Spammers send out their email harvestor bots all the time.  If you put your email address on your website as a link in clear text, you will begin to get “spam”.  Given enough time, a LOT of it.   Email encoding can help a lot.  Ultimately, not putting your email address on your website is the best solution and stick with feed back forms that incorporate captcha images or math captcha.  A simple script by Craig Dansie, author of the Dansie Shopping Cart, can be found here: http://www.dansie.net/mail.html

It’s free.  Nice huh?  If you would like Craig Dansie to install it, he can do so for a very modest fee of 35.00 USD.

If you wish to put your email addresses on your site, here are a few helpful links to help you do it “securely”:

http://www.addressmunger.com/
http://www.stevedawson.com/emailencode.php
http://script-smart.com/resources/email-encoder/index.php

Be spam free before you have to pay a fee to be free!

James

Downloaded the latest blackberry app to test it on this blog. It seems easy enough to use and apparently you can post to multiple blogs with it. Was able to take a photo with my blackberry bold and include it in this post. Neat! (Turkey, yum!)

If you have been around awhile, you may recall that Netscape and Microsoft (Internet Explorer) were in competition with each other years ago.  I used to own (I paid for it!) Netscape 3.0.   That was 1996.  Yeap, got the disk in the mail, loved it.  Remember that exclamation point in the browser that meant you had an email?  Well, one day, I really don’t know when, Netscape decided it was going to “give away” it’s browser just like Microsoft was doing with Internet Explorer.  (This may have been when AOL purchased Netscape)  That was the day it began to “suck”.  And suck badly!  So much so… who the heck even has this browser installed anymore??    Do you remember what the law suite Netscape/AOL filed against Microsoft was about?   Microsoft had “apparently” made Internet Explorer “part” of the OS in Win98.  See more here from a cnet article from Jan 2002:  http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-820227.html

Isn’t Google OS a “browser/OS” ?  See a visual look at it here: http://www.pcworld.com/article/182628/google_chrome_os_visual_tour.html

Like I said… I heard it before…  seems folks want to hate Microsoft, but give a pass to Google.  Don’t get me wrong.   I like *both* companies.  If it wasn’t for Microsoft I couldn’t do half the things I have done with my business.  If it wasn’t for Google, I’d have no Gmail or Google Apps.  I find both companies to be outstanding.  But… like I said.. I’ve heard this before…   had Google gotten into this horse race back in the days of Netscape/AOL, then I’m sure Google would have been lined up in the law suite game too… how quickly we forget and move on…

I’m looking forward to what Google can do with an OS, but I don’t think it will be very competitive for years and years until it can get the drivers needed to run all the different types of hardware out there.   This is the same battle that Ubuntu has had to deal with.   Once Google OS can actually “compete” with Microsoft, we might see some real legal irony.

James

1. It’s clean

2. If you purchased the upgrade, KEEP XP installed.  Don’t format first.  Otherwise your registration code won’t work.  You will end up reinstalling xp and then reinstalling win 7, like I did.

3. windows mail is not installed by default.  (wow!)  Instead you install it by downloading it from windowslive.com

4. AVG Anti Virus FREE 9.5 works fine.

5. This VERY cool “writer program” I am using now lets me update this blog without leaving to go to the website.  =)   It’s called windows writer.

6. Faster than Vista.  Seems to run fine on this old laptop.  Dell Inspiron 710m with 2gigs of ram.

7. If you have multiple computers like me and you are going to upgrade, get the 3pack license for 149.00.  It’s a deal considering 3 individual licenses run 119.00 each.

If you can download email (recieve) but not send… and it worked just fine the day before… your ISP may be blocking the default smtp port 25. You will need to either use port 5190 or 587. Change that in the advanced settings and your problem should go away.

This is from outlook 2007. Very similar to outlook express. You may have to look around in your settings if you use alternative mail client software: