email

Today I received very disheartening email. Al G. writes: " Why has my subscription to the Infopackets Gazette newsletter suddenly ceased? " I decided to check the subscriber base, and found Al's email address still in the list. I know that most of ... the newsletters have been successfully delivered because the web statistics reflect normal activity. So, why wasn't the newsletter getting delivered to Al? The only logical explanation I could think of -- other than Al's mailbox being over-quota -- was that his Internet Service Provider (ISP) may be incorrectly blocking this newsletter due ... (view more)

How can poetry stop spam? Answer: Habeas . Habeas is a new company on the Internet which has developed a technology that permits legitimate bulk mailers -- such as infopackets.com -- the ability to deliver authentic emails and eliminate spam at the ... same time. Legitimate bulk email service providers are able to inject Habeas copyrighted Haiku poetry into outgoing email headers to ensure authenticity and delivery. Internet Service Providers and Spam Fighting programs are able to pick up the headers which can then be used to determine if the message is spam or legitimate. Wait a sec, what's a ... (view more)

I've been toying with some different ways to help get the word out about the infopackets web site. I'm on a tight budget, especially after getting $burned$ from a sucky web hosting company . In fact, I sent the Sucky Web Hosting company an email ... yesterday asking when my account was going to be refunded because my bank statement reported no activity. Here's two emails I received regarding my refund: November 29: " Your account will be refunded all but the $99 Setup Fee. Refunds are usually processed within 24 hours of cancellation ... sometimes it can take a while to show up in your bank ... (view more)

Are you sick of hearing about my mis-adventures yet? I've got more to talk about, and if you want to keep informed about the status of the web site and newsletter delivery, you'll have to read up on it. So, here goes: The current host will literally ... pull the plug on the (current) web server effective November 30th which is at the end of the 30-day "money back guarantee" period. Access to the infopackets web site might be interrupted temporarily until the rest of the Internet catches up to par with my nameserver update. If you don't know what a nameserver is, or if you want to know ... (view more)

It looks like yesterday's problem of Outlook Express not displaying images via email stirred up a lot of responses. I woke up today to find that my Inbox was jammed full of excellent suggestions from our Readers. First, let me explain who might be ... affected by missing pictures in Outlook Express 6: Anyone who has upgraded to, has installed a patch for, or uses Outlook Express 6 Anyone who installed Windows XP, or XP Service Pack 1. These people also have Outlook Express 6 installed on their system. From what I can gather, that pretty much sums it up. There were multiple solutions to the ... (view more)

Since we're on the hot topic of hackers and hacking lately, I thought I'd share with you another great resource that Eric B. sent me. The web site is called myNetWatchman . The myNetWatchman program (agent) gives users a heads-up that they have a ... security problem, if their system becomes infected with an Internet Worm virus. There's also some super-cool reading on their web site (RE: ' Windows Forensics ') which shows how multiple non-hostile applications combined can lead to a hacking threat. I'm not going into great detail because I don't want to spoil it for you; however, I will say that ... (view more)

Yesterday I wrote about a problem concerning the usage of the mail queue on the infopackets web server. To recap: whenever the Infopackets Gazette newsletter is sent out (to the list of readers), some emails are entered into a temporary holding area ... (called a "mail queue") if they are unable to reach the recipient. This is a potential problem for the infopackets web server because the mail queue can "overflow" and cause the server to run out of storage spac e. Recall: The Mail Queue Polling solution I was able to save the web server from potentially running out of space by ... (view more)

This Sunday, I received the "friendship4u" (W32.Yaha.E) email virus about 30 times. I couldn't believe how this little bugger of a virus kept emailing itself to my mailbox. Thank goodness I have a virus scanner in place and Outlook Express 6 which ... do a decent job of protecting me from dangerous email attachments . Although this is a somewhat effective combination of software to combat an email worm virus, it didn't stop the fact that the virus kept showing up in my INBOX under Outlook Express. Every time I received the virus, I would have to weed through good emails and delete all ... (view more)

This past Sunday, I loaded up Outlook Express only to find that my Inbox was flooded with emails from people that I didn't know, inviting me to install a "cool" screen saver which was conveniently file-attached to the email. The email messages ... varied in topic. Most of the file attachments ended in .SCR, some of them ended in .EXE. How nice. Of course, I know better than to open an email attachment from someone I don't know, because 99.999% of the time it contains a virus. If you know a little bit about computers, you might know that a file that has the extension .SCR is generally a ... (view more)

Well, it finally looks like infopackets.com has completed its journey over to its new web server. The entire process (from start to finish, including changing registrars ) took about 60 days to complete. Most importantly, my own personal computer is ... finally connecting to the new web server. The hard lesson learned: while most web service providers are eager to say that a change like this "should only take 72 hours to complete", just remember -- anything that could go wrong probably will, and expect the worse case scenario. OK, I expected that. But I think I got hit with worse than ... (view more)