BIG Net Online Technology Blog » eMail

Is email secure?

admin — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:32:43 +0000

NO. Email is similar to sending a postcard. Anyone along its route can read it with ease. While it’s not likely that anyone is reading your email, you should never send anything such as your social security number, credit card numbers, or passwords, etc.

Which email accounts NOT to use

admin — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 18:54:00 +0000

Most internet providers (aka. AT&T, COX, Time Warner, etc.) give you email accounts with your monthly internet access. Most people use these included email accounts, but my suggestion is to NEVER use them. Here are the reasons why you shouldn’t:

Not very feature rich.
More limited storage space.
Address can be harder to remember (eg. something@san.rr.com)
Tie you to their internet service. (BIGGEST REASON)

This means if you move our of their service area, or just want to switch to a different provider (because of pricing or lack of service), you are forced to change your email address. While not directly, this is similar to the drug dealer business model. Give them free email accounts, and they will keep paying their monthly fee for internet access.

You would be better off using one of the many free email accounts offered by various companies, such as Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo mail. This way your email is not dependent on your internet provider.

An even better solution is to sign up for Google hosted services. For $9/year, Google will give you email at the domain name of your choice. Basically you are only paying to register the domain name, and Google will host your email for FREE! This includes all of the legendary features of their standard Gmail.

Gmail gets IMAP support

admin — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:49:08 +0000

Google is rolling out IMAP support to its gmail and google hosted users. You can activate it by going to settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP and select Enable IMAP.

If you don’t see the IMAP option yet, you can try to logout and then log back in to see if it appears.

For those of you who don’t know, IMAP is a protocol for fetching email from a remote server, like POP, but more advanced. The main difference is that IMAP is designed to be used from multiple computers, so email is not deleted from the mail server when it is downloaded.