No need to check your voicemail ever again

Checking voicemail: a necessary evil. But still more annoying than Bruce Forsyth. So the news that we are about to see the back of it comes with quite some excitement!

Thanks to Spinvox, there can be no more scrabbling for pens trying to take down phone numbers said incredibly quickly. The service uses some mystery technology which turns a voicemail message into a text message and sends it to your mobile phone. It can also copy the full message to you in an email.

They are currently providing a free 7 day trial of the service. We think it will save you at least half an hour a month. Here's a link for you to sample it:

Spinvox

Send big files easily

If you're trying to get a big file to somebody fast, email just won't cut it. If you need to deliver data over to a continental friend, sending it by courier is not really an option either. The answer? A supremely easy-to-use site, YouSendIt.

Just put in the email address, choose the file you want to send and press that button. Easier than pie.

You Send It

Better online communication part 2

Email has been around for three times as long as the Web, so we've found out a lot of uses (and abuses) for it since then.
Thus below is the second article in our series on email, and it contains four more must-knows.

5) When replying to something important or complex, quote the original email in your reply.
Have you ever picked up an old letter from a friend and wished to God you'd photocopied the original you sent, so you could remember what you said? This is your answer.
Some feel it is a matter of taste, but to net veterans, "include original message in reply" is an essential feature of their email program. Essential for several reasons; the most notable being that you don't have to cross-reference different emails when later analysing a conversation. Also, this include feature saves time flicking back and forth between messages to make sure you've covered everything your correspondant needed to know (or, more often than not, things that they didn't really need to know, but you thought you'd tell them anyway.)
In days of old, previous correspondence was indicated at the beggining of each line, by a "greater than" symbol, eg:

>what you said to me first
what I am saying by way of reply

and these built up when forwarded, so you could see how the conversation was evolving:

>>>what you said to me first
>>what I said by way of reply
>what you then said to me
what I am saying now

Some people find this difficult to read, but once you've figured it out, it makes detailed correspondence much easier. If you're sent an email using this schema, the politest way to continue the conversation is to respond in kind.

6) Best foot forward.
Email is the only medium that allows you to copy messages to possibly thousands of people by twitching a few muscles.
If all tools amplify our power, then email cranks up the volume to 11. (For those of you who haven't seen Spinal Tap, that means "pushing it off the cliff.")
So be careful with those forwards! If you're not vigilant you can set off streams of data worthy of a chaos theory apocryphal tale. (Email fluttering in Brazil sets off nuclear emergency in Latvia.) If you recieve a chain letter, petition or virus warning, it's important to check it's authentic before mailing it to every poor soul in your address book. This can be very easily done online at sites such as BreakTheChain - maintained by digital saints. Some of these mails are legitimate, but the majority are actually a form of lo-fi virus, childishly engineered specifically to create data traffic jams on the Net.
Spinal Tap - "It goes up to 11"
BreakTheChain

7) Don't say anything I wouldn't say
Something which leads neatly on from this is the inherent paradox of email communication. It can easily lull senders into a false sense of privacy; it feels like you are all alone in a conversation when you read it. And yet sending an email is more like passing a note around your primary school. Everybody knows who it's addressed to, and there's nothing to stop any of your mates having a peek. Worst of all, it's not hard for (oh horror of horrors) Teacher to grab it and read it out in front of everybody.
Remember - just a finger spasm from a bumbling friend or colleague and your email could find itself on the wrong desktop. Or everybody's desktop, for that matter, as Jamie Oliver knows to his cost.
A good rule of thumb: only say things you would be comfortable making front page news, attributed to you. Otherwise, say it face to face.

8) Use receipts in order to see if the recipient has got your mail.
The stalker's favourite; seldom used by technological newcomers and well-hidden by programmers: the receipt option - built into email protocols from the early years - still works. Not all systems can handle it, but it's worth a try. Method of use varies from program to program, even from version to version in certain systems, which shall remain nameless (doncha just love Microsoft?) The only way to find out what to do is to... gasp... look it up in the help file. I know it's a drastic measure, but when you get your first email back from the recipient's mail server telling you your missive has been received and/or opened, the labour will seem worth it.

9) Know when to use CC and BCC
Would you want your friends to post your mail address to all of their friends, and get all of their friends to send it to all of their friends? Not really. Not if you want to keep the junk from your door and the identity thieves away.
So, for the sake of your friends' privacy, use the BCC box rather than the CC box in your email program when you want to send an email to lots of people.
BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy. It means that any given recipient is unaware of who else the email was sent to and cannot therefore nick their email address.
CC stands for Carbon Copy. Putting somebody's email address in this box means that other recipients will see who it was sent to. Additionally, if they reply, the person in the CC box will see that reply automatically.
It's not hard to work out which is appropriate to use in which situation. That said, be very careful with CC especially.

Better online communication part 1

Email. Rapidly becoming the most used form of communication. Still the killer app of the net after its birth over 30 years ago. (Yes, you read that right... 30 years!)

