New emails are usually marked in bold. Those that have already been replied to or read become ‘un-bold,’ which means they require no further action. To most of us, emails in bold are those which require action. What happens if messages are marked as Read before an action has been taken?

This is exactly what happens in most email clients. It marks messages ‘Read’ immediately after you have opened an email. This overly smart feature has to be turned off.

To do it in Outlook, go to ‘Option/Mail/Reading Pane/Mark item…’. In Mac’s Mail, you need to install a plugin called TruePreview in order to disable this feature.

Mac’s Mail using TruePreview plugin

Postbox with ‘Mark message read’ disabled

After you have disabled the feature, you need to learn a new practice – to mark messages as read manually. The keyboard shortcut for Outlook is CTRL-Q. In Postbox, it is ‘m’. In Mac’s Mail, it is Command-Shirt-U (we prefer to replace it with just two buttons: ^A)

Assigning new keyboard shortcut in Mac’s Mail

Don’t just hit “Reply,” but hit “Reply all”.

Very often, the sender who sent you an email would also include other email addresses in the Cc. If you hit Reply, only the sender will get the reply. In other words, those people in the Cc’d list won’t receive your email. In order to overcome this problem, please hit “Reply all” instead of “Reply”. Make this a habit!

'Reply all' helps keep everyone informed

View “Unread” messages only.

None of us has the time to go through each email to decide which requires a response. Chances are, we are most likely to just pick those ‘Unread’ message and start working on it.

In Outlook or Outlook Express, this can be done by choosing ‘Hide Read Message only’ in the View menu.

Newer email clients such as Mac’s Mail or Postbox has a feature called Smart Folder. You can define rules in a Smart Folder in order to find only unread messages.

Mac’s Mail with a Smart Folder called ‘Unread’

Rules are defined in the Smart Folder

Sorting emails using folders is old fashioned.

Many email users create lists of folders to group their messages. Senders are sorted by company names. It is a hassle to drag each message into the correct folder.

Messages sorted by folders in company name

Newer email clients are equipped with advanced search options which eliminate the need to sort messages in folders. In other words, you can just search to find an email instead of sorting them by company names.

Searching an email with the build-in search feature

Emails sent using your phone should also appear in your Outlook.

Working on multiple devices and still keeping your emails synced is now possible. All thanks to faster Internet connections and the advancement of IMAP protocol.

IMAP allows you to view your messages directly from the server. By configuring all your devices such as notebook, smartphones or tablet to use IMAP, you can have everything in one device to be synced automatically to your other devices.

Previously, email users chose POP over IMAP. In POP, one downloads the message and works locally. Today, with improved Internet connection speeds, IMAP is an affordable option.

Configure Mac’s Mail to use IMAP

Configure iPhone to use IMAP

Signatures, Disclaimers and Email Receipts are dead.

Email isn’t dead yet, but it will die, eventually. Don’t believe us? Well, look at the fax machine. Let’s face it. Facebook email, Apple’s iMessage, Tweets and many other means of communication is pushing email out.

Soon, email features like subject, signature, disclaimers and email receipts will become a thing of the past.

Keep emails short. Ask one question at a time.

View full story

The best email client? Mac’s Mail!

I have tried Outlook Express, Outlook, Windows Mail, Thunderbird, Mulberry, Netscape Mail, Eudora and Postbox but none of them come close to Mac’s Mail. Mac’s Mail comes with Mac OS X as the default email client. What makes the difference? It has one of the greatest user interface with good IMAP support. It has accurate and fast email search features and handles plain text and HTML email better.

Email addresses are better in small letters.

Never write your email address in capital. Well, it still gets delivered but it’s just not right to write it that way. Just remember this: USE SMALL LETTERS FOR EMAIL ADDRESSES.

Example of bad email address

3 ways to send “really huge” files over the Internet.

Emails are not designed to deliver huge files (over 5MB) via the Internet, but there are a dozen other ways to do it.

Use Sendspace.com to attach files up to 300MB

Install CloudApps in Mac to deliver files up to 25MB.

Shared folder using Dropbox

This article is written by Pin. If you have any questions, please email pin@1.com.my

Pin’s company does just one thing – email hosting. In Pin’s own words, it is “the email experience” that virtually no other email provider in Malaysia cares as much about.

Say your domain name is YourDomain.com, your web and email hosting plan enables you to create email accounts like anyone@YourDomain.com and put up a web site at http://www.YourDomain.com.

