Computer and Web Articles

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.

I learned a tip from About.com the other day I’d like to share with all you Hotmail users out there. This tip will teach you how to make your Hotmail bookmark bypass the sign-in screen and take you directly to your Inbox. It should go without saying, but I’ll make sure this is clear: Do NOT try this out if other people use your computer, else you’re simply providing people direct access to your personal email account.

Step 1: Type this address into your browser: http://tinyurl.com/zjbru and, after it’s fully loaded, bookmark the page (call it something along the lines of “Hotmail login”). It takes a moment for the page to load, so be patient.

Step 2: Login to Hotmail, making sure “Keep me signed in” is selected.

Step 3: Click on “Sign in” to access your account.

That’s it! Next time you select your newly-made bookmark, you’ll be whisked directly to your Hotmail inbox Z - no login necessary. This bookmark will continue to work until you click the “Sign out” from within Hotmail.

You know when you’re ordering something online and you see that little lock at the bottom of the screen? That lock icon assures you that all the personal and credit card information you’re about to send to the merchant is safe and secure.

It’s no coincidence that little lock never shows up when you’re in your e-mail program: the e-mails you send to your friends, family and colleagues are far from secure. In a nutshell, this means your e-mails can be intercepted and read by someone else. For this exact reason, our Internet/e-mail tip of the week is to never ever EVER send confidential information (such as your credit card number and expiration date) via email.

For those of you who would like to learn more about an easy method of sending secure emails that cannot be intercepted by others, visit www.hushmail.com.

Does cousin Ronny send you nothing but lewd jokes every day? Did your ex-boyfriend not understand your “Please never e-mail me again” request? Not to worry. Outlook Express actually allows you to block e-mails from specific e-mail addresses.

To block an e-mail address, first click on a message in your Inbox that was sent from that address. Next, click on the Message menu at the top of the page. Scroll down, then click on Block Sender. Congratulations, you just instantly added the sender’s e-mail address to your Blocked Senders list!

If you’d ever like to view or edit your Blocked Senders list, click on the Tools menu at the top of the page, then Message Rules, then Blocked Senders List.

Pretty sweet. Go ahead, check it out at www.dropsend.com and enjoy.

Oh, and on a final note, I just received a shipment of timeforcake 1-inch pins. They’re a nice medium-blue with the white timeforcake angel right smack dab in the middle. No text. They’re pretty awesome. Perfect for your goggle strap or ski beanie or tuxedo. I’ll mail one out to seven people randomly picked from all who drop me an e-mail and tell me where they’d use a pin. So what are you waiting for? Say hello.