Recently in Internet Related Category
I had to send an urgent fax today and did not have access to a fax machine. I signed up first for eFax. Then I realized that I could not send faxes without paying a monthly subscription. I then went to this Wikipedia page and looked at the list of online fax providers. I finally decided on FaxItNice.
The nice part about FaxItNice is that you have the option of not paying a monthly fee. And the credits do not expire. This served me well because I do not send faxes regularly. And I do not want to pay a monthly fee for something I will not use regularly. I uploaded 2 word files and 1 excel file and there were no issues sending them. I went for their Sending Only Plan which costs 18 cents per page to send faxes to the US.
Bottomline: Definitely recommended for people who want to have the ability to send faxes online.
Link: www.FaxItNice.com
AOL/AIM is now offering free email. I signed up for one yesterday. If you already have an AIM username, you can access your webmail at http://mail.aol.com/.
And today, I found out that it also provides IMAP access. I tested the IMAP connection with Outlook Express and it works nicely. The settings are:
IMAP server: imap.aol.com
Port: 143 (default port)
As far as I know, no other email service - Gmail, Yahoo, Rediffmail and even Yahoo Mail Plus do not offer IMAP access. I think Outlook Express can be configured to access Hotmail but I am not sure if it is POP or IMAP, or whether it works for all free accounts.
btw, Fastmail does offer free IMAP access but provides only 10 MB storage space.
I will test AOL/AIM mail for some more time and I will post my experiences here.
Related Links:
- 06/06/2005: AOL Launches Free Email Service (CNN Money)
- 05/05/2005: Yahoo now offers 1 GB email space
- 11/16/2004: Gmail POP access
Just noticed now that my Yahoo email space has increased to 1 GB. Don't know exactly when the upgrade happened. It was supposed to have taken place in mid-April, but I am sure my account quota was 250 mb just 2 or 3 days back.
Have three yahoo mail accounts (two yahoo.com and one yahoo.co.in) and the quota has increased in all three.
Related Link(s)
- 03/23/2005: Yahoo to increase email storage to 1 GB
Adobe is buying Macromedia!
Desktop publishing specialist Adobe Systems is buying multimedia applications maker Macromedia in a $3.4 billion deal geared toward building a software powerhouse.
Read the story here (c|net).
Yahoo announced on Tuesday that it is going to increase it free email storage limit to 1 GB, from its current 250 MB. The upgrade will take place in mid-April.
Yahoo's storage upgrade comes one week after Google started offering Gmail accounts to random visitors of its home page. This has led to heightened speculation in news articles and blogs that Google plans to open Gmail's doors to the public on April 1, a year after it launched in its current test form.
Good news for Yahoo users :). However, Gmail has one major advantage -it offers free POP3 access. Interface wise, I like Yahoo Mail's interface better than Gmail's.
Related Links:
- Yahoo bolsters e-mail storage to 1GB (c|net)
- Yahoo Inc. Again Expands E-Mail Storage (Yahoo News)
The First Tennessee Bank website has been redesigned. Just noticed it now. The new version was not there a couple of hours back. The new design looks neat and professional.
Google released its 2004 Year-End Google Zeitgeist list yesterday (Thu, 12/23). It lists the terms most frequently entered into the company's search engine over the past 12 months.
The most popular queries for 2004 are:
[1] Popular Queries: Britney Spears
[2] Popular Men: Orlando Bloom
[3] Popular Women: Britney Spears
[4] Popular Consumer Brand Names: Ebay
[5] Top Public Figures: George W. Bush
and many more...
And "Zeitgeist" is a german word which means: "the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era"
Related Links:
- Google Press Center: Zeitgeist
- News article at ZdNet
- Google Blog
Update (2/26/2005): If you want to increase your hotmail space, please see this page. I have not tried it yet but from the list of responses, it seems that the procedure works. A cached copy is also available here in case the page mentioned above goes down.
Hotmail now offers 250 mb of email storage space. Just checked my hotmail account and yes, it does have 250 mb email space now. When Yahoo mail increased its email space to 100 mb a couple of months back, I had read somewhere that hotmail was also planning to increase it's email space in August 2004. Two and a half months later, that seems to be a reality.
As for me, I still use my University email account. It offers only 20 mb of space but I use it because it offers IMAP access. Also, it has 6 MX records i.e. basically 6 mail servers handling the incoming email. This means that if one of the email servers go down, the others will pick up the email. Most email providers have only 1 or 2 MX records. Yahoo and Hotmail have 4, Rediffmail has 3 and Gmail has 2 MX records respectively.
