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Articles covering email usage, free email accounts, email providers, email lookup, privacy and tracing, and of course general email problems.
Can I count on mail to a bad address bouncing back?
If you send email to an invalid address or a closed account, usually you'll get a bounce back. Usually. The problem is that you cannot count on bounces.
Can I prevent my mail from being forwarded by others?
Can I tell if email I sent has been read by the recipient?
While there are settings and services that claim to be able to determine if email has been opened, they are notoriously unreliable and pointless.
Can I tell where these virus emails are coming from?
Can a sender tell where I'm reading my mail?
Does spam blocking prevent spam from reaching my machine?
Email I was composing has disappeared. Can I get it back?
How can I archive email in my free email account?
Backing up a free email account is best done by downloading it to a PC-based mail program. Some services support it, others need a trick or two.
How can I keep my email safe from sniffing?
We'll look at what sniffing is and ways to avoid it.
How can I organize incoming email from two accounts?
How can I read my email on more than one machine?
How can I stop a message in my Outlook outbox that won't send?
Once a message goes into your outbox, Outlook tries to send it. While it's trying, there's little you can do. So the trick is to force it to stop trying.
How can I trace where email came from?
A good rule of thumb is to begin at the bottom and work your way up in the headers to determine where an email is from.
How do I add a signature with a picture to my emails?
The ability to add a signature to email depends on the email program you use. Whether or not you can include an image also depends on that program.
How do I change my POP3 account password?
How do I change my email address?
Depending on the email service you're using and how much effort you want to put into it, changing your email address can either be fairly easy or fairly hard.
How do I change the "mailto:" or default mail program?
The 'mailto:' or default mail program is a concept maintained by Windows and changed using Internet Explorer. Usually. We examine how to change the default mail program to a couple of popular services.
How do I change the size of my email display text?
How do I control which email accounts Outlook tries to download?
How do I find someone's email address?
It's difficult to find the email address of someone you want to contact. In order to find the email address, they must want to be found.
How do I forward my old email address?
How do I get attached pictures to show in the body of email I've received?
How do I hide the email addresses I'm sending to on a message?
It's possible to send email to someone without having their email address show up on the To: or Cc: lines by using Blind Carbon Copy or Bcc.
How do I keep attached photos out of an email's message body?
How do I know if someone is opening my email before I read it, then marking it as unread?
Without installing keystroke logging or other spyware on your computer, there's no way to tell if anyone is reading your emails before you do.
How do I print an email with its attachments?
How do I remove addresses from an email message for printing or forwarding?
Removing the addresses from an email you're forwarding or printing should be easy - and for forwarding it is. For printing, a few tricks are needed.
How do I resolve my Hotmail email problems?
We'll look at various Hotmail problems and suggestions to resolve them.
How do I send email to another machine on my local network without hitting the internet?
Sending email from one machine to another on the same network seems like it should be simple and direct. Sadly, it's neither.
How do I send encrypted email?
How do I separate emails I receive on a single account?
How do I set up an email newsletter?
Email newsletters are important to both business and social communication. Setting one up properly is key to acceptance and to avoid being a spammer.
How do I view full mail headers in Outlook?
How do Outlook and Outlook Express relate?
Even though they share similar names and do similar things, Outlook and Outlook Express are actually not related to each other at all.
How long will I get email from an inactive account?
Though inactive Hotmail accounts are open for a some time before they're closed, spammers can make it appear as though an account is still active.
I get "Error Number: 0x800CCC19" when sending email - how do I fix it?
Error Number 0x800CCC19 is a timeout, which can be caused by many things. Most common appears to be interference by your anti-virus program.
Is it really that easy to get someone's password?
We'll look at some ways that someone else could access your account.
Is there a way to retrieve my email history after I've deleted them?
There are things to enable ahead of time if you would like to save your email history, but if they are not enabled then your emails are gone for good.
Just how secure is email, anyway?
Links in HotMail emails: why aren't they active?
Links in HotMail emails are often disabled to protect you. I'll look at how to enable Links in Hotmail, and how to work around it even when not enabled.
Messages deleted on HotMail: can I get them back somehow?
Once messages are permanently deleted on HotMail they're gone. If you've lost important messages that were deleted on HotMail, or any webmail service, you need to rethink your approach to email.
My MSN sent mail isn't showing up in the sent mail folder. Is it somewhere else?
Check to see if the option to save your sent MSN emails is enabled if you aren't seeing any in your "Sent" email folder.
Outlook Express Problems: My folders are empty, corrupted or just not working - what do I do?
Outlook Express Problems, including folder corruption, can manifest in several ways. I've found a good article on Outlook Express folder corruption, and steps to take to avoid, and recover from it.
Outlook error 0x800ccc0d - how do I fix it?
Outlook Error 0x800ccc0d is simply a failure to connect - that's in the error message. How to fix Outlook Error 0x800ccc0d involves a little investigation.
