Once you have quoted text, however, the next question is where are you going to reply — are you going to reply BEFORE (or on top of the quoted text) or are you going to reply AFTER (or below) the quoted text.  I’ve always set my clients to reply to email BEFORE the quoted text, as I find it easier for people to see.  Further, when people reply AFTER the quoted text — especially in an email where you’ve had multiple replies in a single email and thus a long trail of text — it’s often hard to find the newest reply, and some people don’t think to look below all of the quoted text to find your reply.

When I installed the new Thunderbird (that is, Thunderbird 5.0), I found that the program defaulted to having my replies come AFTER the quoted text.  As this is not my preferred way to handle replies, I needed to reset the feature so my replies cam BEFORE the quoted text.  Here’s how to do that:

1. Go to Tools -> Account Settings (not “options” where you think the switch might be located):

Thunderbird 5.0 Account Settings in Tools Menu

2. Now in the Account Settings panel, click the “Composition & Addressing” option under the account you want to modify (note in my example I have two email accounts and I’ve clearly changed the names for the screenshot):

Thunderbird Account Settings Options

Under the “Automatically quote the original message when replying” item (of course, make sure it’s checked so you include quotes in your reply) you can use the “Then,” drop-down box to decide if you want your reply to start after or above the quote (as shown here). or after the quote (not shown).

Once you’ve made your selection, click “Ok” at the bottom to save your modifications.  You may have to restart Thunderbird to see the changes in effect.

you can then decide where you want the quote to be and where you want your signature to be, as well.

A: Yes, but more important questions (and answers) are:

1) Does my email provider support POP/and or IMAP (or any other protocol) access?

2) Does my email client support POP/and or IMAP?

Not all email providers provide IMAP access, where practically every one supports POP, so if you want IMAP you will need to do a little more work to find an IMAP provider vs a POP provider.

And once you’ve established that an email provider DOES support your preferred protocol, then you must find an email client that can support it. Personally, I use Thunderbird for almost all IMAP acesss to my accounts.  But if I were using an exchange server, I’d probably use Outlook.

Hope that helps.

Is the Email Link Taking you to the Correct Place?

Looking at the example below from an actual email,  notice where it says “login to mailchimp” on the right side of the picture.  When I hover my mousse (without clicking) over this link, I see the text on the bottom left of the screenshot that says, “http://login.mailchimp.com”.   The take home here is that as I said above, sometimes the text of the link doesn’t match the destination. In this case, the link text is for mailchimp, and the actual site I’m going to be taken to is mailchimp.  In this manner, I can now safely click the link because the link text is for the site that the link will take me to.

An just in case you were wondering, MailChimp is a mailng-list/newsletter program that I use for this site and for my new site, ClassicalWeekly.com. (And in case you were wondering once again, Classical Weekly is a FREE “classical music recommendation of the week” site that you will LOVE, and you should check it out!)

How to See if a Website is Safe.

Much of figuriing out if a website is safe to visit is based on common sense.  Sites that provide illegal downloads and the link are much more likely, for example,  to have viruses and malware than major corporate news sites.

That being said, you can never be sure, and if you want to really check a site out you can head to one of the following sites to look up if the site in question to see if there’s any information in one of the lookup site’s databases. There are many sites that provide this service but I like these two: (and I like to check both as a second opinion is almost always a good thing):

1)  AVG Web Page Scanner

2) PhishTank - (to test to see if there’s a Phishing scam on a website)

The best protection against internet threats is always just being smart:

1. Don’t click links you don’t know.

2. Don’t open email messages from people you don’t know or recognize.

3. Don’t click links in email messages from people you don’t know or recognize.

4. NEVER click a link in an email that requests your username and password for your bank,credit card  or other financial institution.  If you ever have a question about one of these types of accounts, pick up the phone and CALL.  One of the most popular scams out there is to send people a scary-sounding email about account activity and then have people click a link to a fraudulent website where the person’s information is stolen.

Be smart and stay safe!

But for those of us who use IMAP, backing up our messages is still just as critical. So after many weeks of searching and testing, I came across a great freeware application for backing up your IMAP mail account, called IMAPSize.

