Email reading methods

The main methods of accessing most email are:

• Webmail Interface To access a provider’s webmail interface, you would browse to the URL (or web address) of the provider, and on this web page you log in using your email address and a password.  All of the features offered are on this web page, and you have the ability to log in from any computer connected to the Internet world-wide.
• Local software via POP or IMAP connection This method involves downloading an actual software program to your computer which logs into the website for you and downloads the messages so that they are viewable in this program.

Connection Methods You’ll notice that the options for the Local Software method are “POP” or “IMAP”. There are important differences between the two, and you should understand the difference before making a decision on which to use.  One issue you may run into, however, is that your current email provider may only support one or the other.  Normally, if they support IMAP, they will definitely support POP.  Sometimes they will support ONLY POP.  Yahoo!, for instance, supports POP, and offers IMAP for a fee. POP:  POP is the first mail retrieval protocol used, and stands for Post Office Protocol.  It uses very basic methods of mail retrieval and is fairly simple to use.  When using this protocol, the program retrieving the mail downloads the message and has a couple of options: download the message and leave a copy of it on the website; or download the message and delete it from the website. The problem here is that if you are ever away from your computer, and you use the Internet to log into the website for your email, either you have an inbox with hundreds of messages from the past months, or you have a totally empty inbox because your software using POP deleted the message! IMAP: IMAP is the new and improved protocol that stands for Internet Message Access Protocol.  You can tell just by the word “message access” that there can be some real valuable features here.  Just as you might suspect, this protocol allows your program to ACCESS your messages, instead of retrieving and deleting them.  When using IMAP, the program will log into the website just like POP does, but this time it accesses the headers (subject, sender, date) of the message and displays them to you in the inbox of the software program.  When you click on a message “header” to view the message, it accesses the message and you see it at that point. Here’s the great part about IMAP… When you view the message in the software program, it marks it as “Read”, and also sends this info to the website to mark it as “read” there, too!  If you delete a message in the software program, it deletes it and relays a delete command to the website.  If you create a folder and move a message into it, well you get the picture….  This way if you can use a program on your computer to view emails, but if you are ever away from your computer, you can log into webmail from wherever you are and your emails will be sorted and marked just as they are on your computer!

Other great features

We can’t forget about all of the other features that ride alongside any email system.  What would your email be without a list of contacts?  How about a calendar?  Adding an upcoming event to your calendar as soon as I get an email regarding it is important to me.  If I don’t do it right away, chances are great that I’ll forget! Make sure that if you’re on the market for a new email provider you find out what it offers in the way of contact management , calendar support, and even message filtering – a feature that can sort your messages into folders before you even see them. Also, remember to check on how much storage the service offers you.  Gmail offers virtually unlimited storage, so if you get email from family and friends containing photographs and other files attached, you can save them without worrying about running out of room!

Putting it all together

Now let’s put all of this information together and form a plan!  If you don’t have email yet, or are ready for a fresh account and a new email address, I would definitely recommend using Google’s email service called Gmail. Using Gmail, all of Google’s services are easy to use together. If you must use your current email service provided by your ISP or some other service because you need to keep your email address, or for any other reason  and are not happy with the features or usability then you still have options. The software available for retrieving emails are plentiful, but I like to tell you about free and easy options, so I recommend Thunderbird.  It’s made by the same company that makes the famous Firefox browser, so you can bank that it’s quality.  When you install it and run it for the first time, the setup wizard will prompt you to enter your email address and will detect your settings manually. Another option is to go ahead and sign up for Gmail so that you can benefit from all of it’s features, and have it check your existing mail using POP. This would mean that you have a brand new Gmail email address, but you can keep your old one, too – and it will all land in your Gmail inbox. To do this, get Signed up with Gmail, and head over to the settings page. (You can find the settings link at the top right of the page). Click “Accounts and Import”, and you’ll see the section that allows you to Add a POP3 email account. Once this is set up, Gmail will retrieve your email with POP, just as a software program might, and land it in your inbox. Another option, if supported by your current email host, is to have your email simply forwarded to your new email account, whether it’s Gmail or otherwise. If this can be set up, every email that comes into your old email box will be sent right on to your new one, and you don’t have to do anything to have it retrieved.

Making a decision

Whatever you decide, make sure that you figure out exactly what you need in an email host and pick the one that suits you the best. You could even sign up for all of them, and play around with the interfaces before you give out your new address to friends, family and coworkers. Of course as always if you need any help in choosing an email host, or getting it set up, feel free to contact me.

Protecting your downloads

Saving your apps and music downloads is as simple as connecting to iTunes, right-clicking on your phone in the list and choosing “Transfer Purchases”. After a few minutes, all of your apps and other purchased content will be in iTunes!

Yes, that’s all. Really.

Sync your contacts anyway!

SO many users I hear from don’t sync their contacts! Even if you aren’t upgrading why wouldn’t you want to keep them safe. After all, it probably took you a while to build your list, and what if you lose your phone or drop it into the swimming pool?

