WH4L

What is the point?

The auto-preview feature will allow you to see the sender and subject of every incoming email, before downloading it to your Inbox. This way, you can stay away from receiving large attachments, spam, email worms. It will save you bandwidth and it will keep your computer cleaner.

How do I auto-preview with Outlook?

The following steps explain how to enable the header auto preview feature of MS-Outlook 2002 and MS-Outlook 2003.

• From the MS-Outlook main window, go to Tools -> Options, then open the Mail Setup tab and on the Send/Receive frame, click on "Send/Receive…". Select the accounts for which you want to enable the header auto-preview feature and click on "Edit…".

  

• On the "Folder Options" frame, check the option "Download headers only" ,then click "OK"until you exit the Outlook options windows.

  

• From now on, every email received through the selected Outlook Express email account, will not be download to your computer, but Outlook Express will only download the header section and it will display the Sender and Subject of the incoming email. Then, by right clicking on the email on the Outlook preview panel, you can instruct Outlook Express to delete the email message from the server or to download the entire email to your Inbox folder.

There is a spam protection feature called "greylist" enabled in all webhost4life mail servers. This feature essentially bounces all unknown messages trying to connect to your mail server and askes the sender’s mail server to deliver the messages again.

The premise is that SPAMMERs create scripts that bombard your server with emails. These messages are then bounced back to their sending email server. Greylist is effective because spammers will not usually bother to attempt a second delivery, but legitimate e-mail servers will.

For those messages that are returned to valid email servers, the messages will be retried at least four times. If the first retry is beyond the Block period 5 minutes, and within the Pass Period 6 hours, the message is passed to the Spool and it goes through its normal processing.

The email will be received when the send server is sending in 1st retry. If the sender server set it as 30mins. Then the email will be received in 30 mins after he press the send button. However the retry time is controlled in the sender side. Sometimes it might take longer time for the retry.

A record is also created that says this is a valid email address and keeps it for 36 days (default). If another email from the same email address is received within the 36 day, record clock is reset for an additional 36 days and delivered directly to the Spool.
 

If you are using webhost4life email service you may get some issue about email delay.

In order to provide better spam protection, all of webhost4life mail servers have implemented a new mechanism called "Greylist". This mechanism will cause a delay for 5-30 minutes on the first email sent to you from an unknown email address , depending on the configuration from sending server. This new system will NOT affect your daily email operation. (What is Greylist?)

This move is beneficial to all customers including you; since only first email from a sender is delayed and email is never a real time protocol. This mechanism will greatly reduce email spams sent to webhost4life customers.

If you really need full control over the spam setting and willing to accept a higher rate of negative spams,you can select webhost4life Dedicated Email package so that you’ll have access to disable the greylist feature.

If you are using webhost4life email service you can configure email in Mac OSX Apple Mail to send and receive emails. Below are the instructions on how to configure Mac OSX Apple Mail:

1. Open Apple
2. Click Mail and select Preferences
   
3. Open the Account tab, and click the plus sign (+) along the bottom to add a new account (click on the image to see full size image)
   
4. From General Information, choose POP or IMAP from Account Type:, enter the Account Description, Full Name and Email Address (click on the image to see full size image)
   
5. Enter mail.yourdomain.com in the Incoming Mail Server field. (our hosting use same address for POP3, IMAP and SMTP server)
6. Enter your email username (including @yourdomain.com) in the User Name: field
7. Enter your email password in the Password: field (click on the image to see full size image)
   
8. Enter mail.yourdomain.com in the Outgoing Mail Server field
9. Check the Use Authentication check box
10. Enter your email username (including @yourdomain.com) in the User Name: field
11. Enter your email password in the Password: field (click on the image to see full size image)
    
12. Finally, click Done to finish

If you want to configure smtp in your script in order to send email via web application,please use the smtp information below:

• SMTP should be mail.Your_Domain_Name.com
• Email Account should be any email address you create in your email admin panel. E.g.: sales@yourdomain.com
• Password should be the password of the email address

P.S> Make sure the FROM address of the email that you are sending is a valid email address.  This is very important, you cannot send out an email using a from address that doesn’t exist.  This is used to prevent our customer from spamming.

What is this winmail.dat  file?

Many times you might receive an email with an attachment called winmail.dat. The file is sent from people using Microsoft Outlook as their email program. The file allows Outlook users to send Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF) information along with the email so that it retains the look and feel of the document with formatting, fonts, and colors when its received by another Microsoft Outlook user.

Unfortunately, the file is only relevant and used by Microsoft Outlook. Users of Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape Messenger, and other email programs will receive the attachment called winmail.dat with the email.

The file is attached to the email because the original sender is sending emails in Microsoft Outlook Rich Text Format instead of Plain Text format.

How to Configure Outlook NOT to send Winmail.dat attachments

To Turn off Rich Text sending for messages in Microsoft Outlook:

1. Click on Tools in outlook
2. Click Options, and then click the Mail Format tab
3. In the Send in this Message Format list, select Plain Text, and then click OK

This will set your default sending method to Plain Text, which will lose your special formatting options with fonts, colors, etc. However everyone, no matter what email program they are using, will now be able to receive your email with no problems. 

There is more information on this topic in the Microsoft Knowledge Base

What if I Want to View the WinMail.dat file?

If you want to view the winmail.dat file and see the message, there are programs that decode the file and allow you to view it. Listed below you will find some of these programs.

