCH ALL email and this means all email address are accepted as valid on their servers (RARE but some servers do have this setting).
4) Please do not use this method to continuously to check for availability of gmail / yahoo / msn accounts etc as this may cause your IP to be added to a blacklist.
5) This is to supplement the standard email address javascript validation.

Gmail Now Lets You Make Longer Labels (Without Wasting Screen Space) [In Brief]

Another Gmail bonus. Not that I have super long labels.

Gmail Now Lets You Make Longer Labels (Without Wasting Screen Space) [In Brief]: "

Up until today, you could only make new Gmail labels that were 40 characters long—which could sometimes prove difficult. They've now extended that limit to 225 characters, giving you a lot more leeway in how you organize your messages. They've also truncated the actual labels themselves in your inbox, so they don't take up too much space if they're long or buried in a long trail of nested folders (mousing over them, however, will show you the full label name or path). It's just a few small changes, but certainly welcome ones for label addicts. [Official Gmail Blog] More »"

Facebook Mail?

Given the amount of times I've had to "re-secure" my account settings, I think I'll pass on this one. At least I think/hope the data Google makes available is anonymous. When developers have access to the data (Farmville) you can be sure it's not.

Why You'll Give Up Gmail for Facebook Mail [Facebook]:

"Get ready for a new invasion wave from Facebook: Mail. According to Techcrunch's sources, a full webmail client integrated with The One and Only Social Network will debut next Monday. This is why it may become your favorite webmail service. More »"

Scholarship FAIL

Got this spam the other day. Uh, maybe we won't be sending him any money.

Subject: I WONT TO WINE THIS SCHOLARSHIP

   My name is Surafel Ashenafi.i am student of Addis Ababa  university

faculity of technology in the department of chemical engineering.But this

department is not my interist.I wont to study mechnical engineering  if i

get a chance.

   I wont to know what is  your criteria for this opportunity?

   THNK YOU !!

GMail Enables HTTPS by Default

I've always wondered why this wasn't the case to begin with...

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To disable this feature, go to Gmail's settings page, select 'Don't always use https' and click on 'Save changes'. If you can't use Gmail offline when this feature is enabled, try this workaround.

Gmail's HTTPS Access Is Enabled by Default: "Unlike other popular webmail services, Gmail allows you to read your messages using a secure connection by visiting https://mail.google.com. In 2008, Gmail added an option that redirected you to the https version and now this option is enabled by default.

'Using https helps protect data from being snooped by third parties, such as in public wifi hotspots. We initially left the choice of using it up to you because there's a downside: https can make your mail slower since encrypted data doesn't travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data. Over the last few months, we've been researching the security/latency tradeoff and decided that turning https on for everyone was the right thing to do,' explains Gmail's blog.

Even if this feature is restricted to Gmail, there's an interesting side-effect: if you open Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Reader by clicking on Gmail's navigational links, you'll use the https versions of those services.

Gmail Security Tips

Here are some great tips for Gmail account security from the GMail Blog. I think the last one is really important. There have been numerous cases in the media recently about free email accounts being compromised using "security questions". At the very least, make sure you have a reliable backup email account listed for password recovery.

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Gmail account security tips: "Posted by Sarah Price, Online Operations Strategist

As part of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, we recently posted about how to pick a smart password. Having a strong password goes a long way in helping to protect your data, but there are a number of additional steps you can take to help you keep your Gmail account secure:

1. Remember to sign out. Especially when using a public computer, be careful to sign out of your Google account when you're finished. Just click the 'Sign out' link at the top right corner of your inbox. If you're using a public or shared computer and want to be extra thorough, you can also clear the browser's cache, cookies and history. Then, completely close the browser. On your personal computer, you can also lock your computer with a password-protected screensaver if you need to step away momentarily. Learn the best ways to lock your screen in Windows or in Mac OS X. Forgot to sign out? Open up a new Gmail session on another computer and use Gmail's remote sign out feature to close any sessions that might still be open elsewhere.

2. Be careful about sending certain sensitive information via email. Once you send an email, you're no longer in control of the information it contains. The recipients, if they so choose, could forward the email or post its contents in a public place. Even if you know and trust the people you're emailing, that information may become exposed if their accounts become compromised or they get a virus on their machines. As a rule of thumb, should you need to provide a credit card number or financial account number to respond to a message, provide it over the phone or in person — not over email. And never share your password with anyone. Google does not email you to ask you for your password, your social security number, or other personal information — so don't send it!

3. Enable 'Always use HTTPS.' Any time you visit a webpage, your computer needs to send and receive information across the Internet. HTTPS is used to encrypt data as it is transmitted between computers on the Internet, so look for the 'https' in the URL bar of your browser to indicate that the connection between your computer and Gmail's servers is encrypted. We use HTTPS on the Gmail login page, and you can choose to protect your entire Gmail session with HTTPS as well. HTTPS can make your mail slower, so we let you make the choice for yourself. Open Settings and choose 'Always use HTTPS' on the General tab if you want to turn it on.

4. Be wary of unexpected attachments.To help protect you from viruses and malware, Gmail automatically scans every attachment when it's delivered to you, and again each time you open a message. Attachments you send are also scanned. That said, no system is foolproof, so if you happen to get an email from a friend with an attachment you didn't expect, don't be afraid to ask the sender what it is before you decide whether to open it.

5. Make sure your account recovery information is up-to-date. Your account recovery information helps you regain access to your account if you ever forget your password, or if someone gains access to your account without your permission. We currently offer several paths to account recovery. Every Gmail user must select a security question and answer — be sure to choose a combination that is easy for you to remember, but hard for others to guess or come across by investigating. Don't choose a question like "What is my favorite color?" as others may easily guess the answer. We also encourage you to provide a secondary email address and/or a mobile phone number, so we can send you a link to reset your password if you lose access to your account.

Five favorite Entourage tips

I found #4 particularly helpful. I've always wondered how to work with the database for Entourage.

Five favorite Entourage tipsReady to stop doing things the slow way in Microsoft Entourage? Joe Kissell shows his five favorite ways to boost your productivity in this popular e-mail program.

Email is the new FTP

This morning I was informed by a co-worker that a professor on campus attempted to send him a 3.5GB file via email. Not only was he surprised that it did not work, he was mad and thought there must be something wrong on my co-workers end because he had done everything correctly.

Now this makes me wonder what most people think when it comes to file size (if at all). Since I have been around computers for a while I understand the significance of size when talking about files and what you can do with them. I suspect to most people nowadays, this does not matter at all.

Most people who have been introduced to computers in the past couple years have not had to deal with size as an issue (at least not with files). Applications can handle huge files much more easily than in the past. Computing power has become so limitless that the average end user has a super computer on their desktop with multiple cores/processors to do their work. Bandwidth issues have become a thing of the past. Disk storage is so cheap that people have terabyte raids at their disposal for just a few hundred dollars. USB drives, the floppy disks of old, are so large now that more than files can be stored on them. Multiple operating systems can be installed to them as they are carried around as portable workstations.

With instant messaging and texting becoming the usual forms of communications, email has become the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) of the past. Huge amounts of online storage are available to most free email accounts. People use them for storage rather than email. Why am I surprised when people get angry because they can't email a file? A file is just a file after all.