The email dash

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 20 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last week, I wrote a post about technology’s role in the demise of the English language and I was interested to read about the “correct” spelling of e-mail in this week’s IT Week. It seems that by popular usage today, email is 10 times more common than e-mail. As IT Week points out, the grammatically correct version (e’mail) is unlikely to catch on. Interestingly, Answers.com notes that email is the common spelling but has elected to continue the use of e-mail as it is easier to read.

Restoring data in Outlook Express

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 20 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I don’t use Outlook Express personally, but I recently rebuilt my father-in-law’s PC and imported his settings from the old disk. I didn’t have a clue where Outlook Express stored its data, but came across an article on the iOpus website about backing up Outlook Express. The old system was non-functional, so I didn’t follow the whole article, but it gave me the information I needed to find all the .DBX files with the mail data and the .WAB address book file.

Your e-mail: anytime, anyplace, anywhere

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 20 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

For some time now, I’ve been using the mail2web.com web service for reading my e-mail when I’m away from home.

The basic service doesn’t require registration (no details are stored as it is basically an HTTP wrapper for POP3 and IMAP4 servers), but registered users can use a customised mail2web site with multiple e-mail accounts, favourite newsgroups, frequently used links and even their own image.

Now the guys at mail2web have made the service even better, with WAP and PDA versions of the website. In an earlier post, I gave details for connecting a PDA to the Internet using the Vodafone GPRS service (the principle is the same whoever your mobile carrier). Now I can access my e-mail on a page that is formatted to suit the PDA screen.

Get ready to pay for your Hotmail

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 20 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

In a somewhat cynical (IMHO) move, Microsoft is hiding behind security to drop access to its free Hotmail service from Outlook, Outlook Express, and presumably from competing e-mail clients. The service (which uses web based distributed authoring and versioning – WebDAV) will still be available, but users will have to pay for it. To Microsoft’s credit, I believe that AOL and Yahoo! already restrict such access to paid subscribers.

According to the BBC, users who want to use Outlook to pick up their Hotmail messages will have to pay $19.95 (£11) for an annual subscription to Hotmail Plus or the $99.95 (£55) a year for MSN Premium. Users who are already using the technology to download their messages will be able to carry on using the service for free until April.

MSN say they have decided make the changes because spammers were exploiting the system (do they think spammers will be put off by a $19.95 annual charge?). They have already taken other steps to prevent spammers using Hotmail by limiting the number of outgoing messages on free accounts to 100 per day and introduced extra validation requirements when opening a new account.

The withdrawal of free WebDAV access began on September 27th for new users and will become effective for all users worldwide in 2005.

Links

Microsoft Nixes Outlook, Outlook Express Access to Free Hotmail Accounts
Hotmail fees for Outlook access

Allowing potentially dangerous attachments in Outlook

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 20 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve come up against this one before, but as its something I’ve had to look up on a few occasions, I thought I’d post it up here. You know the problem – someone e-mails you a useful script and Outlook blocks access to it; and rightly so as we have no real way of telling if the attachment could be malicious.

If you trust the sender and are sure you need to access the attachment, there is a quick registry hack you can employ:

  1. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security\ (for Outlook 2003 – change 11.0 to 10.0 for Outlook 2002 or 9.0 for Outlook 2000).
  2. Add a new String Value called Level1Remove and add a semicolon-delimited list of file extensions to be allowed, e.g. .bat;.cmd;.com;.exe;.vbs.
  3. Restart Outlook and the offending attachments will be accessible.

Remember that this is disabling a security feature, so only enable potentially dangerous attachment types as an emergency workaround and remove the Level1Remove value once complete.

More details may be found in Microsoft knowledge base article 829982.