But how many of us can actually use it appropriately? Maybe our emails are not as effective as we think. Only a small proportion of our communication has reached its full potential. This 2-part post explains our hints for better online messaging.

So here we go, at risk of eliciting cries of "Physician, heal thyself..."

1) Stick to one subject per email.
Otherwise you can create a filing headache for your recipient - especially when mixing business and pleasure.

2) Give your email a succinct, descriptive subject line.
After many years of furious sending and receiving, mailboxes can become stuffed with messages bearing titles like: "Re: [10] Hello" - which seems ok at the time - until you need to find a particular message, months later. Turning up the one you had in mind, in the middle of that lot, can cause more heart palpitations than an English breakfast and solid coffee. Even with intelligent search functions around, there can be hundreds of messages to sort through to find "that one that talked about the thing for so-and-so." One appropriate description at the top of your missive can add days to somebody's life (probably) and endear you to them many years down the line (definitely.)

3) Label your emotions.
Email's lack of cues that, ordinarily, body language or tone of voice would give to the recipient, can result in extraordinary miscommunications, which are the first wedge in the splitting of many a relationship. Irony and dry wit can enrich communication and understanding offline, but online they can easily be taken literally. Additionally, by way of a different extreme example, lack of emotion in email can seem like pure cold-bloodedness to the addressee. There are only 2 ways to prevent this - to use stage directions for yourself (for example "Your time-keeping is, as always, impeccable [smile]") or the ubiquitous smiley- in this case, an indicator of brazen cheek: ("How dare you call me tardy :-P".) Other than in serious or old-school business situations, the casual linguistics which have evolved through email are very forgiving of such informalities. Email beginners may find it irksome or odd, but, as any ex-pat will tell you, foreign customs that seem to fit like a wooden suit at first must be learned and practised to maintain relationships. Eventually they become like old, comfy, utilitarian jeans.

4) If sending an HTML email, give a text-only alternative
Some emails now use HTML to change fonts, colours and embed tables and photos. This gives them the appearance of web pages and is effective for branding and skim-reading purposes. However, it's a nightmare for accessibility. Once an email is forwarded it can break or lose its formatting, and not every mail application or device (such as the new breed of smartphones) can read HTML email. If you are advanced enough with your email to use such a feature, make sure that the email reads as you intend it to when all the HTML is stripped away. Also, (at risk of sounding like a schoolteacher looking over horn-rimmed glasses,) make sure the code produced is written according to proper HTML standards. Or you'll get into trouble.

Next post: How to know whether somebody's got your email, best foot forwarding and the perils of gossip.

Check email away from home

If you have your own email account (otherwise known as a POP3 box) and need to check your email while away from your main computer at home or work, this neat site will let you do just that. And it's free.
(For those with mail accounts hosted with Rechord / Re{store, you will need to use the "Advanced Login" link.)

Mail2Web

Spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam and spam

Hands up who's fed up of being sold things they don't want in their inbox every day! It's even more irritating than being served in a greasy spoon cafe packed with chanting Vikings.

There is no easy answer, but these tips should stem the flow of spam - aka unwanted email.

Preventative measures

• If you have to give your email address to a website, use a different one to your regular account. We have several different email accounts for this purpose. If some unscrupulous marketer should then add it to their list, you can cancel the account with little harm done.
  
  
• Try not to get into the habit of using cc: in the headers of emails to forward virus warnings or other spurious chain emails to large groups of friends. They may look helpful but are often sent out by spammers who want to harvest email addresses. Two websites which will help you check to see if what you're about to forward is really true are listed below. We really recommend you use them before selecting everybody in your address book.
  Break The Chain
  Snopes (actually a very entertaining site and worth a look whether you're researching a spurious email or not - it even debunks the myth that Coca-cola decided which colours Santa Claus would wear)
  
  
• Some cheeky spammers use software that collects email addresses from websites. There are ways to hide your address from such software using Javascript. Get in touch if you need any more help spam-proofing your site.

Cures

• Rechord's anti-spam system of choice is ClearMyMail. This service does not rely on filters to get rid of spam - so none will ever slip through the net. When you set it up, you identify senders that you want to receive mail from; newsletters you are subscribed to, for instance, or friends and colleagues. When email comes into your inbox, ClearMyMail acts as a sentry, letting through the emails from your approved senders, and rejecting blocked ones. The clever bit happens when ClearMyMail gets email from somebody you've not explicitly approved. It will send you an email telling you the email addresses of the senders, and you just tell it which ones you want.
  The link below will take you to their 30-day free trial.
  ClearMyMail
  
  
• If you want to join the throngs of spam vigilantes, register with Spam Cop and report any naughty emails to them. They will investigate and report the originator to the relevant authorities so that they can't plague us any more.
  SpamCop
  
  
• There is also a project on the boil called Okopipi which aims to turn the tables on the spammers by sending the companies advertised by spam an email for every junk mail they send out. All perfectly legal, but vengeful enough to be rather satisfying.
  Okopipi