The problem with email addresses with the user names sales@ or info@ is that they tend very quickly to become spam magnets. Try as we might with filters and rules, and chopping and changing our email software, spam still seems to wriggle through the mesh.
Tiring of the usual spam downloading ritual each morning, I did something that surprised me this week…abandoned my fav email client, Mozilla Thunderbird after two years. What’s even more surprising is that this latest solution comes from Microsoft in the shape of Windows Live.
Having started out with Outlook Express way back in the Nineties following a brief foray with AOL (they got shirty after realising I’d managed seven months of free trials instead of just one), it’s now back to the future with Microsoft. What commenced as merely a wee experiment with Windows Live to find out what it was all about has ended in a full-scale switch over I didn’t see coming.
The big advantage of Windows Live and others of its email aggregation kind is having easy access to all your email accounts in one place regardless of whether they be POP3 or webmail accounts. If, like me, you collect email addresses like socks, it can be quite a challenge popping them all on a regular basis. Windows Live, though, copes admirably in rounding up all your messages, with over a dozen email addresses – not counting ones being forwarded – the new Microsoft email platform managed to corral all but one of mine: a Lycos webmail account. It even coped with retrieving a truly ancient Lineone email account and using a different SMTP server to send replies from.
I was convinced. Then hooked when the usual flood of emails for male enhancement, dodgy degrees and mortgages dwindled to barely a trickle. And even then I wouldn’t see it as spam is automatically shunted into a separate folder. Security and privacy are taken seriously, and there are some nice touches, including the option to digitally sign and encrypt messages.
Unlike other web-based email, Windows Live stores message both locally on your own machine and online. However, you will only be able to access live.co.uk and Hotmail accounts if you sign in remotely from another machine. This is the one serious shortcoming; especially after spending so much time configuring each email account and re-creating the folder structure only to discover there are no filtering options. (I haven’t tried this, but it would be interesting to hear if anyone has done a custom install of Windows Live, without all the other embellishments, onto a USB stick and run it from there effectively. Might still do it though.)
I’d be the first to admit that the thought of upping sticks and moving to a new email client is a daunting prospect. In a way, though, while it can be time-consuming, it is also liberating starting over with a pristine inbox and good intentions to keep it that way. Just don’t forget to backup your old messages and address books, and resist the temptation to free up a bit of hard disk space by uninstalling the redundant software. Better safe than sorry on that score.
