TUDIES which analyse large volumes of communication have always been interesting. For instance, most of the E-mail traffic nowadays is identified as SPAM; and over 80% of it is said to come from compromised Windows PC‘s. However, for a change, this is not what I wish to discuss today. I don’t want to have yet another bite at the effects Windows has on the WWW. It leaves me bitter.

Earlier today I read that only 37% of all E-mail at the ‘average’ office are personal E-mails. The rest are not. Some E-mails these days are invoked from a system rather than a human. Typically these are less interesting, less urgent, or can be altogether ignored. Some of that is mass mail, automated and despatched using address databases.

It is sometimes hard to discern between a personal message–one to which a response would be polite–and one which is targetted at a wide audience and whose content is carefully doctored to appear personal. I would like to recommend and promote a personal tip of mine. It is a little method I thought about for detecting and telling apart computer-generated from human-generated mail. When entering your name (e.g. at registration stage), for example, always append extra spaces that serve no purpose but preserve the integrity of the name. Having done so, you challenged the wisdom of the bot. Before punctuation, for example, you can see if a human inserted the name properly. A naive algorithm will not bother to crunch spaces, so the automation deems self-evident.

In other circumstances, having the recipient’s addresses within sight may help. Full headers can be very informative and various Thunderbird extensions even simplify text with representative figures (e.g. routing information as a series of flags, mail client name as an icon, signature as an icon, etc.). It makes the information easier to digest and it adds a wealth of knowledge that is often missed. Lastly, never discount the BCC tricks. A seemingly personal message can reach anyone ‘on the same wagon’.

A screenshot of Thunderbird with the CrossOver theme

OZILLA Thunderbird is, in my humble opinion, a very user-friendly mail client (as well as feeds reader or news reader) ‘out ot the box’.Like Firefox, it was built to suit merely anyone, even those who describe themselves as computing mediocres. Shall you wish to entend it, possibly making it more complex and harder to master, all you need to do is go to the official extensions page, click on the install button and make your application far more versatile. I have a dozen extensions installed at the moment and jointly they make Thunderbird more powerful than any other mail client I have come across.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

nice old writeup from Tristan Miller (someone whom I first met on UseNet) explains why it is a poor idea to send Word files. I explored his site at deeper levels in the past as his opinions broadly intersected with mine. I also happened to find this funny ‘scientific paper’ with an hilarious followup.

Returning to the subject at hand, the true nuisance is mail that contains Word attachments. It is a plague that appears to be reaching its end. Funnier (or coversely — more annoying) experiences include the embedment of nothing but plain text (or even a single image) in a Word files which is attached to a blank-body message. Some people just never learn. Here are some effective E-mail signatures that I have come across in the L_yX mailing list.

I do not have a copy of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
I have no plans to buy one.
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint use proprietary data formats,
encouraging consumerism by forcing us to purchase new licenses
every time they “upgrade” their secret formats.
Send plain text, rich text format, html, or pdf instead.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

Or a shorter version thereof (one which honours the 4-line signature limit)

Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are unreliable, unmaintainable, and unsafe.
Send plain text, rtf, pdf, or W3C html instead.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

There is now the ODF argument as well. ODF has recently become an ISO-approved standard.

Upgrade to Thunderbird. It’s Open Source and it honours standards/netiquette.

ICROSOFT Outlook is a terrible mail application, despite some common beliefs (and expectations due to cost, or bloat). I cannot comment on its abilities as a calendaring software as I have only seen others using these peripherals features. However, at least one Outlook user whom I exchange E-mails with is breaking every rule in the book regularly (if not always). Outlook does not prevent him from doing this. As a matter of fact, it encourages this and a dissatisfied recipient is of course less likely to reply.

Here is a short description of the problems inherent in these messages that I receive from Outlook (and sometimes Outlook Express too):

• HTML-formatted
• Non-standard ‘HTML’ (Microsoft Office inclination, MSIE-centric)
• Roughly 38 kilobyte even for a one-liner (an enormous non-standards compliant ‘style sheet’ is prepended)
• 10-line signature (Outlook does not warn or deter)
• No signature delimiter (breaking all RFC standards)
• Always top-posted, not trimmed and lacking context (Outlook is definitely not helping by creating new lines and putting the cursor at the top)
• In quotes, re-wrapping is broken and irregular symbols get inserted sporadically

There is no gentle way to approach the issue, but one such person learned to at least stick to plain-text (owing to a kind request). The top posting habits remain though. Outlook Express requires QuoteFix, which is addon software/hack, just to stop this default behaviour and make bottom posting practical. So there is no subtle way to suggesting others to improve their posting habits, unfortunately. To them, the Windows/Microsoft way is the right way. Acceptable standards lose their value when a desktop monopoly simply ignores them.

Some time ago I wrote some notes on how to begin loving E-mail again , which reminds me of an old favourite that is titled the UseNet improvement project.

I have just learned (through Bruce Schneier) that, in a large German dating site, the password “123456″ works 1.4% of the time and 2.5% of all passwords begin with “1234″. People are simply lazy or unwilling to memorise passwords. This all means that it would only take about 60 attempts to break into a user’s account.

In an era of Web services, remembering many password can be difficult. For this reason, I personally chose the ‘master password’ approach, as I call it, and I also manage everything as such on my PDA. Password choices are a very important matter, which is something you come to realise only when you get hacked/cracked. In the case of unencrypted comminication, they need to be changed very regularly, as well.

Thunderbird with an Aqua-based theme called CrossOver

OZILLA Thunderbird is an Open Source mail/news (most latterly RSS) client, which I have praised several times in the past. It is also my default mail application — the haven I found after experience with various other packages.

At present, I continue to use a mail notifier for Thunderbird which is rather stripped-down and is called the Mozilla New Mail Icon (project homepage). However, it lacks some of the power of other checkers — particularly those that deliver detailed information without interfering with the user’s current work (e.g. steal window focus). The good news is that the Thunderbird team is making progress and is bridging the gap between the latest of Outlook and the Mozilla family of applications. A good example of this is their calendar extension. They may even go farther ahead by incorporating tabs, which for mail clients is unprecedented.

In Thunderbird 2.0 there will finally be a built-in function which triggers an overview-type popup whenever new mail arrives (see screenshot). This way, users will not necessarily have to divert attention to the bulky application. When mail arrives in large volumes, such features can be very valuable.

Separating ham and spam

NE powerful technique to avoiding spam are E-mail addresses (accounts) which are not public. They can reside rather happily alongside more public address(es), but the level of ‘noise’ in each then varies. Reading habits benefit from the separation.

An odd suspicion should rise when a private (undisclosed) mail account is beginning to receive spam. Then, one can only spect that EITHER:

• A trusted person gave the E-mail address to a spammer or posted it publicly for ratbots to harvest

OR

• Somebody’s computer has been hijacked and address book data pulled from it, leading to misuse

This unfortunate scenario has recently hit me. At the end, it turned out that SpamAssassin was disabled, so I reported the fault to my host. My private account remains clean and has been clean for over a year. I warmheartedly recommend this tactic, which will be explained at greater depth if you follow the link above.