Mobile Devices that make emailing and browsing easier

August 4th, 2010 | Posted under Internet Trends, Miscellaneous, Software, The Internet | No Comments »

Mobile Devices that make emailing and browsing easier

The mobile market is now considered to be one of the fastest expanding and profitable markets in the world. With virtually everybody above the age of twelve possessing a mobile, there has been a rapid increase in the number and variety of mobile sets and connections available. With a wide array of smart phones hitting the market browsing the net is now just a swipe-of-the-finger away. The World Wide Web no longer rests on your desktop; it now cuddles on your palm.

iPhone

Manufactured by Apple, this multi-touch screen phone is equipped with internet browsing and is multimedia enabled. Being 3G enabled it supports very high speed internet and smooth connectivity in addition to sporting a high resolution camera.

Nexus One

A smart phone manufactured by Taiwan’s HTC Corporation that uses the Google based Android Open Source Mobile Operating System the phone sports a sleek design in addition to supporting high speed internet browsing and fast data transfer.

Nokia/Samsung

Samsung and Nokia manufactures mobiles in a wide range starting from ordinary phones to those having state-of –the art internet browsing and downloading capabilities. Their high end models Samsung Omnia and N-97 has packed in a lot of features within a reasonable price and boasts of a large market share.

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Top security issues while accessing Internet over mobile devices

June 24th, 2010 | Posted under Computer Advice, Software, The Internet | 1 Comment »

Top security issues while accessing Internet over mobile devices

With a surge of smart phones in the ever expanding Mobile market it is time the world shifted from your desktop to the palm of your hand.  The conventional click is being replaced by a swipe of the hand. According to a recent survey more than 63 million urban users worldwide use their mobile for accessing the internet on a monthly basis. With the advent of 3G networks and better wireless connectivity, accessing the internet via mobile is becoming increasingly popular. However, internet access using mobile always involves a few risks.

Owing to the absence of well developed anti-virus software for mobiles they are always prone to spam, viruses and other malicious content. Such infection is usually characterised by the following abnormalities:

Abnormal Phone Bill

A large unexpected increase in the phone bill would mean that the phone account is being misused.

Freezing of handset

Sudden hanging, malfunctioning or restarting of the mobile phone indicates presence of virus in the handset

Unauthorised usage of email accounts

Unidentified e-mails and messages in the ‘sent’ folder would mean that the phone email account has been hacked.

Changes in configuration

Uncalled for changes in the user interface, background, wallpapers and color settings could either mean virus attack or remote access to the device.

However, with many new mobile operating systems up for the launch a solution to these problems should not be very far.

Top five web-based mail clients

June 1st, 2010 | Posted under Internet Trends, The Internet, Web Hosting | No Comments »

How to use the sendmail option on PHP

May 26th, 2010 | Posted under The Internet, Web Hosting Tips | No Comments »

How to use the sendmail option on PHP

Websites often need to send mail to certain user accounts for purposes like email-id verification, sending newsletters and updates, or sending account details. The PHP programming language has the mail() function to send mail to any Email address. It uses the SMTP protocol for sending mail.

Syntax of the sendmail function

bool mail ( string $to , string $subject , string $message [, string $additional_headers [, string $additional_parameters ]] )

The variables explained

The variable $to signifies the email address to which the mail is being sent. Some examples are:

• username@example.com
  
• username@example.com, anotherusername@example.com
• User <username@example.com>
• User <username@example.com>, Another User <anotherusername@example.com>

The variable $subject supplies the subject of the email sent .

The string $message contains the entire body of the message.

$additional_headers is used to supply additional headers with the mail, for example the from header, or the Reply-To header. The headers are seperated with CRLF ( carriage-return linefeed ) sequences.

Example

An example use of the sendmail function -

$to = ”abc@example.com”;

$subject = ”testing”;

$message = “hello world!”;

$headers = “From: webmaster@example.com” . “\r\n” . “Reply-To: webmaster@example.com”;

mail($to,$subject,$message,$headers);

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Why more and more people use mail forms on their website

March 15th, 2009 | Posted under Computer Advice, Web Hosting Tips | No Comments »

Why more and more people use mail forms on their website
Almost every website has a contact button, although I’m not sure if the CIA does (would be cool if they had a call-back button…’Yeah, who’s this? It’s the CIA!’ but I’m sidetracking). A couple of years ago, when you clicked on a contact button, you would have gotten a page with an address, a phone number, some information and an e-mail address. The address and the phone number are still there most of the time, but the e-mail address has been replaced by a form.