If you use gMail (or even if you don’t for that matter), using Google contacts is a pretty good way of keeping everything safe. Even if your whole computer AND phone died, your contacts would live on. If you have a Google account, great – if not, sign up for one and log into gMail.

Once you get iTunes open and your iPhone is plugged in, find the Info tab, and the contacts section.

Choose to sync with Windows Contacts (if you’re on a Mac, sync with Address Book). This shouldn’t take very long, and when the sync is complete, you can open Windows Contacts and see all of them there!

Export to .csv & Import to Gmail

With Windows Contacts open, click the Export button in the toolbar and it will ask you to choose a file name. Click browse and save it somewhere that it will be easily accessible (like the desktop).

Back to your Gmail account, click the contacts link on the left side, and you will see an “import” link at the top right. This will ask you where your .csv file is, so select it and click import.

Congratulations, your contacts are synced to Gmail!

Use Google Contacts from now on

Personally what I would do is delete ALL of my contacts from my iPhone before setting up syncing with Google. If you aren’t comfortable with this, it’s understandable but just remember that you may end up with a few duplicate contacts, depending on how your current setup is. But hey – you now have TWO backups of your contacts – one in Windows Contacts, and the other that you just imported into Gmail!

Back to iTunes – where you selected to sync with Windows Contacts, simply change this to sync with Google Contacts, and it will display a popup to enter your Google credentials.

Now even if the update deletes your contacts – YOU’RE SAFE!

A very real issue is that it really is downright illegal. What it has come to is that production companies are struggling with ways to try to keep people from stealing the music. They at one point ruled that all companies selling music online (iTunes, etc…) must include DRM in the file. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and it prevents you (half-heartedly) from copying the file and sending it to all of your friends. I’m sure there are a million sites you can find with a google search to figure out how to get rid of the DRM on files you purchase. However, I will leave the moral decision-making to you. (You know you’ll do what you want anyway, right!? I know I would…)

The biggest concern of mine on this topic is your own safety. When you are downloading music from Limewire or some other network that provides P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing, you are putting your trust in a complete stranger that the file you are downloading actually is what you think it is. You may THINK you’re downloading Michael Jackson’s greatest hits, but in actuality it is very easy for the person uploading that file to fake it out and just rename the file so that it looks to you exactly like an audio file.

What will inevitably end up happening is that some day you will download what you think is a real rockin’ song, you will attempt to play the file with whatever your media player choice, and will get a message like “____ Media player cannot play this file. It may be corrupt or invalid”. So you figure “damn, it didn’t fully download, I’ll have to do it again.” What actually happened was that it DID in fact download properly, however it’s not what you think it is. Since the creator of this file named it with an extension like ‘.mp3′, your computer knows automatically that it should open it up with your media player. When it gets to the media player, it’s not a valid audio file and you get an error.

Once you make an attempt to open that file that you thought was a song or video, you have executed it, and if it is a virus or some sort of bug or tracking device, it is now getting all comfy and making itself at home in your hard drive. It could contain a key-logger, which is especially dangerous. This type of bug tracks every single key you press on your keyboard and makes a log of it. Then, every so often it “phones home” via your internet connection and sends the log file with your keystrokes to the creator of the file. If they are able to pull this string of text from your key log they’ve got your bank account information!

www.chase.comdrudarbymybluecar….

All in all, it is very important to keep yourself safe online. Even if you use antivirus software, most of the time that will not catch an infection until it is already fully manifested in your computer. Sometimes it can be removed, sometimes not. Good viruses often attach themselves to important system files, so that if you are able to remove them, your operating system will no longer boot. Try and do the right thing and just pay the 99 cents for a song on iTunes.

You’ll feel better about it in the long run.

So why, then – should I have to pay Apple $1 extra just to snip my audio file? And what if I want to have a song as a ring tone on my iPhone that isn’t available in the iTunes store? Well, I’m going to show you…

The first thing that you need to do is get Audacity downloading. It’s a free program and it is very easy to use. Visit http://audacity.sourceforge.net to get the download.

While that’s downloading, head over to Windows Explorer (or just open up any folder) and hit the ALT button on your keyboard (if you’re on Vista. If you aren’t on Vista, don’t worry about hitting ALT). You will see the file, edit, view… menus appear below the navigation bar. Choose Folder Options from the Tools menu.

Switch to the View tab in the folder options window and find in the advanced settings list “Hide extensions for known file types.” This should be DE-SELECTED.

By now, Audacity should be downloaded and you can go ahead and install it. We’re getting to the fun part! Open up Audacity and prepare your music file. A properly prepared music file should be: 1) a COPY of the original 2) mp3 format 3) a really good song that won’t embarrass you if it rings in public! You want it to be a copy because you don’t want to accidentally damage the original file. This is a good practice when working with any file on your computer.

