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Windows Secrets & Support Alert Newsletter Issue 162 • 2008-07-24 • Circulation: over 400,000
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Table of contents INTRODUCTION: New ways to access all Support Alert information TOP STORY: Yahoo Mail's makeover gives it the webmail edge LANGALIST TIPS: Yes, there is life after e-mail newsletters WACKY WEB WEEK: Schwinn Lake? Gears-elle? Ballet on a bicycle BEST SOFTWARE: Reduce spam using free software PC TUNE-UP: New tactics to keep mail servers spam-free PATCH WATCH: Ill effects of Microsoft's DNS patch linger on PERMALINKS: Send these links to your friends and co-workers YOUR SUBSCRIPTION: How to change your address or unsubscribe |
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INTRODUCTION New ways to access all Support Alert information 
By
Brian Livingston
The Support Alert Newsletter merges today with the Windows Secrets Newsletter, creating an e-mail publication with a combined circulation of more than 400,000. For you, the best part is that all the great tips, reviews, and news items from the old Support Alert are now posted in one place at WindowsSecrets.com — and we've worked hard to make our entire library of content easy for you to browse and search. Ian "Gizmo" Richards has licensed to Windows Secrets all of the articles that ever appeared in the 159 issues of the Support Alert Newsletter that he published. All of these articles — free and paid — are now part of the WindowsSecrets.com library of content. You can take advantage of our new information in three ways: 1. Find reviews of the best free software 2. Browse all past issues of the Support Alert Newsletter 3. Search for articles on any topic in our entire library Find reviews of the best free software The old Support Alert focused on reviews of free Windows software. This is a new focus of Windows Secrets, too. So we've added a "software sidebar" to our Web pages to help you find top products of every type. We've organized the most recent reviews into more than 100 categories. 
The sidebar shown at right is an example. If clicked, it leads to the actual sidebar on the Windows Secrets home page.To support our reviews of the best software, Windows Secrets has been adding new columnists who are experts in reviewing both freeware and commercial software. Our newest contributing editors, Scott Spanbauer and Becky Waring, started writing reviews for us in May 2008. Gizmo, our new senior editor, is adding his own reviews twice a month, beginning in today's paid content. Each of these reviewers has more than 20 years' experience with the computer industry. No, we're not going to slack off on Windows Secrets' long-standing coverage of Internet security threats and the problems Windows users are having with Microsoft patches. Adding software reviews to the mix is intended to be an added benefit of your subscription. Our community of reviewers has already re-examined and updated about a dozen of our 100+ categories of software. By the end of 2008, we will have updated the reviews in at least half of the categories. Within one year, we'll have updated them all. I know the reviews will vary in tone until all of the updates are completed. Please forgive us if you find any glitches. For now, I hope you'll try our links and give us feedback on any categories you'd like our testers to update. Browse all past issues of Support Alert Gizmo published thousands of helpful articles — some long, some very short — between Sept. 28, 1998, and July 17, 2008. All of this Support Alert Newsletter content, free and paid, is now posted and searchable at WindowsSecrets.com (see Figure 1).  Figure 1. Every Support Alert Newsletter issue is now posted in the WindowsSecrets.com library, and you can use our specialized interface to see a breakdown of individual articles. We've posted every newsletter from the past 10 years on its own lengthy Web page. And we've sorted onto separate pages every individual article from the most recent three years, back to January 2006. This makes it easy for you to jump to exactly the topic you need. (Within the next few days, we'll finish indexing every individual article all the way back to 2002, when Gizmo promoted himself to editor of Support Alert.) To browse through previously published articles in back issues of Support Alert, visit the WindowsSecrets.com library. Search for articles on any topic Our specialized search engine (see Figure 2) finds every article that closely matches your query. Our results page shows you links to individual articles in most cases. For Support Alert content that's many years old, we link you at a minimum to the issue that contains the desired article.  Figure 2. You can now search in one place for any article that was ever published in Windows Secrets, Support Alert, or LangaList. The second tab that's shown in Figure 2, "All Windows-related sites," enables you to search all PC tech sites Web-wide, not just the Windows Secrets library. This feature uses a search technology we developed by harnessing the Google API, which is explained in an Apr. 17, 2008, article. Most of the credit for migrating 10 years of Support Alert content into our library and search index should go to Windows Secrets program director Tony Johnston and Web developer Damian Wadley. Wading through 159 back issues to mark where each article begins and ends were technical editor Dennis O'Reilly and editorial assistants Katy Chenoweth and Pat Milligan. To use our search engine to find articles, visit the Windows Secrets search page. All Support Alert paid content is now free To celebrate the merging of Support Alert and Windows Secrets, we've made all of the previously published Support Alert content free to all subscribers. When you browse or search past issues, you'll see both the free articles and the formerly paid-only articles. This makes the content easily accessible to everyone. Gizmo himself has converted all of the material on his TechSupportAlert.com wiki to free content. He writes, in the "Support Alert and Windows Secrets are merging" FAQ on his site:
