Design Services: Website Design Insight

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Bayesian spam filtering is the process of using Bayesian statistical methods to classify documents into categories. Bayesian filtering gained attention when it was described in the paper A Plan for Spam by Paul Graham, and has become a popular mechanism to distinguish illegitimate spam email from legitimate “ham” email.

blogging

The practice of posting entries in your weblog. A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). Although most early weblogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of “blogging”.

Common Gateway Interface

An important World Wide Web technology that enables a client web browser to request data from a program executed on the Web server. CGI specifies a standard for passing request data between a web server and the program used to service that request.

database

A collection of information that has been systematically organized for easy access and analysis. Examples include: Web site search and online stores/shopping carts.

domain

A sub-set of internet addresses. Top-level domains are divided into .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .gov and .edu. Apart from these there are also country-specific domain extensions like .ca, .com.au, .co.za, .fr etc. In SEO it is generally accepted that having a keyword-rich domain is beneficial.

File Transfer Protocol

A commonly used protocol for exchanging files over any network that supports the TCP/IP protocol (such as the Internet or an intranet).

ham

Good, non-spam email, that you actually want to receive.

Linux

A computer operating system that is one of the most prominent examples of free software and of open-source development: unlike proprietary operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS, all of its underlying source code is available to the public and anyone can freely use, modify, improve, and redistribute it.

pharming

Pharming is the exploitation of a vulnerability in the DNS server software that allows a hacker to acquire the Domain Name for a site, and to redirect traffic to that website to another web site. DNS servers are the machines responsible for resolving internet names into their real addresses - the “signposts” of the internet. This type of attack involves Trojan horse, worms or other technologies that attack the browser address bar, thus redirecting the user to a fraudulent Web site when the user types in a legitimate address.

phishing

In computing, phishing is a form of social engineering, characterised by attempts to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an apparently official electronic communication, such as an email or an instant message. The term phishing arises from the use of increasingly sophisticated lures to “fish” for users’ financial information and passwords.

poisoning

Poisoning a DNS server involves changing the specific record for a domain, which results in sending the user to a Web site different from the one intended unbeknownst to the user.

RSS Feed

RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by news websites and weblogs. They are used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel.

server

In computing, a server is a software application that carries out some task (i.e. provides a service) on behalf of yet another piece of software called a client.

spam

1. (n.) A spam message is an unsolicited, usually commercial e-mail message. It is also referred to as UCE, or unsolicited commercial e-mail. From the sender’s point-of-view, it’s a form of bulk mail, often to a list culled from subscribers to a Usenet discussion group or obtained by companies that specialize in creating e-mail distribution lists. To the receiver, it usually seems like junk e-mail.
2. (v.) The practice of sending massive amounts of e-mail promotions or advertisements (and scams) to people that have not asked for it. Spam mail is controversial and there are many levels of definitions for it.

spammers

The perpetrators of email spam, who send nearly identical messages to thousands (or millions) of recipients. Spammers often harvest addresses of prospective recipients from Usenet postings or from web pages, obtain them from databases, or simply guess them by using common names and domains. By definition, spam occurs without the permission of the recipients.

SURBL

Spam URL Realtime Blocklists
SURBLs differ from most other RBLs (Realtime Block Lists) in that they’re used to detect spam based on message body URIs (usually web sites). Unlike most other RBLs, SURBLs are not used to block spam senders. Instead they allow you to block messages that have spam hosts which are mentioned in message bodies. From SURBL.org

toolbar

Toolbars are seen in common applications such as Microsoft Word, and as add-ons for web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

 

W3C

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a way for content publishers to make news, blogs, and other content available to subscribers, and you can view all of your RSS content in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. Using RSS, publishers can make content and updates available for download by subscribers automatically. The content on all Web sites is not available as an RSS Feed, but the list is growing daily. A user subscribes to an RSS feed using an application with RSS aggregation capabilities, such as Outlook 2007.

What’s RSS doing in Outlook?

You spend all day in Outlook, right? We know that besides Internet Explorer and the actual Windows Operating System, Outlook is one of the applications that our users spend a majority of their time in when using their computer. Now think about how often you check the news by reading a bunch of web sites, whether at home or at work.

