The Four-eyed Journal » email

Send Email Using @facebook.com from Gmail

jhay — Mon, 02 May 2011 01:00:35 +0000

Do you already have your own Facebook email address? This new feature came with the new Facebook Messages wherein your Facebook account becomes the central hub for your communications: email, Facebook messages, chats and text.

It’s a cool new feature and definitely a welcome update to Facebook that once more proves why it is the king of all social networking sites today.

No matter how cool it is to send email with ‘@facebook.com’ address, I still prefer Gmail in handling my e-mail. So I thought of ‘merging’ the two: being able to compose and send email using Gmail but with my ‘@facebook.com’ address listed as the sender.

I did this by using Gmail’s Sending mail from a different address feature. It’s quite easy to setup and if you’ve done this before the whole exercise could be done in less than five minutes.

The steps are easy, once logged in to your Gmail account, click on the gear icon in the upper-right and select Gmail settings and select the Accounts and Import tab.

1. Under Send mail as, click Add another email address

2. In the ‘Email address’ field, enter your name and your @facebook.com address

3. Choose the option to use Facebook’s SMTP servers.

4. Click Next Step then ‘Send Verfication.’ Gmail will send a verficiation message to your Facebook inbox.

5. Open that message and copy the verification code in the Accounts section of your Gmail settings.

And you’re done! You can now send an email from your Gmail account and have your Facebook email address appear as the sender. Of course replies to that email would still go to your Facebook Messages Inbox but now you can send messages outside Facebook and use Gmail’s neat features like formatting, attaching large files etc.

I haven’t gone around to using a desktop mail client like Thunderbird to manage my @facebook.com email yet. Perhaps somebody else has done it already, but that’s for another time. Hopefully, this simple tutorial will help those who like to use their Facebook email address but retain the neat features of Gmail.

How to authenticate email with domain key in Google Apps

jhay — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 23:00:42 +0000

If you use Google Apps to handle your email using your own domain name, there may have been times that friends or colleagues you’ve sent email to have failed to receive them.

This is because their anti-spam system may have flagged that email as spam and since people rarely visit their spam folder that email you’ve sent has been deleted without them knowing.

Worse, spammers can forge the ‘From‘ address on mail messages so that spam may look like it came from a legitimate source. And if your PC has been compromised by malware or your email address has been harvested online, there’s a higher chance that you’re domain has been spoofed and used by spammers to trick your friends and contacts that the spam they sent really came from your domain.

Google Apps now supports a feature to prevent such email header spoofing which is the DomainKeys Identified Mail protocol or DKIM. This basically adds a digital “signature” to the header of mail messages you send from your domain.

This digital “signature” can then be verified by recipients to make sure that the mail message really came from your domain.

To add DKIM signature on your outgoing mail using Google Apps, follow these steps:

Log-in to your Google Apps Dashboard

Go to Advanced Tools section

Click on Setup email authentication (DKIM)

Select the domain for which you want to generate a domain key

Click Generate new record

The information needed for the creation of the TXT record in the DNS records of your domain.

It is safer to coordinate with your domain name registrar or web host to accomplish this without any trouble.

Wait up to 48 hours for the DNS changes to fully propagate then you can go back to the Set up email authentication (DKIM) section of your Google Apps Dashboard and click on the ‘Start authentication’ button to activate DKIM authentication to your outgoing mail.

To confirm that the DKIM signing is active, you can send an email to someone and ask them to review the message and check that the ‘signed by‘ line is present and it shows your domain name.

With DKIM signing, your outgoing mail now have a lesser chance of being dumped into the spam folder of your recipient’s email account nor will spammers be able to successfully spoof your domain.

Would you give Facebook apps your email?

jhay — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:56:45 +0000

Spam. We just hate it. I remember the first few months of signing up for an account in Facebook, notices were a common feature of the site as with other social networking sites, but as Facebook got more popular and as well as another app called Poke Me, the notices were coming in by the hundreds every singe day. It had to stop.

Thankfully, there was a way to stop applications on Facebook from sending notices that were, to be quite frank, mundane and so trivial it only got in the way of my online workflow. Cleaning out your inbox and getting rid of those notices everyday. It was annoying.

And now it’s making a subtle comeback:

Opening yourself to spam?

It’s a good thing that it’s optional because if it were turned on automatically without a notice and our consent then it’s another bad move by Facebook. The feature is great especially for those who are playing games, a notice would serve as a reminder that it’s harvest time or the Chocolate Cake you baked is ready to serve. My fear is that if have a lot of apps, then that’s a lot of notices. Plus, there’s no way of knowing how many notices an individual app may send in a day. So it could be a return to the days when you’d find yourself annoyed with deleting emails notifying you how much ‘pillows’ have been thrown your way. And then there’s the privacy and security concerns but I won’t dwell on the issue just yet, we’re all quite familiar with it.

What’s your take on the matter? Would you share your email address with Facebook apps?

