When you send someone an email attaching document files like Microsoft Word, Excel etc or a Pdf file, unless your recipient has the particular application installed, he/she may not be able to view the file.

While there are several alternatives that your recipients can adopt to view the file, here is a simple solution that you can follow that will save your recipients the hassle. Read the full story

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Ever wondered whether it’s email or e-mail? This controversy has been going on for a long time. Just google up the search term email vs e-mail and you will find several discussions on the topic. Rob has a nice post on this topic in his blog.

While not many people seem to care much about it, it does make an interesting topic to waste your time over. While email is easier to type, there is one opinion that it should be e-mail, since the hyphen denotes the compound word “electronic mail”.

Read the full story

Almost all email services have a limit on the the maximum size of files that you can send a attachments. For instance, in Gmail this limit is 20MB.

Filemail.com is a free service that lets you send large files to anyone with an email address. With the free service you can send files as large as 2GB. Just fill in the recepient’s and your email addresses, type in your message and upload the file. Read the full story

Suppose you have lots of friends and you have their email ids too. And you want to send a mail to every one of them, how do you do it? What’s the big deal, you say. Just select all their ids from your address book and send it. Simple.

But did you realize that when you do it that way all the email ids will be visible to everybody? Not all of your friends would be happy to have their email ids shared with all your friends.

So what is the better way of doing it? The solution is very simple. Instead of putting all the email ids in the ‘To:‘ field, put them in the ‘Bcc:‘ (blind carbon copy) field and in the ‘To:‘ field you can put your own email id.

This way you would have sent the mail to everybody without anybody knowing who else you sent the mail to.

(Thanks Henry Britto)

Gmail has recently doubled the maximum size of attachments to a mail from 10MB to 20MB. This is definitely good news.

But you need to remember that if your recipient is using a service that does not allow such large mails then there might be problems. So it would be safe to send to other gmail users or if you are sure that the recipient can receive mails of this size.

It may not be long before Google breaks out of the 2+ GB of storage space and goes unlimited like Yahoo mail and Rediffmail.

Phishing is a scam where criminals send emails to thousands of people. These emails pretend to come from banks, credit card companies, online shops and auction sites as well as other trusted organisations. They usually contain a compelling but bogus reason to go to the site, for example the mail may ask you to update your password before your account is suspended. When a gullible victim clicks on an embedded link in the email it takes them to a website that looks exactly like the real thing but is, in fact, a fake designed to trick victims into entering personal information such as a password or credit card number

Criminals can make an email look as if it comes from someone else. Fake emails often (but not always) display some of the following characteristics:

• The sender’s email address doesn’t tally with the trusted organisation’s website address.
• The email is sent from a completely different address or a free web mail address.
• The email does not use your proper name, but uses a non-specific greeting like ‘dear customer.
• A sense of urgency; for example the threat that unless you act immediately your account may be closed.
• A prominent website link. These can be forged or seem very similar to the proper address, but even a single character’s difference means a different website.
• A request for personal information such as user name, password or bank details.
• You weren’t expecting to get an email from the company that appears to have sent it.
• The entire text of the email is contained within an image rather than the usual text format. The image contains an embedded hyperlink to a bogus site.

What you see below is a real Phishiing e-mail (pretending to be from Paypal) that I received a few months back. But luckily I immediately spotted that it was a spoof and actually sent a mail to Paypal informing them about this mail. Paypal promptly sent a reply saying that it indeed was a spoof mail and that they will caution other users too.

From: Paypal Security Center <online@yahoo.com>
Date: Nov 1, 2006 1:40 PM
Subject: Accounts Management
To: undisclosed-recipients

Dear valued PayPal member,

It has come to our attention that your PayPal account information needs to be updated as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and update your personal records you will not run into any future problems with the online service.

However, failure to update your records will result in account suspension. Please update your records on or before November 5, 2006. Once you have updated your account records, your PayPal session will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.

To update your PayPal records click on the following link:

http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run<http://202.125.66.19
3/icons/www.paypal.com/SecureInfo/paypal/index.php>

Thank You.
PayPal Update Team

Accounts Management As outlined in our User Agreement, PayPal will
periodically send you information about site changes and enhancements.

Visit our Privacy Policy <http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=
p/gen/ua/policy_privacy-outside>and User Agreement <http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/ua/ua-outside>
if you have any questions.

Copyright 1999-2006 PayPal. All rights reserved.

As you can see the mail has been sent from online@yahoo.com and the link that is in the email is pointing to an IP address 202.125.66.19 and not to the paypal site. So if you are a little careful you can easily spot a phishing email. But you must remember that the criminals are also clever and are constantly finding innovative ways to fool people.

Skype users can now have their voice mail messages delivered to their e-mail and SMS addresses through a voice-mail-to-text service offered by SimulScribe.

Utilizing its proprietary voice-recognition algorithms that transcribe voice mail to text, the service works with wireless, networked, and voice-over-IP services. SimulSribe has recently extended its service to Skype users too. The system’s transcription accuracy is claimed to be more than 90%, and text messages are delivered in “near real time” with the caller’s phone number in the subject line.

The company offers several pricing options for the service starting at $9.95 for 40 messages. You can try SimulScribe free for 1 week.