IMAPSize allows you to easily setup multiple IMAP accounts, backup the email messages on these accounts, and most importantly — in my opinion — saves the messages in an easily accessbile format. I personally don’t like working with .PST files (created when you backup emails and data in Outlook) because you have to restore the entire .PST file to get to a single message. The way IMAPSize saves email messages allows you to very easily access individual messages to quickly view them.

You can get IMAP size for for free (it’s freeware) at: http://www.broobles.com/imapsize/index.php

The first thing to understand about email before talking about email protocols is that when someone sends you an email, this email eventually winds up at the mailserver of your ISP before it makes it to your inbox. Think of this mailserver as the traditional post office, receiving, sorting, and storing mail until it’s time for delivery. Once the email message has reached your ISP’s mailserver, the POP3 and IMAP protocols are the methods you use to acutally “pick-up” or receive the message. Generally all of this happens relatively quickly, (just try sending yourself an email), but now that we have a little bit of structural understanding of when the protocols are used, we can talk about each one.

The POP or POP3 email protocol is most useful when you are using one computer to manage your email. The POP protocol will contact the mailserver, and download the messages to your local computer. Once you have downloaded the emails from the mailserver, they are no longer available on the mailserver (with an exception which we will go over shortly). This is advantageous because all of your email is stored and available locally and instantly on your computer, whether you are online or not online. But because you are downloading the messages from the server to your local machine, once you’ve downloaded the messages, they will not be available on the mailserver for you to view from other computers.

Consider the example of the traditional post office. If you tell a friend to pick up a package for you, but forget that you told your friend to pick it up for you, and picked it up yourself, there will be no package there when you friend gets to the post office. Accordingly, if your computer is automatically set to check and download emails every 15 minutes (which many machines running Outlook are configured to do), if you went on the road and checked your email account via webmail, you may not see all of your messages because some may have been already downloaded by the mail client (E.g. Outlook) running on your local machine.

To avoid this problem, Outlook has a feature that enables you to leave a copy of the mail on the server for a specified number of days, and to only delete the email from the server once you’ve delted it locally. This is a very handy feature, but with the disadvantage that sometimes multiple copies of emails begin to float around.

Enter IMAP. In the IMAP email model, all of the messages are always stored on the server and are never downloaded locally. Thus, IMAP gives you incredible flexiblity. No matter where you check your email, or from which computer, you will always see the exact contents of your email the same way. I work on two different laptops and a desktop machine, and it’s critical to me that I see all of my email the same way on all machines (unlike the POP example where I may “miss” an email if it’s already been downloaded). Naturally you need to have a reliable ISP as well as ample storage space on your server. That being said, it’s smart to download any very large attachments and then delete the message from the server to free up mailbox storage space.

In contrast to POP, you must be online to be able to view your messages if you are using the IMAP protocol, as IMAP requires you to be online as all of the messages are stored on the server.

A final consideration about the POP vs IMAP protocol is the ability to backup your messages.  Using the POP protocol and a program like Outlook, it’s very easy to backup your messages (usually into an outlook .PST file which you can later restore).  Because IMAP doesn’t download the messages, the above method won’t work.  Fortunately there are some very good programs out there that can connect to your IMAP mailserver and create copies of the emails that are there.  One such program is the freeware, IMAPSize, which I review in this post.

So in the end it all comes down to personal choice. Many people are now using free webmail-based services such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail to handle their email needs, and since most people access these accounts via a web browser, the POP/IMAP protocol debate doesn’t apply (though with some of these services you can use POP and IMAP to interact with a local email client).   For most home users, who will mostly access their email on a single computer, and have occasional ISP-webmail use (e.g Comcast or Time Warner webmail), the POP protocol is quite adequate.   As long as you remember to have your email client leave a copy of the messages on the server so you don’t miss any emails that your computer downloaed before you checked via webmail, you should be fine.

But for the more on the go or business user, who lacks the infrastrucure of an exchange server  or uses multiple computers, IMAP is great way to go.  Personally, I switched about 4 years ago, and haven’t looked back since!