E-mail hoax: Telamonia dimidiata spiders are not deadly

jhay — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:16:48 +0000

Just received an email from a good friend of mine warning me about the supposedly deadly Telamonia dimidiata spider.

The hoax, meaning this story is not true goes like this:

PLEASE READ, IT IS VERY IMPORTANT

Three women in North Florida turned up at hospitals over a 5-day period,
all with the same symptoms. Fever, chills, and vomiting,
followed by muscular collapse, paralysis and finally, death. There were no
outward
signs of trauma.

Autopsy results showed toxicity in the blood. These women did not know
each other and seemed to have nothing in common. It was discovered,
however, that they had all visited the same Restaurant (Olive Garden)
within days of their deaths. The Health Department descended on the
restaurant , shutting it down.
The food, water, and air conditioning were all inspected and tested, to no
avail.

The big break came when a waitress at the restaurant was rushed to the
hospital with similar symptoms. She told doctor that she had been on
vacation, and had only went to the restaurant to pick up her check.

She did not eat or drink while she was there, but had used the restroom.

That is when one toxicologist, remembering an article he had read, drove
out to the restaurant, went into the restroom and lifted the toilet seat .

Under the seat, out of normal view, was a small spider. The spider was
captured and brought back to the lab, where it was determined to be the
Two-Striped Telamonia (Telamonia dimidiata), so named because of its
reddened flesh color; This spider’s venom is extremely toxic, but can take
several days to take effect. They live in cold, dark, damp climates, and
toilet rooms provide just the right atmosphere.

Several days later a lawyer from Jacksonville showed up at a hospital
emergency room. Before his death, he told the doctor, that he had been
away on business, had taken a flight from Indonesia ,changing planes in
Singapore , before
returning home. He did NOT visit (Olive Garden) while there. He did (as
did all of the other victims)have what was determined to be a puncture
wound, on his right buttock. Investigators discovered that the flight he
was on had originated in India ..

The Civilian Aeronautics Board (CAB) ordered an immediate inspection of
the toilets of all flights from India and discovered the Two-Striped
Telamonia (Telamonia dimidiata) spider’s nests on
4 different planes!

It is now believed that these spiders can be anywhere in the country.

So please, before you use a public toilet, lift the seat to check for
spiders. It can save your life!

Do not be afraid or worried because the story is not true. It’s a hoax, an urban legend that goes around the internet via email.

Here are the facts according to Wikipedia and Snopes.com:

In 2002 , the spider became the subject of an email hoax claiming that it was a fatal spider found lurking under toilet seats in North Florida. This hoax was a rehashing of an older email circulated in 1999 with similar claims, except under the name “South American Blush Spider (arachnius gluteus[sic])” – literally “butt spider”. It has also been found that similar email hoaxes(details of original changed here and there) has been found in other parts of the world claiming that the same thing happened in that country. No such events ever occurred.

The Telemonia dimidata or the two-striped telamonia is a true (see pictures here), living species of spider found in Singapore, India, Bhutan, and Indonesia. However, it’s venom is not toxic to humans. Bites from this spider are very, very rare.

Though this stories are a good read and could pass off as a good idea for a movie or novel, but let us be careful before believing anything we read in our email. It never hurts to be doubtful at times.

Lastly, read and do some research first before you forward any stories or warnings you receive via email, it will stop the spread of false information and lessen the useless emails that crowd your friends’ or contacts’ inbox.

Have you tried TrackThis by Yotify?

jhay — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 05:58:22 +0000

You’ve probably noticed a little blue button at the end of each post in this blog that says “Track This” on it.

Not another email subscription service

Well that’s what it is exactly for. Allowing blog readers to track the blog that they read by email. It’s not subscribing to a blog’s RSS feed via email, but it’s pretty much the same concept.

Instead of the whole blog posts delivered into their inbox, users will receive an email containing links of the latest posts from the blog which they have tracked using Yotify’s Track this widget. The content is filtered by using tags or keywords chosen by trackers.

Upon tracking a blog, trackers need to confirm their email address and it also doubles as a registration process which allows them to come back to Yotify.com where they could control the frequency of the email updates, what goes in those emails and of course stop receiving such updates.

Another source of traffic

For us bloggers, an account is setup upon the installation of the Track This widget from Yotify.com. From there, we are given the metrics of how many are tracking our individual blog posts and the most tracked keywords. Giving us another source of information on which to base our future blog posts on.

Plus, your blog gets to be included in the growing index of blogs and websites being tracked at Yotify.com in effect giving rise to an additional source of traffic.

It’s social

This could be potentially increased once the users of Yotify.com start to share and recommend your blog posts to other users or their friends. It’s like FeedBurner and Feed Blitz’ email subscription service but one that gives the subscribers, aka trackers more control of what comes in their inbox and something to pass along.

Hopefully, it will help bring in more traffic to this blog. I’ll be keeping it until January to see how things will work out. If you’re interested in trying this tracking widget, you can do so by downloading here.

Merry Christmas everyone!