A few days ago I sent you a strategy for leveraging your signature file. Do that and you will save time with every email you reply to. If you missed that email I’ve put it on the blog here:

http://www.tnpcnewsletter.com/blog/2009/05/24/how-is-your-signature/

A few people wrote and asked if this only worked with Outlook. Every email program I’m familiar with will let you edit your signature file. I have edited the signature inside Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Pine, Gmail, Kmail, Eudora and several others I’m sure. Those are just the ones I have experience with.

Some email programs let you use multiple signatures with is very nice. Set one for replies and one for new mails. Then make a nice one to use with your friends. If your program does not let you use multiple signatures there is still a solution. I’ll tell you about that in the near future.

Finally here’s a tip that helps me reply to emails quickly. As soon as I see an email that I plan to reply to I hit reply. I mean before even reading it. Then I’ll read and reply at the same time. Before I started doing this I would see a longer email and think “I want to reply to this” but because it was long it would get put off. Now I just hit reply  and answer that email as I go.

If you have tips or comments please leave them below.

My friend was typing this anyway. Now she simply copies their
question, hits reply, pastes the question inside the ” ?”.  Now she
is off and running.

Expanding your signature file may seem like a small thing that only
saves you a few seconds. That is true. But those few seconds spread
over all the email you reply to day after day add up.

It’s scary how easy is to be snared in an email “phishing” attempt. I have told you how to avoid phishing attempts several times in the past. Now get this – I almost fell for one of these scams just last week.

The particular email that arrived in my inbox claimed to be from PayPal. The subject was “Restore Your Account Access.” Normally I just delete these and go on. This time was different. My PayPal account had been restricted. I was eagerly waiting on a reply from PayPal that access had been restored.

When I saw the email I almost clicked the link. Almost. It is easy to see how people fall for these phishing attempts. What caught my eye and kept me from clicking?

First I took my own advice and just logged directly into my PayPal account. The account was still restricted and there was no new information to be seen.

Second was the very handy “Display Mail User Agent” Extension inside Mozilla Thunderbird. I use Thunderbird for my email and have several extensions installed. This particular extension does one thing – it shows an icon telling you which Mail User Agent (MUA) or email client was used to create the email. In this case it said the email was created in Microsoft Outlook.

None of my official email from PayPal has been written in Outlook. That should have been my first clue. Here is a picture of the false PayPal email along with icon from “Display Mail User Agent”:

This experience brought to mind a local news story from last year. It seems a lady had her eBay account hacked. She was adamant that she never shared her account details with anyone. Then she showed how she only clicks on links in emails from eBay. Obviously she was caught in a phishing scam and didn’t realize it.

What happened with my PayPal account? They restored access the very next day.

You can read a previous article on phishing and how to avoid getting taken here:

http://www.tnpcnewsletter.com/blog/2007/01/10/safer-email-tips/

Be careful out there.

~ Dan

–
© 2007 Dan Butler

Dan Butler is the Editor-in-Chief of TNPCNewsletter.com and the
author of the amazing new book that shows you how to save your
identity, get your email read, and put more time into the things
you really enjoy…

For most of us, electronics are like the weather: we complain a
lot but don’t do anything about it. So periodically you come
across products that solve those complaints and make you wish
you had done more than just gripe. This is the first in an
occasional series of items I have found that intrigue me in that
way.

Top of my list: SimulScribe (simulscribe.com). It is a $10-per-
month voicemail service that you can use to replace your
cellphone, office, or home voice mailboxes – or any combination
of them. That alone is valuable, giving users a needed central
collection point for messages. But the key innovation in
SimulScribe is that it uses speech recognition technology to
transcribe your voicemail and then sends it along to you as an
email that contains both the transcript and an audio file.
Transcriptions aren’t perfect – bad connections and certain
voices fool it – but they are usually good enough to give you
the gist of the message and let you assess its urgency. When in
doubt, you play the audio.

This is a huge time-saver: no wasted calls to check on empty
mailboxes; you get the messages as they come in. It is a plus
for smartphone users, as you can discretely check your voicemail
on screen without making a call. I personally find it helpful
since I pay little attention to my cell while I am using my
office phone and vice versa. My guess is that sooner or later,
all voice mailboxes will work this way.

Check out the SimulScribe service here:

http://www.simulscribe.com

© 2007 Al Gordon.

In addition to his computer interests, Al Gordon is a political
and media consultant in the Boston area.

Over the years I have highly recommended the Pegasus email client. I still do if you are an advanced user.

David Harris the creator of Pegasus sent this email that talks about Norton Antivirus flagging Pegasus as a Trojan. It is not. If you use Pegasus and Norton read this note carefully and protect yourself.

The Pegasus Mail web site is:

http://www.pmail.com/

Since a signature update on May 15, Norton Antivirus has begun detecting the Pegasus Mail executable program, WINPM-32.EXE as a trojan horse called “Trojan.Dropper”. The first symptom most people will have of this problem is the deletion of WINPM-32.EXE during a system scan.

Firstly, we wish to stress that there is no trojan horse in Pegasus Mail: the Norton Antivirus program is producing a “false positive” – an incorrect analysis based on poor or erroneous signature information.

Secondly, you will not be able to recover from this problem without first amending your Norton Antivirus installation, since it will automatically delete any attempt to download or reinstall the Pegasus Mail program.

There is a comprehensive thread describing this problem and offering some short-term workarounds on our community web site, here:

http://community.pmail.com/forums/thread/659.aspx

It is our belief that you will get very little technical assistance from Symantec on this issue, but we urge you to try anyway if you encounter this problem. We have instructed our lawyers to send urgent messages to Symantec in an attempt to get this resolved as quickly as possible, but once again, current experiences are not giving us much faith in their responsiveness or sense of moral responsibility.

IMPORTANT: if you suffer from this problem and attempt to reinstall Pegasus Mail (assuming you use one of the workarounds to prevent NAV from deleting it as you do so), you MUST use the “Upgrade” option in the installer in order to retain access to your existing settings and data.

– David Harris –

When you run Outlook 2000 on Windows Vista you receive the error:

” ERROR OPENING WINDOWS ADDRESS BOOK. UNABLE TO FIND WAB.DLL”

Scott’s Blog has the answer:

Click Here to read Scott’s answer

Use Explorer to navigate to C:\Program Files\Common Files\System
Copy wab32.dll and wab32res.dll to C:\Windows\System32

I had to open Explorer in Administrator mode to copy the DLL’s. How do you do that? Hold Ctrl-Shift while clicking in Explorer or the Drive letter you are opening.

If that doesn’t get Outlook 2000 running on your system visite Scott’s blog at the link above for more details.