How to Speed Up E-mail

If you use an e-mail client such as Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, you may notice that over time, it might seem to get slower and slower. This is most likely due to the fact that all of those e-mails you have saved up has slowed the e-mail program down. With attachment sizes regularly topping 5 to 20MB per e-mail, it’s no surprise that this can occur. Here are some tips on keeping your e-mail nice and neat as well as speedy.

For Outlook Users

• Consider saving attachments to a folder on your desktop or inside your Documents folder. Once you do this, you should remove the attachment from the e-mail message itself to keep it slim in size.
• Consider setting up AutoArchive to where it can automatically move or delete older messages out of your main personal folders file into one called “Archive Folders”.
• You can scan through all of your e-mails for large e-mails by using Outlook’s built-in “Large Mail” search filter. This will help you identify all e-mails that are larger than a certain size. I recommend anything larger than 500KB be moved out of Outlook or deleted.
• Regularly empty your Deleted Items folder. You can set Outlook to ask you to empty it automatically every time you close it.

Outlook Express or Windows Mail Users

Consider upgrading to Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007 or another program such as Mozilla Thunderbird. Outlook Express does not handle large stores of e-mails very well and can end up causing errors over time.

Webmail Users

If you use a service such as Gmail, Yahoo, MSN Hotmail, your ISPs webmail server, or others, you’re probably okay. However, some webmail accounts have limited space so it would be wise to delete large attachments from your account if you want to ensure that you can keep receiving and sending e-mails. For a great, free webmail service, I highly recommend Google’s Gmail (www.gmail.com). They offer over 7 gigabytes of storage for your e-mails and climbing. You can also set up direct POP3 or IMAP access with an e-mail client such as Microsoft Outlook, for free.

I am offering a limited time remote support service to overhaul and optimize your e-mail client for $29 per PC/e-mail client*. With this service, I can:

• Perform a scan against your personal folders file to ensure it is error-free.
• Help you identify large e-mail attachments and move them out of your e-mails.
• Set up AutoArchive for you to ensure that you will always have a lean e-mail client.
• Configure other settings such as “Empty Deleted Items on Exit” and your own custom e-mail signature if desired.
• Remove unnecessary toolbars/add-ons in your e-mail client for better performance.
• Defragment and compact your e-mail files for even better performance.

* Note: This service applies to Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Windows Mail, or Outlook Express users only. If you are interested in switching your current e-mail client or webmail over to Outlook, or have any questions regarding this service, please feel free to contact me.

Ways to Reduce Spam/Junk E-mail

In this post, I’m going to talk about one of the most hated things about computers and the Internet — spam. Spam, also called Junk Email, hits our inbox daily whether we like it or not.

Most of you already have some kind of anti-spam mechanism, whether it’s by hosting with me, using a big ISP’s e-mail, or using a free webmail service like Yahoo! or Google. These all have server-side spam filtering. However, anti-spam is not a perfect science, so some junk mail still slips through. Below, I have listed seven different tips on reducing or circumventing spam.

• Don’t use any “auto-preview” features in your mail client. Examples of this are the Reading Pane in Outlook 2003/2007 or the Preview Pane in Outlook Express/Windows Mail. These should be turned off as they auto-load the e-mail. Most spam is easily identifiable by its sender and subject, which is okay to view.
• Don’t post your e-mail address in plain text on the Internet. Examples include having it on your website (use a contact form instead), posting in forums, chat dialogs, or blogs. Having your e-mail in plain text can easily be found by spam robots that crawl the Internet to harvest e-mails for spamming. Spammers are very sophisticated with this, much like how Google is sophisticated with web search.
• Don’t unsubscribe. Some spam e-mails have an “opt-out” link that simply verifies that you’re a real, active e-mail user who opened their junk e-mail message. Legitimate newsletters, however, usually have good privacy policies, are e-mails that you know you signed up for, and are from trusted, known sources.
• Don’t open suspicious/unknown attachments. Spam e-mails may come with an attachment that looks like it’s a picture or a text file of some sort. This is usually malicious in nature and will usually infect your system with a Trojan that gathers even more e-mail from your own address book. A good anti-virus solution usually circumvents this very well. In fact, AVG AntiVirus 8.0 does this very well. It has plugins that scan incoming emails for these malicious attachments and will either silently take care of it for you, or prompt you to do something about it.
• Don’t open spam e-mails with pictures. The pictures are downloaded from a spammer’s server on the Internet. This lets them track you and see that you opened their message. It’s a welcome mat for even more spam.
• Use a throw-away e-mail address. If you regularly find yourself having to sign up on various websites just to gather information on something, download something, or get something, it may be a good idea to have a “throw-away” e-mail address. This is an address that you can use for sign-ups only and it would be separate from your business or personal address that you only give to friends or family. Free e-mail services such as Google’s Gmail, Yahoo, or MSN Hotmail are easy to sign up for and use. On the more advanced side, I have my own domain “neuroncomputers.com”. So what I do is I create some random, jargon e-mail address like signups392@neuroncomputers.com and use that for awhile. When I see that it gets hit with tons of spam, I simply delete it and create a new one called signups405 and so on so forth.
• And the #1, perfect anti-spam solution is…Don’t Use Email! Of course that would be impossible since email has really become a staple in business and in our personal lives. The good news is, as technology gets better and better, so does the fight against spam. From my own observations with clients and how their email systems are set up, I’ve seen first hand that approximately 98% of all emails have been effectively blocked and discarded as spam. So if you’re actually getting 5-10 spam e-mails per day, that’s only a small fraction of the 2% of e-mails that are not being blocked. I’d certainly hate to have thousands of spam e-mails in my inbox!

If you have any spam-blocking/prevention ideas, questions, or comments, please feel free to share them with me, and I’ll be sure to add your comments to my blog and in my next newsletter edition.