Gizmo and our other writers are now working to bring you an all-new crop of timely information on Windows. Our best information, including Gizmo's new columns, will appear in the paid section of future newsletters. The paying supporters of Support Alert and Windows Secrets also have access to the paid content from all past Windows Secrets and LangaList articles. This body of work consists of some 2,000 stories we've published so far on every conceivable aspect of making Windows do what you want. We're looking forward to bringing you the best possible research in both our free section and our paid section. Our software reviews now include relative scoring The box at right shows a new feature we're adding to our reviews of free and/or commercial software. When products are reviewed by our writers, you'll see a relative score from 1 to 100 for each competing offering.
The box at right is a sample. The "more info" link merely leads to the Windows Secrets home page. But the scoring boxes in full reviews will link to a download page or similar. If a program comes in both a free version and a paid version, you'll see two scores. If the registered version provides better features, it'll earn a higher score than the free version. You can choose for yourself whether the additional functionality (which the writer will describe in the body of the review) is worth the price. You may decide that the free version is all you need. No one expects these scores to be scientifically precise. They're not benchmarks that we've measured to 1/100 of 1 second. They're the subjective judgment of experts who've tested each program. Relative scores are plenty useful when you need a piece of software — quick! If two programs are rated 80 and 81, you can assume they aren't very different from each other. But if they're rated 70 and 90, you'll know that the reviewer found one to be clearly superior. Our old friend, Fred Langa, is doing all right I've mentioned the LangaList several times in this space. Fred Langa — the former editor of both the LangaList (1997–2006) and Windows Secrets (2006–2008) — has just sent us a message in a bottle. I'm pleased to report that he's getting on just fine since he retired earlier this year. In fact, he's contributed an update on his adventures in a new article today. When I learned that Fred would write something for us about his new leisure status, he was on a beach in Hawaii. Rough life. I don't think he rode there from his home in New Hampshire on his motorcycle, either. I've heard from many subscribers who miss Fred's unique voice. No one feels the loss more keenly than I do. I could always count on Fred to fill his columns with neat tricks and wry humor. But he's earned the right to take it easy and smell the roses now. We can only hope that Gizmo and our other new columnists will somehow fill his shoes. Brian Livingston is editorial director of WindowsSecrets.com and the co-author of Windows Vista Secrets and 10 other books. |
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TOP STORY Yahoo Mail's makeover gives it the webmail edge
Get a free e-mail account in an instant When it comes to Web-based e-mail, we've got an abundance of choices. Still, most of us use Google's Gmail, Microsoft's Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail. Recent enhancements to Yahoo Mail give that service most of the best features of Outlook and other desktop e-mail programs. This puts Yahoo Mail a notch or two ahead of both Gmail and Hotmail, though those two services are far from slouches. All three of the services I tested get your e-mail account running quickly. Signing up requires only some basic information such as your preferred e-mail address, an alternate (existing) e-mail address, your name, and your country of residence. Hotmail also asks for the state or province you live in, the postal code, and your birth year. Yahoo wants to know your birthday (day, month, and year) and postal code. Among the more advanced features offered by the services are the ability to search your mail and to link your mail account to a calendar and other ancillary utilities. Note that Microsoft offers the equally free Live Mail, but this product — and the accessories that come with it — has to be downloaded and installed on your PC rather than working solely in a browser, so Live Mail doesn't belong in this review. E-mail has become such an important, idiosyncratic application that most of us have our own must-have features as well as those we can live happily without. Some people use filters religiously while other folks never use them. Other folks might care a lot about page-load speeds but don't have any use for folders. The table below will help you decide which features of the three services are most important to you. Each of the offerings has some unique, impressive attributes. Table 1. No two webmail services offer the same combination of features.