POP is good but I like IMAP a lot better and it is much more convenient. I have a gmail account but I seldom use it because it does not provide POP or IMAP access. It would be great if I could have access to an email service with good storage space (200mb+) and which offers IMAP access. I am even willing to pay for it. I have tried the free version of Fastmail and it works pretty good.
Related entries from my blog:
- Rediffmail now offers 1 GB of email space (June 17, 2004 10:35 PM)
- Yahoomail now offers 100 MB of email space (June 15, 2004 06:39 PM)
- Got my Gmail account! (June 12, 2004 01:40 AM)
Correction (6:39 PM 11/13/2004): It seems Gmail does offer POP access now but not to all its users yet. I just checked mine and POP access has not been enabled for my account yet :(. If Gmail starts supporting IMAP, it will be really great!!! :).
Mozilla Foundation's Firefox 1.0 was officially released yesterday (11/9). Have downloaded and upgraded my previous Firefox installation (0.9). It seems that Firefox downloads have exceeded 10 million!
www.firefox.com now takes you to the Firefox homepage. However, until one or two months back, it displayed a seperate page. The previous owner - Kevin Karpenske, has transferred the domain to the Mozilla foundation. A very generous gesture indeed! Kevin is a fiction writer and his new website is www.quailish.com.If you would like to thank Kevin for his generous gesture, do post a message in his discussion forum.
It seems that due to large number of downloads, the Mozilla site became slow yesterday (11/9). Also, due to heavy traffic, the www.spreadfirefox.com website currently (2:36 AM 11/10/2004) displays a text-only version.
Related Links:
- Mozilla releases Firefox 1.0 (news.com)
- Firefox homepage
E-commerce is 10 years old today. The first e-commerce transaction was conducted on Wed, Aug 11, 1994. The item sold was a "Ten Summoner's Tales" by Sting which sold for $12.48, plus shipping costs.
Interested? read the article at news.com.
Location of IIS log files:
Windows Xp:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\Logfiles\W3SVC1
Windows NT/2000:
C:\WINNT\system32\Logfiles\W3SVC1
Related Links:
- Gathering Log Files from an IIS Web Server. From Cisco website
Just realized that there is no longer an "Add Member" feature in Yahoo groups. I am owner and/or moderator for a couple of groups. But none of them displays the "Add" feature now. The "Invite Member" feature is still there.
Wonder if it is a permanent or temporary change.
Note (4:50 AM 8/2/2004): Thanks to Brajeshwar for the comment. I found the "Add Members" link at the bottom of the Members > Invite Members page. Hmm, I thought that there was an "Add Members" link on the "Members" page. Guess I was wrong.
I had 25 spam comments in my blog today. That was just too much!
Update(3:34 AM 7/21/2004): MT-Blacklist
Thanks to Brajeshwar for the tip. I have installed MT-Blacklist and it is working great. It has a huge database of blog spammers. More about this later.
Links:
- MT-Blacklist
- Installation
- Latest blacklist file
This is hilarious!
Rediffmail has also joined the GB bandwagon. Google first intoduced Gmail with 1 GB email space. Yahoo then increased its email space quota to 100 MB. And today, I see that Rediff has also followed suit and increased its email space to 1 GB! One of my rediff accounts is a paid one and for that account, the email space quota is 2 GB! Compared to rediffmail, I think Yahoo's email space quota is more reasonable.
I just don't understand how they are going to maintain such huge amounts of email space.
[1] How to send email FROM a cingular mobile phone using SMS.
Step [a] Compose message: <email><space><message>
Step [b] Send to 111
Example: If you want to send the message "test message" to "someone@example.com", compose the message as:
someone@example.com test message.
[2] How to send email TO a cingular mobile phone.
Option [a] Send email to mobile_number@mobile.mycingular.net
Example: If the mobile phone number is 865-387-1234, send the email to 8653871234@mobile.mycingular.net
Option [b] Send a message directly from the Web: http://cingular.com/sendamessage
Option [c] Create an email alias for your cellphone in the format alias@cingularme.com : http://www.cingularme.com/do/registration?l=en-US&v=cingular
Example: If your username/alias is "john", emails sent to john@cingularme.com will be delivered to your cingular mobile phone.