Creating Email Accounts

You can create email accounts using the web-based control panel given.  It is at http://www.YourDomain.com (cPanel users) or http://mailadmin.YourDomain.com (MailAdmin users).

For cPanel users, please login and click Email Accounts icon to create new email accounts.  Once you have done this, you can start using the email service via webmail at http://www.YourDomain.com/webmail.  You can also set up your email software (such as Outlook) so that you can send and receive emails from your computer.  Please refer to the “Server Configuration” email sent to you for details.

For MailAdmin users, please login and click Users button on the left to create email accounts.  You can access webmail at http://webmail.YourDomain.com.  Please also refer to the “Server Configuration” email sent to you on setting up your email software in your PC.

Creating Web Site

Developing a web site is not an easy task.  You can either outsource web development to web developers, or try to do it yourself using many free content management software (CMS) out there.

By using a CMS, you don’t need to possess too much technical knowledge to make up a web site.  Popular CMSes are such as WordPress (easiest) , Drupal, Joomla, Xoops, and OS Commerce (for e-commerce web sites). You don’t have to download these software but simply install any of them in cPanel.  Click Fantastico in cPanel to find out more.

Using CMS to create a web site requires a little learning curve.  But once you have mastered it, you can replicate your skills to create other web sites as well.  For many business and personal web sites, actually creating a blog is quite a good choice.  You can use WordPress to do so.  Find out how to use WordPress to develop your web site.

You can also use web development software such as Dreamweaver and Microsoft Frontpage to create your web site.  How easy are these?  If you know how to use Microsoft Word, it does not take you much time to learn Microsoft Frontpage.

But if you prefer to hire a web designer to do up your web site, there are thousands of them interested in your job.  You may want to try engage a web designer among my partners here. (If you are a web designer reading this, you are welcome to join as a partner too)

Hosting Your Web Site

When you are ready to put up your web site on the server, you can do this by using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) service provided as in the “Server Configuration” email sent to you. You will need an FTP software to do the job.  Recommended is FileZilla (free). Another way to upload is by Windows Explorer as described here.

If you use software such as FrontPage to design your web site, you can also upload or publish your web site straight from the software itself.

Hope this little article help.  If you face any problem, welcome to contact me here

Anyway, sometimes my hosting customers too can encounter problems in their Internet connection to our server.  I normally ask them to check their connection to server and send me report generated by a software called PingPlotter.  Customer support by phone and email is a full-time job.  So I might as well post here and refer them to this article.

So are you reading this because you can’t connect to our server, or any web site?  Download PingPlotter (free version) at http://www.pingplotter.com to find out what’s wrong. Install and run the program as usual.

As you can see above, there is a little text box at the top left.  Just type your server address there and hit Enter.  The server address depends on what you want to check.  It could be mail.yourdomain.com or pop.yourdomain.com for mail server, webmail.yourdomain.com for webmail, www.yourdomain.com or simply yourdomain.com for your web site.

A little graph will be generated on the right hand side every few seconds.  It shows what happened along the way from your PC to our server.  If the graph is mostly in green, you are having good connection.  If there is some yellow or red color, there might be some bottleneck or network problem somewhere halfway.

To churn out the report, click Edit menu, then Copy As Image.  You can then start and paste the copied image into your graphic software, such as Paint.  Then save the image and send to me at ricky [at] rickysoo.com.

Any question or comments? Welcome to comment below.

Would you like to indicate your location or department in your email address?  You can use subdomain in your email address such as sales@malaysia.mycompany.com or ricky@hr.mycompanycom!

What is a subdomain anyway?  It is anything that goes before your domain name.  For example, in “singapore.mycompany.com”, “mycompany.com” is the domain name” and “singapore” is the subdomain.

It’s easy to create email address with your chosen subdomain.  Let’s create an email address called ricky@malaysia.mycompany.com.

1. Log into your web-based control panel cPanel.
2. In cPanel, go to the Domains section and click Subdomains.
3. Enter “malaysia” as subdomain, specify the location of the subdomain (such as /public_html/malaysia), and click Create button.
4. In cPanel, go to the Mails section and click Email Accounts.
5. Enter “ricky” as the email username, select “malaysia.mycompany.com” from the domain list, enter other details such as password, and click Create button.
6. Now set up your email software such as Outlook to start using your email account. Done!

