Windows Tips and Tricks

Even at its peak, AOL was consistently rated at the bottom of the national dial-up ISPs. When I had to teach computer classes using AOL, it was a frustrating experience using their dreadful software. It was a poor service but it trapped many newcomers with its ubiquitous offerings and omnipresent disks. Once snared, it was difficult to get out. The proprietary and non-convertible formats used by AOL for email, addresses, favorites, etc. made moving to another ISP very difficult. (Not to mention that canceling the service was no easy task.) The spread of broadband finally convinced many to drop AOL but millions are still subscribers. If you are one of those who feels you are stuck with AOL because of all your personal data being in their format, PC Magazine has some help. A recent article describes the situation:

Chewing off your own leg to escape from AOL was never actually required, but for many years the process seemed nearly as painful. AOL’s traditional modus operandi kept subscribers shackled to the service even if they hated it. Admittedly, the company has made efforts of late to “open” the service quite a bit and has made most of its content free. Maybe AOL has finally realized that genuine customer loyalty is rarely created via force. But legions of captives still pay monthly ransom to AOL a decade or more after installing one of the unavoidable AOL start-up disks from the nineties. Many others remain stuck with AOL’s maddening desktop client software, even though the service is free, because they don’t know how to convert their data.

The article describes some commercial software that can help you escape:

Fortunately, a number of independent developers now offer utilities for converting AOL data into less proprietary forms. The most seamless product I found was ePreserver from Connected Software (www.connectedsw.com), which makes the technical part of the conversion a snap.

Update: Walter Mossberg mentions http://www.trueswitch.com/ in his latest mailbox column.

Here’s some more unpleasant news about Internet security. If you use Web-based email programs such as Gmail on a wireless connection, even encoding by SSL isn’t as secure as once thought. George Ou writes about the problem at ZDNet:

What’s really sad is the fact that Google Gmail is one of the “better” Web 2.0 applications out there and it still can’t get security right even when a user actually chooses to use SSL mode. Other applications like Microsoft’s MSN/Hotmail and Yahoo don’t even have SSL modes. The fact that they use SSL mode for first time authentication and sign-in is irrelevant because they all drop down to unencrypted mode right after the user authenticates.

In other words, if you use an email program at a public wireless hot spot, assume that everything can be read by someone else in the neighborhood. Actually, I assume that any email that I send, wired or wireless, is subject to being read by strangers. If something is really confidential, don’t use email to send it.

In many ways the usefulness of email has been greatly impaired by the torrent of spam and phishing. In spite of all that, it remains a valuable method of communication as long as we are vigilant. PC World has a slide show with some information on spotting a scam in an email. They could have done more with the subject but every little bit of knowledge about the problem helps.

As I hope everyone recognizes, the “From” address in an email is easily faked. To check where an email really came from, you need to read a portion of an email called the “header”. This part is not normally shown but can be easily revealed. The exact method depends on your email software but here is how it works in Outlook Express 6 or in Vista’s Mail program.

Right-click a message and choose “Properties” from the context menu that appears. In the dialog window that opens, click the tab “Details”. This will reveal the header information. (Incidentally, there is also a button “Message source” that will allow you to read the whole message in plain text and thus avoid hidden hypertext problems.) In the header will be an entry “X-Originating IP” followed by some numbers that are the IP address of where the email started. In order to know what the IP address means, you have to use a look-up service called “Whois”. There are many sites on the Internet that provide this service but here is the link for American Registry for Internet Numbers.

After you look up the IP address, you may still only know the ISP that provided the address for the mail service. However, this information can still help in distinguishing a fake. If an email supposedly from Aunt Matilda in Idaho originated from an ISP in China or Europe, you can bet that Aunt Matilda didn’t send it.

More on reading email headers can be found here.

A lot of spam tries to sell you various quack or phony medical remedies. National Public Radio has an interesting audio clip about the problem:

About one third of spam e-mail is trying to sell a medical product. A couple of scientists decided to order one of every medication offered to them to see what would happen. Pediatrician and Slate’s medical columnist Dr. Sydney Spiesel discusses the experiment with Alex Cohen.

I am not sure how these statistics are arrived at but a new study says that 90-95% of email sent in 2007 was spam. Contrast that with the estimated 5% of email being spam in 2001.

The heading of this post is the title of a satirical piece over at Google Blogoscoped. Needless to say, it isn’t in praise of how Microsoft does things. Here’s the opening premise:

Today I want to ponder the question: what if Microsoft, not Google, had created Gmail? What would be the differences in that web mail client for users today? What if we apply some of the same design rules that brought us Hotmail, for instance?

According to an article in Slate, the young are ignoring email for other forms of communication like social networks and instant messaging. According to the article:

Ten years later, e-mail is looking obsolete. According to a 2005 Pew study, almost half of Web-using teenagers prefer to chat with friends via instant messaging rather than e-mail. Last year, comScore reported that teen e-mail use was down 8 percent, compared with a 6 percent increase in e-mailing for users of all ages. As mobile phones and sites like Twitter and Facebook have become more popular, those old Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts increasingly lie dormant.

The article goes on to say:

Thinking more practically, there’s now a generation gap between first-generation and second-generation Internet users. Colleges are finding that students increasingly ignore or never receive campus-wide e-mail announcements. All those clever forwards from Grandpa are going unread.

Is this just a teenage fad? Not according to the author of the article who says:

So, is the solution to browbeat these little rebels back in line and enforce mandatory e-mail usage? Good luck. Chances are, as usual, that the grown-ups will be the ones who are forced to adapt. Colleges have already thrown up their hands and created Facebook and MySpace pages to stay in touch with students. Since Facebook opened its gates to oldsters this year, parents are coming in and setting up camp a safe viewing distance from their kids.

So, will you be joining Facebook?

We have yet another twist on the Nigerian scam. Maybe you don’t fall for stuff from supposed widows of African dictators or bank directors with lost accounts but how about a plea from a friend or business acquaintance? The New York Times Bits blog describes a new scam:

Here’s how it works: The scammer somehow breaks into a victim’s Web-based e-mail account. He then impersonates the victim and sends an emergency plea for help to everyone in the account’s address book, asking them to wire money to Nigeria. The e-mail includes some variation on a story about getting mugged or losing a wallet while on a trip to Nigeria.

Robot programs called “spambots” are constantly trolling the Internet for email addresses to add to spam lists. If you ever post your email address on any site that spambots can get to, you’ll soon be getting a mailbox full of spam. That would include forums, chatrooms, blog comments, or anything public. One possible solution is to use throw-away addresses but that has drawbacks. Another approach is to disguise an address in some way that bots can’t see or figure out. This blog uses a challenge question and on other sites I use JavaScript to protect the email address used for contacting me. For those who are interested, a general discussion of methods for hiding addresses is at A List Apart. It’s a little technical but anyone who wants to have a blog or a personal Web site might find it useful.