Related Links:
- Send a message from the web
- www.CingularME.com
Last updated: 3:40 AM 12/29/2004
Starting today (6/15) Yahoo is offering 100 mb space for email. Yahoo has made the move mainly to counter Google's Gmail which offers 1000 MB of email space. Just checked my Yahoo account and yes the space has increased to 100 MB and also it is sporting a new look. Also, Yahoo Mail Plus (the paid version)offers 2 GB of space!!!
Also, it seems millions of dormant email addresses will now be available again for registration.
Articles:
- Wired.com
PHP based POP mail reader
For the past few days I have been looking for a PHP based POP Mail Reader. Checked out a couple of them. I think that UebiMiau is a really good one. It is really easy to install and does not need any database. Also, it works great both on Unix/Linux and Windows. Really easy to configure.
PHP based IMAP mail reader
If you are looking for a PHP based IMAP mail reader, use SquirrelMail. It is definitely the best. I would not be searching for other mail readers if Squirrelmail supported POP. There is a workaround to read POP emails using Squirrelmail but you still need an IMAP server to store the data.
Previously, I have tried accessing the UTK LDAP server a couple of times. But I always ran into one problem or the other. Finally succeded today.
[1] PHP script to query the UTK LDAP server
Wrote a PHP script to query the UTK LDAP server. Got the basic info from the php.net website. The script is online here. The source code can be viewed here.
[2] Setting up LDAP address book in OutlookExpress
- Open OutlookExpress
- Tools > Address Book
- In Address Book, Tools > Accounts
- Add (use the following info)
LDAP server: ldap.utk.edu
Port: 389 (default)
Search Base: ou=People,ou=Knoxville,dc=tennessee,dc=edu
Useful Links:
- http://dii.utk.edu/ldap/
- http://web.utk.edu/~mike/mac/osx-utk-ldap.html
- http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.ldap.php
Update (10:37 PM 5/17/2005): A better discussion of the Yahoo 999 error is here.
Update (10:13 PM 2/17/2005): If you have come here trying to find information about the Yahoo 999 error and you are not able to access your email, you might want to try the options mentioned below:
- Trying logging into your account using
http://login.europe.yahoo.com/ or
http://edit.in.yahoo.com/ or
www.bt.yahoo.com or
http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/
- Read more about the error here.
Spent the last 5 hours trying to figure out how to archive Yahoo! Groups messages. I want to keep a copy of the messages on my computer and also put a local copy online.
[1] PG-Offline [Windows]
Site: http://pgoffline.com/
Type: Shareware
Bob's Review: This one works great. Very easy to configure. Also, the messages can be exported as .mdb (MS-Access) files. However Yahoo! Groups blocked my IP after about 332 messages. I got the Yahoo! 999 error. Here is a screenshot. Access was restored after about 3 hours. More discussion about the Yahoo! download limit is here.
Cons: Does not seem to have an export to html option.
[2] yahoo2mbox [Unix/ Linux]
Site: http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~zeitlin/yahoo2mbox.html
Type: Freeware
Bob's Review: This one was really easy to install. Just one Perl script. That's it. However, you need shell access to run the program. Use this syntax:
perl yahoo2mbox.pl --start=0 --end=200 --user=your_username -o mbox group_name
Yahoo blocked my IP after about 300 messages. Since I had access to about 60 different logins (and therefore 60 different IPs) to my unix account, I kept changing the logins after I got a block. No need to use the --delay option. Just change your IPs when you get blocked. Of course, if you are on a static IP, then maybe wait 3 hours and try again!
The mbox file generated can then be read using Outlook Express (Well, I use Outlook Express!) by creating an IMAP connection to the unix machine and choosing the location of the mbox file as the root folder path.
Update (6/12/2004):
MHonArc
The mbox file generated using yahoo2mbox can be converted into mailmain style static html pages using MhonArc. You will need a Unix/Linux machine (and most probably root access) to run the script. MHonArc is really good and works just great!
Testing Media Temple's bokmarklet feature. Not sure if it is really that useful. The only advantage seems to be that I need not copy-paste the URL.
TIME.com: Voices On Broadband -- Mar. 29, 2004
3/30/2004: It seems I was wrong. MT bookmarkets are in fact very useful, especially for trackbacks. I am still learning though. I am pinging one of the entries of my blogspot blog and in fact, it works - like a charm!
A nice tutorial about Trackback is here.