By the way, if you have created a subdomain as above, you can also use it to have a different web site for your branch in Malaysia under your domain name with the address http://malaysia.mycompany.com!

There are a few ways to upload files to, and download files from, your web server by means of FTP (file transfer protocol). The most common way is using an FTP software for this purpose.

But I’ll show you a basic way which works, and which does not require you to install any FTP software.  If you know how to copy and paste files in Windows Explorer or My Computer, you can copy and paste files too to other servers.

1. Open up Windows Explorer or My Computer on your computer.
2. Make sure there is an address bar in Windows Explorer where you can type address.  Can’t see?  Go to View menu, click Toolbars, and turn on Address Bar.
3. Type this into the address bar – ftp://username@ftp.domain.com .  Please substitute username with your FTP account username, and ftp.domain.com with your FTP server name.  You can get these details from your hosting provider.
4. You will be prompted for your FTP account username and password.  Enter them to log on to your web server.
5. Once successful, you will be able to see the file content on your server.  If necessary, browse to the folder where you want to copy files to.
6. To copy files to your server, just copy them from your file system, and paste it to the folder.  Done!

By the way, I host a little Java applet which lets you quickly upload files by FTP here.  Try it out!

In such cases, it’s best to find out whether there is anything wrong in our network connection or not. You can simply use the “command prompt” service in Windows and run a few tests – namely ping, telnet and tracert.

To start, click the Start button, click Run, type cmd, press Enter, and you will be a blank screen awaiting your input. You are then ready to start each test. Let’s assume your domain name is domain.com. You should substitute domain.com with your own domain name in tests below.

Ping

This is a quick connection test to the server. If the connection is OK, you should receive responses from the server. On the command prompt, type:

ping www.domain.com – test the web server
ping pop.domain.com – test the incoming mail server (old server)
ping smtp.domain.com – test the outgoing mail server (old server)
ping mail domain.com – test the mail server (new cPanel-based Linux server)

Telnet

It tries to log you on to the server and sees whether it’s successful or not.

telnet pop.domain.com 110 – test the incoming mail server at port 110 (old server)
telnet smtp.domain.com 28 – test the outgoing mail server at port 28 (old server) – change to port 25 if you are using fixed IP address
telnet mail domain.com 110 – test the mail server at port 110 (new cPanel-based Linux server)

Tracert

It reports any connection problem along the way connecting to a server.

tracert www.domain.com – test the web server
tracert pop.domain.com – test the incoming mail server (old server)
tracert smtp.domain.com – test the outgoing mail server (old server)
tracert mail domain.com – test the mail server (new cPanel-based Linux server)

After each test, you can copy the result and send to us. To copy the result, click on the little icon at the top left corner of the command prompt window, and then click Edit and then Mark. Use your mouse to highlight the area of the window you want to copy, and then press Enter to copy.

Then you can email the test result to us. To exit from the command prompt window, simply type exit and then Enter.

Should you have any question, please contact us here.

But the way Outlook Express stores its emails may not be the best way. Unfortunately things can happen that the emails can get corrupted. For example, if you suddenly power off your computer when it is downloading emails, the downloading is interrupted and your emails in Inbox and some folders can be gone.

So if you are using Outlook Express, or any email software for that matter, it’s prudent that you back up your emails regularly, especially when you have important company emails. One customer of mine opens and saves every email as a file in the hard drive. But this is just too tedious

Worry no more. Just grab a copy of the free Outlook Express Quick Backup. With a click of the “Complete Backup” button, it backs up all your emails in all folders. Not only your emails, but your folder structure, address book, email accounts and settings are backed up as well. Great tool!

In case your emails are lost, you can always restore back your previous backup. Just click the “Complete Restore” button, your Outlook Express will be back as previous. Thumb up!

Check the the left sidebar of this blog and you will see a little orange box. If my company’s MSN account is turned on, it will read “Click to chat”.

Simple click it and you will be given two options – either to login to your Windows Live account, or chat anonymously. Either way, you will be able to chat with us.

And I was delighted to see an incoming chat within 2 minutes of setting it up on NextLevel Tutor Network web site!

But I have two Windows Live accounts, one for business and one for personal. I wish to put on the personal one for this blog, and the business one for other sites.

The problem is how do I access both accounts at the same time in Windows Live Messenger? Any idea?