2Gmail lets you display links to RSS feeds, but you need the separate Google Reader site to see the entire feed. #1: YAHOO MAIL AND YAHOO MAIL PLUS
No e-mail application is perfect, but Yahoo Mail provides such a rich environment for my daily communications that I've become addicted to the service. Yahoo Mail's recent facelift adds some Web 2.0-level functionality, making the service work more like a desktop application. For example, you can single-click to select a message, Shift-click to select a range of messages, and Ctrl-click to choose multiple files one at a time. Yahoo also lets you drag and drop your selection to custom folders for storage or to the trash can for deletion. Unfortunately, you can't create nested storage folders, nor can you drag and drop between the mail application in the browser and your desktop as you can to add attachments to Outlook, for example. Like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail lets you customize the colors of your mail window, but unlike the Microsoft product, you can't change the location of the Yahoo Mail reading pane, which is always positioned below your inbox. As in Windows Explorer's Details view, Yahoo Mail lets you click column headings to quickly sort mail by date, size, subject, and author. The service's unique flagging feature allows you to arrange messages based on whether they're flagged or not. Like the other two services I tried, Yahoo Mail stores your contact info, including multiple phone numbers, addresses, and notes. Yahoo Mail gives you a limited number of canned categories for each entry (for example, five phone numbers plus a pager number). Hotmail offers the same function, but only Yahoo Mail's Contact list has date fields for birthdays and anniversaries, which are added to your calendar automatically. Yahoo's calendar integration is evident in your e-mails as well. The service detects dates and times in your messages and marks the entries with a dotted underline. Hovering the mouse over the text pops up an option for adding the event to your calendar. It's often handy to have spare e-mail addresses you can use for registering at shopping sites, for business correspondence, or for personal mail, for example. In addition to yahoo.com, Yahoo Mail now offers two other domains — ymail.com and rocketmail.com — you can choose for your address. Unfortunately, there is no quick way to jump between multiple accounts in Yahoo Mail. However, Yahoo also offers a paid version, Yahoo Mail Plus (US $20 per year), that provides disposable addresses along with many other added features. Advertising in the free Yahoo Mail can sometimes be aggressive, with an annoying panel of animated ads popping in from the right. It cost Yahoo some points in my scoring and has probably cost them a few customers as well. The for-pay Yahoo Mail Plus eliminates these ads and promotional taglines and adds auto-forwarding, POP access, more filters, increased message size limit, and more. You can compare the features of the free and paid versions at the service's FAQ page. While none of the three services I tried lets you display more than one message in a single browser window, with Yahoo Mail you can open e-mails in multiple tabs. This lets you switch quickly between open drafts or received messages by clicking the tab for the item you want. Yahoo Mail's unique features include SMS messaging and an RSS reader. Unfortunately, the service seems to fail more often than Gmail and Hotmail, at least in the past. Also, Yahoo Mail's performance isn't as brisk as competing webmail services. Still, its wealth of features and its clean and easy interface make Yahoo Mail my webmail choice. #2: MICROSOFT LIVE HOTMAIL AND HOTMAIL PLUS
With a recently revamped interface, Windows Live Hotmail (formerly Hotmail) is the best-looking of the mail services I reviewed. Not only can you choose a custom color for the interface, you're also able to change the location of your reading pane by placing it on the bottom or side of the screen. Hotmail supports the same selection conventions, drag-and-drop, and folder storage features as Yahoo Mail, and the Microsoft mail service lets you sort messages by date, author, subject, and other criteria. However, unlike the other two services I looked at, Hotmail lets you hide all mail except items with a specific subject or author or items with an attachment. On the subject of disposable addresses, Hotmail states: "Add up to five of your e-mail addresses. When you use an alternative address, recipients may see the following information: 'From: realaddress@live.com on behalf of name@example.com.'" Since Hotmail doesn't hide your real e-mail address, I don't think this qualifies as a true disposable