Bits'n'Bytes

As heard on CJCD

Episode 21

Well, winter's been here for a few months now and a fair number of you are thinking about taking a break and heading south for some warmth and others may be heading to distant spots for business. Regardless of your reasons for leaving, almost everyone wants to be able to stay in touch with friends and family who stay behind.

Recent changes to the way companies provide email services has changed the way we're able to do this. As a result of all the spam being circulated around the internet right now, many companies have locked down the parts of their servers that send email. Let's say you try to send an email using your laptop that's set up with an account from The Edge or SSI Micro. But you're in Edmonton, using a Telus server. When you try to send your email, the Telus server checks to see who's sending the mail. It sees that your account is not a Telus account and says "Sorry, no relaying through our server is allowed" and blocks the email.

It sounds kind of paranoid, but that's how spammers can send so many emails every day. They find servers that don't give them this error message - meaning they're not locked down - and send a pile of mail through those servers.

The way around this, is to use the webmail component that most companies now offer. Instead of using Outlook or Outlook Express, use Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. Instead of typing www.theedge.ca or www.ssimicro.com , type in webmail.theedge.ca or webmail.ssimicro.com and you'll get a page asking for your username and password. If you've ever used a hotmail or yahoo account, these accounts work exactly the same. You can receive emails, compose new ones, and add your photos of that big marlin you caught and send it to everyone back home to drool over and curse your name - whatever you can do with your normal email account you can do with the webmail component.

Just remember that you will have an account size limit - same idea as hotmail, and if you exceed the size limit, you can't send or receive until you delete some of your messages, or download them using Outlook or Outlook Express.

Stay tuned next week for more advice about antivirus and antispyware programs.

I’m Computer Dave, thanks for your time.