Computer and Web Articles

Attention all Gmail users: use the following tips and you’ll be on your way to Gmail greatness:

• Enable your keyboard shortcuts by clicking on the Settings link (top of your screen, on the right), then clicking on the General tab. See the Keyboard Shortcuts area?
• Make sure the “Keyboard Shortcuts on” option is selected.
• Once your keyboard shortcuts are turned on, use those shortcuts! If you’re reading an e-mail and determine that you’d like to reply to it, just hit the “r” key on your keyboard.
• Alternatively, if you want to forward an e-mail you’re reading, simply tap the “f” key on your keyboard.
• Hit your forward-slash key (/) and your cursor will instantly jump into the Gmail search box.
• If you’re in the middle of composing an e-mail, but decide that you’d like to save it and work on it later, click on the “Save Draft” button in Gmail (usually located between the Send and Discard buttons). Later, when you’re ready to work on it again, go to Drafts, located under Sent Mail and above All Mail, click your message, and keep typing.
• Remember that you can easily set up a signature that will go at the bottom of all your e-mails by going to Settings, selecting the button next to the edit box in the Signature section, and typing in the text you’d like to have in your signature.
• If you’d like to be whisked immediately to your Contacts list, hit the “g” key, then the “c” key.
• If you ever access Gmail from a computer other than your own, make sure to login to https://gmail.google.com — note the extra “s” after the http. Logging in at this address means your Gmail password is kept safe and secure, and (other than that creepy guy sitting next to you who keeps glancing furtively at your monitor) your e-mails are kept private.

I’m going to take a wild guess and say that, at one point or another, you’ve experienced this issue: e-mails coming in from friends, family and business associates are treated as junk mail.

If you’re using Outlook 2007, all you need to do to ensure that this doesn’t happen in the future is to add the e-mail addresses of trusted senders to your Safe Senders List. E-mails from senders on this list will never be treated as spam.

Oh! And here’s a great Outlook 2007 Safe Senders List trick: Click on Actions, choose Junk E-mail, choose Junk E-mail Options, then choose the Safe Senders tab. Look down toward the bottom. See the option that reads “Automatically add people I e-mail to the Safe Senders List”? Check it!

Now you can rest assured that all the friends, family and business contacts you e-mail will never have the e-mails they send to you treated as spam.

Do your e-mails regularly find their way into your recipients’ spam filters?

Though you’ll likely be surprised by few of the following phrases, keep in mind that using any of them in your e-mail subject lines make you a prime spam suspect in the eyes of most modern-day spam filters.

Some of the prime spam filter trigger-phrases include: fast cash, web traffic, online marketing, incredible deal, free gift, free info, earn extra cash, increase sales, limited time offer, info you requested, information you requested, internet market, financial freedom, weight loss, home based, apply now, eliminate debt, extra income and free membership.

This website may not save the world, but it certainly does a great job of helping people send the occasional fun and unique e-mail. You see, when you create an e-mail within the message box in the Fuzzmail website (www.fuzzmail.org), all your deletes, edits, pauses, typos, changes, and writeovers are recorded in an ‘e-mail-message-video’ of sorts and sent to your recipient.

This unique manner of letting your e-mail recipients view the creation of your messages is most definitely not something most people would want to utilize regularly.

On the other hand, I can assure you that in addition to allowing for the occasional less-sterile communication, it definitely allows for some creative, funny and crafty messages.

Check out the third example message listed on the site’s Example page to see what I mean … heh heh.

If you’re a Gmail user, you just might be interested in the following shortcuts:

/ — Hitting this key jumps your cursor directly into the search box.

! — This is a great shortcut. Hitting the exclamation mark immediately marks an e-mail as spam and then removes it from your conversation list.

c — This key lets you compose a new e-mail.

Shift key + c — This key combo lets you compose a new e-mail in a new window.

u — Refreshes your page, then returns you to the Inbox (or list of conversations).

g, then c — This will take you right to your Contacts list.

s — Pressing the “s” key adds or removes a star to either a message or conversation. (Stars allow you to give messages and conversations special status.)

Tab key, then the Enter key — Once you’re done typing an e-mail, hit this key
combination to immediately send your message. (Doesn’t work on Macs. )

I’ll admit, it is rather easy to forget the importance of writing good subject lines in your e-mails. How many times have you quickly typed “hi” or “!!!!” (or worse, nothing at all) into the subject line of an e-mail you’ve sent off? My guess is that you’ve probably done this several times in the last few days.

“Erin, I’m finding it a pain to scan through our e-mail correspondence, mainly due to non-descript e-mail subjects like “question.” Be a star and try and make them more descriptive like “Website XYZ Javascript rework.” Then, I can spot them easier in our rapidly expanding list of e-mails.”

Not only was this e-mail a great reminder, it was a loud wakeup call pointing out that I’d become lazy - and my laziness was negatively affecting others. Don’t become lazy. Title your e-mails; your recipients will thank you for that small extra bit of effort.

A while back I extolled the convenience and functionality of DropSend.com, a site that allows you to e-mail up to five huge files per month for free (when you send more than five files you pay a small fee).

Though I personally still use Dropsend.com, I thought you’d like to know of an alternative I recently discovered: www.MailBigFile.com. Sign up for a Pro Account for a measly $19 per year and you can send files up to 2GB to your family, friends or coworkers. Files can be downloaded up to 25 times, they’re available for download for 14 days, and you receive a notification once the file has been downloaded by your recipient.

If you’d like to use the free service, you can send files up to 512MB in size to one recipient, and the files are available for download three times over the course of five days. Pretty good for free, if you ask me!

A few weeks ago a dear friend of mine emailed me with his unique dilemma: the emails he was sending out via Outlook Express had recently stopped being saved in his “Sent” folder. What was he to do?

I was stumped. After asking him various follow up questions and racking my brain, I could think of no reason his email program would suddenly begin acting so oddly.

More follow up questions and fifteen minutes of online searching later, I found the answer. If you’re experiencing the same problem as my friend, a very likely solution can be found right here: http://tinyurl.com/kyd23.

Sure, emailing your Microsoft Word documents is easy.  Sure, you do it all the time.  Sure, you didn’t know about the many problems related to the emailing of Word documents.

Though emailing Word documents to your friends and colleagues is usually a perfectly appropriate thing to do, it’s best to use caution and not assume that everyone will be able to read (or even open) your files.  Why use caution?  Because. . .

• The message will be larger than it needs to be; Word documents are B-I-G.  Why do you care? Because you’re essentially forcing your recipients to receive and open oversized documents.  Also, emails with larger attachments take longer to send and longer to download.
• Your recipient might not have Word.  For example, many people read their emails on their Treos, Blackberries, or cell phones-none of which have Word.
• Many mail programs won’t allow Word documents to be opened directly or even saved to disk on account of the rampant virus-spreading via Word documents.
• Emails with Word attachments are more likely to be filtered as spam or potential viruses; this means it’s entirely possible your email won’t even make it through to your recipient.

If you’re sending important information via email in a Word document, it’s usually best to either paste your Word document’s text directly into the body of your email.  If this isn’t realistic, consider following up with a separate email or phone call to determine if your recipient received the Word document you sent.