address. Nevertheless, having multiple e-mail accounts is much easier to deal with in Hotmail than in the other webmail apps I examined. For starters, you can choose e-mail addresses ending in either hotmail.com or live.com. Best of all, you can link multiple addresses and jump between them quickly using a pop-up menu on the upper right. Hotmail's ability to switch quickly among multiple accounts will make it the best choice for some people. However, the service has some catching up to do if it wants to match the breadth of features provided by competing webmail services. Like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail has a $20 version that gives you increased storage and attachment size as well as fewer ads and no account expiration. The differences are summarized at the Windows Live Hotmail Plus site. #3: GMAIL
Of the three webmail services I tested, Google's is the most unique. The differences are apparent from the moment you sign up for a Gmail account. When you do, Google asks you to enable "web history," which means the company maintains a record of the sites you visit and searches you conduct via its servers. While your Web browsing and search history may be useful to you, letting this information reside on Google's servers raises privacy concerns. (It's also worth noting that Google posts advertising to your Gmail page based on the content of your messages.) Since the Enable Web History option is checked by default during signup, you need to opt out if you don't want to be tracked. The differences between Gmail and the competition don't end with setup. Anyone who has used Gmail is aware of the significant paradigm shift the service represents in terms of how you organize your mail. Gmail eschews the folder-storage metaphor and instead lets you add labels or tags to each message so you can search for it later based on those keywords. This allows you to "store" mail under multiple labels without having to copy it into multiple folders (which Yahoo Mail and Hotmail won't let you do, anyway). Arguably, the Gmail approach makes it easier to search for and find mail later, though it makes for a very full — and messy-looking — inbox. You can also organize your Gmail by using the service's archive feature (effectively giving you one additional folder besides your inbox) or filters to auto-archive, label, delete, and otherwise process your messages. Instead of sorting items, Gmail requires that you use its search feature to display a subset of your mail. Gmail is different in still another way: The service lacks a separate reading pane to let you view your inbox and read messages simultaneously. Also, if you don't like Gmail's single pastel color scheme, you're stuck. However, Gmail is more flexible in other areas. For example, unlike the contact forms for Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, the handy "add" link following each field on Gmail contact pages lets you create a seemingly unlimited number of text boxes for phone numbers, e-mail and mailing addresses, and other information. In addition, Gmail's message-composition window includes an "Add event invitation" feature that schedules your event in your Google Calendar. Recipients who click the Yes, No, or Maybe links in the reply are directed to Google Calendar to register their response. Although none of the three free services I tried offers truly disposable addresses, Gmail comes closest, letting you create a disposable address by adding the plus sign (+) and text after your name — for example, scott+shoppingsite@gmail.com. The message is delivered to your regular Gmail inbox but is easier to filter. Note, however, that many Web sites do not accept addresses that include a plus sign, which seriously limits the ability to take advantage of this feature. Gmail's performance depends on the speed of your Internet connection and the amount of stuff in your inbox. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Gmail's minimal graphical elements and controls make it the speediest mail service of the three I tested. Gmail is different, but the differences may suit you just fine. And if top speed is what you crave, Gmail is the pacesetter. Scott Dunn is associate editor of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. He has been a contributing editor of PC World since 1992 and currently writes for the Here's How section of that magazine. |
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LANGALIST TIPS Yes, there is life after e-mail newsletters