Fentun
Will work on Win9X, NT, and 2000 computers. But does not work on Windows XP

WMDecode
Program using a simple drag and drop procedure to view winmail.dat contents

TNEF’s Enough
Macintosh program to decode winmail.dat TNEF attachments

MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is an Internet standard for describes message content types.

MIME messages can contain text, images, audio, video, and other application-specific data.Official MIME info is provided by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the following documents:

• RFC-822   Standard for ARPA Internet text messages
• RFC-2045 MIME Part 1: Format of Internet Message Bodies
• RFC-2046 MIME Part 2: Media Types
• RFC-2047 MIME Part 3: Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text
• RFC-2048 MIME Part 4: Registration Procedures
• RFC-2049 MIME Part 5: Conformance Criteria and Examples

Different applications support different MIME types.

The reference below is a list of MIME types supported by Microsoft Internet Information Server version 5.

After you’ve completed your website you need to let search engines know your website is available now. How to do that? You can do that be submititng your website url to search engine.

When  you make a search in google for "submit url to search engines" you’ll find lost of entries to submit your website url.Both free submission service or paid service.

In case your web hosting account is not configured to server certain mime types with the proper content type. You can change this using .htaccess file.

For example if you need to configure your server to display ASX files:

AddType video/x-ms-asf asf asx

For windows media audio WMA

AddType audio/x-ms-wma .wma

A comprehensive list of mime-types can be found here

There is one more useful feature of the AddType directive. Most of you most probably know that Internet Explorer opens MS Word, Excell, PDF and some other files inside a browser window. To force the browser to download the file you can use AddType to change the document type:

AddType  application/octet-stream  .doc .xls .pdf

Do you want to increase the search engine ranking of your WordPress blog? Check out these 9 SEO WordPress plugins that Shawn Jooste from Elite Blogger has pulled together for us.

The best place by far to find traffic is from search engines. The art of Search Engine Optimization is often very daunting for new bloggers. Even some experienced bloggers just see SEO as a cloudy puddle of mud they would rather not play in.

WordPress by default is pretty decent at letting search engines see what’s going on. But there are a whole bunch of other things that can be done to make your blog rank better. Fortunately there are plugins available to help you get better rankings for your blog, so you don’t have to go digging into the code of your blog to get some results from search engines.

I’m not going to explain the validity or effects of each of these SEO tactics in detail. There is more than enough of that on the Internet already if you want to do some research. I’ll mention briefly what the benefits of each plugin is, and why you need it.

1. All in One SEO Pack

This allows you to set the basic SEO stuff for your blog. You need page titles, meta tags, keywords, and descriptions. This plugin allows you to configure them for either your entire blog or on a post by post basis.

2. Redirection

From time to time you make changes on your blog. Sometimes these changes end up breaking your Permalink structure. This often happens when you make a change to an old post, or do an upgrade to WordPress and make some changes to the permalinks. It’s very very common if you move your blog from one host to another.

Basically what happens is that each post has a unique URL, called a permalink. When this changes, visitors who go to that blog post won’t find it. The redirection plugin helps you fix these problems by redirecting the visitor to the new permalink. This reduces the amount of traffic you get to pages that don’t exist.

3. Robots Meta

By default search engines crawl and index ALL the pages on your blog. This isn’t ideal, because it creates duplicate content and you can get yourself punished by search engines without knowing it. What the Robots Meta plugin allows you to do is tell the search engines which sections of your blog to crawl. This means that you’ll get more respect from search engines, and likely more traffic.

4. SEO Smart Links

One of the key issues with SEO is your internal linking structure. The more you link to a certain page on your blog, the more important it is to your overall content. Search engines treat your internal links as an indication of how well structured your site is. The problem with this is that if you had to manually go and create links to relevant and important posts you’ll spend hours and hours doing it.

SEO Smart links allows you to specify a word, like ‘SEO’ and then link it to a post on your site. Then each time the word SEO appears on your site, it’s automatically turned into a link you specified.

5. SEO Friendly Images

Images also play an important role in your SEO strategy. So it’s important that you tag them correctly. SEO Friendly images allows you to do this, and saves you hours and hours of work. If, like most bloggers you use images in your posts, then this plugin is essential.

6. Google Positioner

It’s important to know your keywords. And this handy plugin allows you to track the keywords you’re getting searches for. It’s pointless selecting a few keywords, then writing some content for those keywords and hoping that the rest goes well. SEO is about being proactive and tracing what works and what doesn’t.

7. Permalinks Moved Permanently

A common mistake bloggers make is choosing the wrong permalink structure. When you start your blog you think you know which is best, and as time goes buy you want to change your permalink structure. The problem with changing your permalink structure is that your traffic will come to a standstill until your site is reindexed, and that could take months.

This plugin is similar to redirect but is an easier and better way to manage permanent permalink changes.

8. Nofollow Case by Case

The nofollow attribute over the last year or two has had a fairly large impact on the blogosphere. All comments in WordPress by default are nofollow links. This means that no Page Rank (PR) is being given via the link. This plugin changes that and makes comment links valuable again. There are a number of reasons you would want to give away link juice. It’s often used to attract people and encourage them to comment. It can be very useful for new blogs who need some exposure.

9. SEO Slugs

Stop words are ignored by search engines. So most of your post titles have them in, but they are meaningless to search engines. So when you have a post title like this: “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings” you have a permalink like this: ‘/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings’ but what you really want is for your permalink to look like this: /immediately-higher-rankings.

This plugin automatically removes stop words from the permalink, helping you to rank better.

Conclusion:

Getting better traffic from search engines will help you boost your blog. You’ll get better income, rank better, and be able to build a better brand.