Once you open audacity, you can drag-n-drop your music file into the gray area and it will automatically go through the mp3 importing process. You’ll see the file like this:

Go ahead and play the song, and listen for it to get to the starting point you would like the ring tone to start at. When it gets to the right point, just pause it and note the time. Use the time line just above the file to estimate. There will be a certain amount of fine-tuning anyway. You can control where the song plays by using your mouse right on the blue lines. It’s just like a cursor in a line of text.

Once you find your starting point (which should probably be the start of the chorus), you need an ending point (obviously). Your phone generally isn’t going to ring for very long and even if you don’t answer it, voicemail will eventually pick up or the caller will just hang up. [Don't act like you've never ignored the phone ringing just to listen to your ringtone!] I usually either wait for the song to give me a good ending point (the end of the chorus) or if the chorus is too long, I give it about 20-30 seconds and just end it. Like I said you won’t hear anything past that anyway.

In order to trim the song, highlight the peice you want (just like text in a text editor) and click the “Trim Outside Selection” button in the toolbar. I put a red box around it in the next screen shot.

Repeat this process for fine-tuning. If you aren’t particular about making it sound like the song starts on a good beat or ends nicely, then you’re done. Otherwise… experiment away! When you’re done, press Ctrl+a on your keyboard.

In order to be able to save as an Mp3 you need to download a dll file. Click HERE for instructions on obtaining the dll file. Make sure you download the zip option.

Once it’s downloaded, unzip it and store the dll file in a location where it won’t get deleted, like the program files directory, or My Documents if you know you won’t accidentally delete it.

Choose “Export Selection as Mp3 from the file menu and save it right on your desktop. Audacity will prompt you to locate the dll that you downloaded. Simply browse to it, and Audacity will export your file! We’re over halfway there!! At this point, if you play the file that we just exported, you will only hear the short version we trimmed! Now open up iTunes.

Drag the file we just exported into iTunes directly into your library. It will be imported as an Mp3. Right click on the file, and choose “Create AAC Version”. You’ll want to see which one is which, so right click on the “Name” column header in iTunes and click “Kind”. This will add a column to show you the file type of each file. You can now delete the file we dragged into iTunes which is an MPEG audio file (as seen in the Kind column).

Now you’re left with just the AAC audio file of our little creation. Drag it out of iTunes and onto your desktop. Here’s where the importance of doing the step where you disable “hide extensions for known file types” comes in. On your desktop you should see the filename as well as the .m4a extension.

Right click on the file, and choose “rename”. You can leave the actual name alone, but change the extension to “.m4r” from “.m4a”.

Back to iTunes: Click “Ringtones” under library, and drag your new .m4r file there. Configure your iPhone to sync ringtones, and after your next sync it should be listed when you view your settings. On my first time doing this several months ago, I had to play around with my options a bit before it actually showed up on the phone. I ended up having to let iTunes erase all of my synced data, and re-sync, which wasn’t really a problem because it put everything back like it was.

Worst case scenario, if the ringtone just simply won’t sync to your iPhone, go to your iPhone summary in iTunes and check the box “Manually manage music and videos” then you can just drag your ringtone from iTunes into your iPhone with the little iPhone icon in iTunes.

Here’s to show you that it’s in my phone:

Good luck! Feel free to email me or post a comment if you have a question!

I will not approve comments from those blasting my content! I do not expect everyone to agree – but there’s a way to do it and a way not to do it.

For years, when writing a book, one of the biggest processes was to find a publisher who wanted to publish your book. If they didn’t like your idea, you didn’t get your book published. If they did like your book, they published it and then you had to put up your own money to buy copies of the book to even get it into bookstores or to sell it on your own. Enter Lulu. If you haven’t heard of Lulu before and you have ever tried or even thought of writing any kind of book, you can’t afford not to check this out!

Lulu, in my opinion has absolutely revolutionized the writing (or as I lovingly refer to it – content creation) world as we know it! Content is absolutely the most important part of our online life. No content – no reason to design! Who needs a web designer – or a website for that – when there is no content to put in it!? The need for content creators is great. While you might say that there is a ton of content out there already – take some time and browse through it – books, eBooks, blogs, even forums can sometimes be considered content – and you will soon notice that there is as much non-credible content as there is good! What Lulu has done is make it easy AND affordable for good quality content creators to do what they do best. . . CREATE!

Self publishing is just how it sounds. . .you create the content and do all of the legwork like formatting, proofreading and even cover designing! The content – your book in this case – is TRULY yours – cover to cover. Possibly the best part about the self-publishing process is printing on-demand. You can create your content and get everything ready for production on Lulu, but never print a book until a book is sold. Customers can even be directed to Lulu.com directly to order your book! They print it and ship it! Your books can be sold as eBooks, printed books or both!

Go ahead – learn more about Lulu! You just might be driven to create some content! Or you may even have some content that you created long ago that you were never able to get published or printed. Now’s your chance…

Go!

Now!