In and out of the world of Windows Test, test ... is this thing still on? Can you hear me in the back? It's been a while since I appeared in these pages, but it's nice to drop in. I thought I'd give you a brief update on what I've been doing for the past months since I retired from full-time writing. With regard to Windows: Like many of you, I've experienced some frustrations with Vista. My primary, XP-based PC has several subsystems for which there are no Vista drivers. I can't upgrade it to Vista without trashing some perfectly good hardware, and I'm not going to do that. My laptop can run Vista, but it's just a bit too underpowered to run Vista at a speed I'm comfortable with. After using Vista on it for many months, I finally reverted to XP Pro. It's too bad, because I like Vista (it's visually gorgeous, with a number of useful improvements). But for now, the benefits of upgrading simply aren't worth the costs to me. Chasing tornados and video-blogging about it Most of what I've been doing has nothing to do with Windows. For example, this spring I went on a tornado chase in the American heartland and got within about 1,000 feet (300 meters) of a major tornado outside Quinter, Kansas. I posted some videos of our storm chase on Google Video. It's in segments: parts One, Two, Three, and Four. There's more information and links to a ton of still photos (including a real-life encounter with the tank-like Tornado Intercept Vehicle, or TIV, that you may have seen on the Discovery Channel) on a small blog I've started. After 30+ years in tech writing, I've also been using the blog to experiment with other forms of writing including science essays, humor pieces, and more: all with an eye toward finding what I'll do next, now that I'm not under the gun of the constant deadlines of newsletter publishing. It's been fun to try new things. Those of you who remember the eight-part Housecall series that I published in this newsletter might enjoy reading one of my larger writing experiments: a photo-essay of the rest of the ocean-to-ocean motorcycle trip I took last summer. It's posted on Adventure Rider, a free motorcyclist site. Although I'm no longer routinely writing about Windows, I'm very glad Windows Secrets is doing well and growing so spectacularly. Congratulations to everyone involved, especially you, the readers of Windows Secrets and Support Alert, who should benefit from being served by such a large, healthy publication. If you feel like it, drop by my blog and say "Hi!" Fred Langa was editor and editor-at-large of the Windows Secrets Newsletter from November 2006 to May 2008. He was editor of Byte Magazine (1987–91), editorial director of CMP Media (1991–96), and editor of the LangaList e-mail newsletter (1997–2006), which merged with Windows Secrets. |
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WACKY WEB WEEK Schwinn Lake? Gears-elle? Ballet on a bicycle
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YOUR SUBSCRIPTION The Windows Secrets & Support Alert Newsletter is published weekly on the 1st through 4th Thursdays of each month, plus occasional news updates. We skip an issue on the 5th Thursday of any month, the week of Thanksgiving, and the last two weeks of August and December. Publisher: WindowsSecrets.com LLC, Attn: #120 Editor, 1700 7th Ave., Suite 116, Seattle, WA 98101-1323 USA. Vendors, please send no unsolicited packages to this address (readers' letters are fine). Editorial Director: Brian Livingston. Senior Editor: Ian Richards. Associate Editor: Scott Dunn. Technical Editor: Dennis O'Reilly. Program Director: Tony Johnston. Web Developer: Damian Wadley. Editorial Assistant: Katy Chenoweth. Copyeditor: Roberta Scholz. Contributing Editors: Susan Bradley, Mark Joseph Edwards, Woody Leonhard, Ryan Russell, Scott Spanbauer, Becky Waring. Trademarks: Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. The Windows Secrets series of books is published by Wiley Publishing Inc. The Windows Secrets & Support Alert Newsletter, the Windows Secrets Newsletter, Support Alert, WindowsSecrets.com, LangaList, LangaList Plus, WinFind, Security Baseline, Patch Watch, Perimeter Scan, Wacky Web Week, the Logo Design (W, S or road, and Star), and the slogan Everything Microsoft Forgot to Mention all are trademarks and service marks of WindowsSecrets.com LLC. All other marks are the trademarks or service marks of their respective owners. HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: Anyone may subscribe to this newsletter by visiting our free signup page. WE GUARANTEE YOUR PRIVACY: 1. We will never sell, rent, or give away your address to any outside party, ever. 2. We will never send you any unrequested e-mail, besides newsletter updates. 3. All unsubscribe requests are honored immediately, period. Privacy policy HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: To unsubscribe from the Windows Secrets Newsletter,
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