What does "conversation timed out" mean in an email bounce?
Occasionally email will bounce with the error "timed out". We'll look at what that does, and does not, tell us, and what might be the real problem.
What does "relaying denied" mean?
"Relaying denied" is an obscure error you may receive in a bounce message. We'll look at what relaying is, and why it might be denied.
What for-pay email providers do you recommend?
People often use free email providers for critical data only to lose everything when a problem occurs. So what do you look for in an email provider?
What is POP? Or POP3? Or a POP account? And what about SMTP?
POP, POP3 and SMTP are all acronyms that you might see used when talking about configuring email. We'll look at what they mean, and how they relate.
An SNM file is simply a Netscape mail email message file.
What's the difference between "plain text" and "HTML" email?
Email can be sent in several formats the most common being plain text and HTML. We'll look at the difference, and which might be preferable.
What's the difference between Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Hotmail and MSN Hotmail?
Microsoft has created a lot of confusion with how it names its mail products. Add the transition from MSN to Windows Live branding and it gets worse.
What's this backwards P all over my email?
A backwards P is probably a paragraph mark. If you're seeing a backwards P it's easy to turn off, but also tells me you should change something else too.
What's this confirmation request I got when I emailed someone?
Challenge/Response is a spam fighting technique that forces you to prove you're human before your message will be delivered. It's controversial, to say the least.
Where are these viruses coming from?
Email viruses come from many sources, usually from other machines infected with a virus. There are clues in email headers, but that's often incomplete.
Where's the Sent Items folder in Outlook Express?
The Sent Items folder isn't always visible in Outlook Express. We'll look at the options to make the Sent Items folder visible, and make sure that Sent Items are getting placed there.
Why am I not getting all messages sent to the mailing list I'm on?
Mailing list messages represent a conversation between members that has a natural order. It can be very confusing when some mailing list messages arrive out of order, or not at all.
Emailing movies is very tempting, because it's simple. Unfortunately emailing movies and other large files often fails. We'll look at a couple of alternatives.
Why can't I put my email on CD?
Burning email folders to CD is a reasonable way to archive email and free up space - until you want to read it. Then additional steps are needed.
Why can't I send email from all my accounts?
Why can't I send mail from my hotel room?
Spam may be to blame if you can't send email from your hotel room.
Why can't my guest send email using my LAN?
Issues with configuring a guest's email have some simple solutions.
Why did I get a password reminder I didn't ask for?
A password reminder that isn't expected can be startling. An unexpected password reminder could be due to many things. The best thing is to ignore it.
Why do pictures in email sometimes show up in-line, and sometimes as attachments?
Pictures in email don't always display. The reasons pictures in email don't display are many, and confusing. We'll look at some of the factors.
Why do the changes I've made to a document that was emailed to me disappear?
Due to complexity of attachments in emails, changes you've made to a document that was emailed to you can disappear.
Why does email take so long to be delivered sometimes?
Counting on email being almost instant is probably a bad idea. Email is designed to tolerate many delays, and delays do happen.
Why does my email sometimes show up with funny characters like "=0D" in it?
Email can often use complex methods to encode special or even not-so-special characters. Occasionally those methods become accidentally visible.
Why does my laptop bounce email?
Why don't pictures show up in the emails I send or receive?
There are a few reasons as to why pictures won't show in the emails you send or receive.
Why is Outlook sending email using the wrong account?
Why is attaching a Word document to email such a bad idea?
Why is downloaded email disappearing immediately?
Anti-malware software can interfere with email such that email disappears immediately, or other features of the email program stop working or worse.
Why is my email being immediately deleted?
Why is my friend getting two copies of my mail?
Getting multiple copies of email is most often a problem at the receiving end. We'll look at both sending and receiving, and the most common causes.
Why is my mail to HotMail (or AOL, Yahoo, etc.) subscribers not being delivered?
Mail not being delivered is an unfortunately common problem. There's no magic answer, but I'll look at some of the reasons your mail not be delivered.
Why is the time on my email wrong?
Email is timestamped by the program that creates it. Normally Window's time, date and time zone are used. Web services, however, need a little more.
Even though most of us might never fall for it the reason there's so much spam is quite simple: spam works.
Why is using Hotmail for my business such a bad idea?
Many small businesses uses free email services such as Hotmail as a shortcut or cost saving measure. Unfortunately it can costs them business in the long run.
Why shouldn't I use the "Report Spam" or "Junk" button?
The "Report Spam" and "Junk" link serve an important function in the war against spam. However, used improperly they can do much more harm than good.
Will I lose my email if I don't check it for a while?
Will receiving large attachments eat up all my disk space?
Would you please recover my password? My account has been hacked or I've forgotten it.
I'm asked daily to reset lost passwords, recover hacked email accounts or retrieve lost information in them. Here's my answer.