That may sound nice, but sometimes it’s a curse. Not all mail forms work well, and most of the time they don’t support attachments. So much for sending them your resume. Annoying as it may be, there really is a good reason for replacing the e-mail address with a form, and that reason is spam. Maybe you’re afraid of spiders, but the ones you really should be afraid of, are the spiders of hackers (not to be confused with those of search engines). These spiders crawl through millions of web pages, with just one mission: gathering e-mail addresses. To spammers, every e-mail address means money, so they’re pretty keen on gathering them. That’s bad, but hey, if there’s no e-mail address to be found on the website, there’s nothing to gather.

This is why more and more people use a form in stead of an address displaying on the page, simply to limit the number of spam e-mails. However, it’s not an airtight system. More advanced bots know how to recognize an e-mail form, fill it out and send it. Also very annoying, but at least they don’t know the address they’re sending it to, so they can’t steal your address and spread it. The way to limit form spam, is to install a protection system like captcha (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha). This system requires people to enter a code, before being able to submit the form. So now you know, all the terrible annoyances on the web are cause by one thing: spam! Time to become a vegetarian.

Create an online newsletter using Constant Contact

February 27th, 2009 | Posted under The Internet | No Comments »

Creating a newsletter is difficult for two important reasons. First of all, writing is a craft in itself and second, you need to be able to create a nice html thing. Oh and there’s actually a third: recipient management. If Mrs Saunders from the Dentist Office complaints that she doesn’t want to receive your e-mails anymore, you have to remove her from the list. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a system that did all that for you? Luckily there is, it’s called constant contact. Of course you still need to write the newsletter yourself, but that’s just about it.

1. Go to www.constantcontact.com
2. Click on Free Trial (yep, sadly this isn’t free)
3. Fill in the details that are required
4. Your account will be activated. Click on Build or Import your contact list.
5. Create a contact list and import your recipients
6. Now click on Create an Email
7. Give your email a name.
8. Choose the template that fits your needs the best (you c an design your own one, but id you could you wouldn’t need this service for that)
9. Click Next
10. Fill in the E-mail settings (subject, name, extra options etc.)
11. Click Next
12. Now you’re in your template. Just add text and upload pictures to format your newsletter the way you want it.
13. Click save and Continue.
14. Now decide if you want to send your e-mail now or if you want to schedule it for a delivery on another moment, and confirm.
15. That’s it, you’ve designed your first newsletter, composed it, and sent it. Good job!

Of course you’re not supposed to enter all the contacts manually, there’s a system for that ( I just love to say system). Create a signup box for your website on the CC website, and place the code on your site. Now people can sign up through your site. It’s brilliant, apart from the fact that you’re going to pay when your recipient count surpasses 30. But the fact that this service takes a lot of work out of your hands, makes up for it all!

Mozilla Thunderbird – Free Windows Email Client

February 11th, 2009 | Posted under Computer Advice, The Internet | No Comments »

Mozilla Thunderbird is a Free Windows Email Client for everyone who wants to use it. I highly recommend it for anyone who uses personal email, and wants to keep everything organized, without much fuss.

It has a slew of features such as:

• Easy to organize all your email in folders.
• Tag and color code your email messages.
• Show message history, so you can view the e-mail that went back and forth like a conversation.
• Search quickly and easily throughout all your emails with powerful in email and search within all of your folders.
• Saved your searches so you can find what you already found quickly and easily.
• Phishing protection and privacy protection.
• Powerful spam filtering system.
• Automated updates that keeps everything up to date automatically.
• Open source so there is a community working on it all the time.
• RSS feed reader built in.

Wow what a list. I mean, when you consider the price tag of $0, what more could you ask for? Honestly! I couldn’t ask for much more than that. This isn’t just a low end freebie people, this is a full featured email client that you can’t go wrong with. To add to all the excitement look at their great logo:

Thanks for reading. Until next time.