Web browsers, or browsers for short, aren’t strictly an email related topic. However, the browser has become an important tool to most email users because of the proliferation of web-based (browser-based) email clients. Many email users have never used a stand-alone email client and have always processed their email using a browser-based client.
The best known browsers are:
You are almost certainly using at least one of these.
If your email software suddenly starts downloading duplicate copies of the same emails, there are four common causes to consider.
1. Your email software has more than one “Account” or “Profile” or “Personality” configured to download messages from the same email POP account. As a result, your software downloads one copy for each Account/Profile/Personality.
One of the most annoying types of unwanted email is the mass forward. You know, the kind where one of your “friends” sends a heart-warming story about a dog or a list of interesting “facts” about bananas to everyone in their email address book. (More often than not that friend also sends everyone’s address to everyone else too but that’s another story.)
The reason this stuff is so annoying is that you can’t just block the person sending it because, most likely, they are a friend and might actually send you something you’re interested in at some point. On the other hand you really don’t care about an amber alert notice that was proven false five years ago. So, if you can’t block them, what can you do?
Today’s new virus campaign comes in the tried and true category of the bogus email postcard.
Volume is high, beginning early this morning. So far all subject lines contain:
You’ve received a postcard
In each case the sending address is spoofed to match the recipient’s email address. This is done in order to try and bypass spam filters that allow you to enter approved senders or that automatically allow email from addresses in your address book.
The short answer is yes. Anyone can forge the sender (From) field of an email and have it claim to be coming from pretty much any address they want.
At first glance you might think “That’s horrible, why do we allow that to happen?” The truth is that it’s rather common, and you might even do this yourself, though for entirely innocent reasons.
Spammers use a variety of tricks and tactics to try and hide the URLs that link spam emails to their spam hosting websites from the various email filtering programs that are trying to catch them.
Many, if not most, of these tricks depend on the fact that today’s browsers (which are used by email programs to display html emails) are extremely forgiving when it comes to non-standard and broken html.
By default, email client software programs will delete all messages from your mail server right after downloading them. This means that when you click “Get New Messages” or “Check Mail” (or whatever you do to see if you have any new messages) your email client connects to the server where your mailbox account resides and copies all of the messages from the server to your computer. When it finishes, it removes the messages from the server so that the only copies of the messages are the ones downloaded to your computer (or phone or PDA if that’s what you used to check mail).
Sooner or later, anyone using email is going to run across the term “email client”. The context of this encounter is usually a tech support conversation in which the support rep asks “Which email client are you using?” If you don’t know how to answer this question don’t worry, you’re not alone.
Understanding the basics of how email works can make life a lot easier for any email user. Especially those who are interested in using email effectively. In this post we’ll cover the basics that every user should know.