You know the drill: Open Internet Explorer, go to your Favorites, open the site, find where the newest articles are posted, find one that’s interesting, click it, read it, go back, read the next one, etc. Rinse and repeat with each site that has the content you like to keep track of. And if you find an article worth sharing with anyone, then you have to copy the URL, switch back to Outlook, open a new email, paste the URL in, compose your own text, and send it on its way.

We decided that was way too much work.

Since almost any news, blog, or forum worth its salt pushes out an RSS feed, we decided to bring the news to you by putting it right inside Outlook. You can now easily subscribe, read, and share information from all of these sources by bringing them into Outlook using RSS.

RSS in Outlook is not just about making the process of keeping up on E! Hollywood News easier at work. Think about the number of ways that companies use to post information internally to its employees, like internal blogs, intranets, news sites, clipping services, and so on, many of which are hosted on content platforms that all push out an RSS feed.

 Note   You can find a detailed description of how to get started by actually subscribing to feeds in the article, Introduction to RSS.

But I’ve subscribed to too many feeds — now I’m overloaded. Help!

You can easily subscribe to WAY more feeds than you’ll ever have time to read. Case-in-point, I have 200+ feeds in my current Outlook profile at work, and more than 500+ in my profile at home. How can I possibly deal with that much information? The answer is to let Outlook easily find the information you’re interested in from those feeds. Instead of spending time creating complex folder hierarchies that you then put the individual RSS Feed folders in (Technology, Food, and so on), and then still have to click inside of to read each feeds’ contents, why not use our brand-new and ultra-fast Instant Search to do the work for you.

I have a set of Search Folders that accomplish this for me, helping me easily pull the important content out of the thousands of articles that come down from my feeds. For example, my Daily News search folder is where I go each morning while I drink my coffee to find out what’s going on in the world, while my Office Watch folder alerts me with an unread item whenever someone’s blog mentions any keyword matching the query in the folder, like “outlook,” “office,” “rss,” and so on. I’ve posted a simple set of instructions on creating these two search folders on my blog; try ‘em out!

What about the size of my Inbox?

The more RSS Feeds you subscribe to, the more you space you take up in your mailbox (the Outlook file that contains your Inbox and all other folders). If you’re a home user connected to a regular POP e-mail account then the size of the mailbox is limited only by your hard drive space, but for many folks their work account has limited size maintained by their administrator. Or, maybe you just want to get rid of all the old content from feeds since many publish several articles a day.

What can I do?

There are two things you can do, either separately or together, that can help manage the amount of space that RSS items take up in your mailbox. The first is just move them to a separate Outlook Data File on your hard drive. Since this data file is not kept in your “main” mailbox, the RSS items won’t contribute to the mailbox’s overall size and therefore not cause you to hit your size limit. Once you’ve created this separate data file, it’s just a simple drag-and-drop to move an RSS folder from your current mailbox to the new data file. Outlook is smart and will recognize that the feed’s folder has moved, and you’ll continue to get updates in this new location.

You can also use AutoArchive to automatically move or delete items from RSS folders. AutoArchive is like Outlook’s personal mailbox maid, and it can be easily customized to accommodate the types of content you receive in Outlook. For example, on several feeds I have AutoArchive delete all the content once week, since these are typically news feeds whose content is not that important to keep around. Some of the feeds I subscribe to from inside of work I will have AutoArchive actually copy to a separate data file so I can permanently retain them.

 Note   I wrote a post about AutoArchive that describes how to do all of this in detail. Check it out and let us know if these techniques help!

I hope some of these techniques help you read your RSS feeds more effectively and manage the impact they may have on your information overload.

Happy aggregating!

“I tried to send a large attachment to a friend and now the e-mail is stuck in my Outbox! I’ve been trying to delete it and I can’t because Outlook says it’s still trying to send it. Help!”

This is a fairly common issue that we’ve heard a lot of users report through the blog, so we wanted to write a quick post and explain the easiest way to get out of this situation.

E-mail messages can get stuck in the Outbox for a few different reasons, but the most common case happens when the e-mails are very large (megabyte-wise) due to their attachments. You may even see errors like “Outlook is transmitting the message” when trying to delete them from the Outbox.

So if you’ve got an e-mail stuck in your Outbox and you can’t re-open it, try this:

1. Go the File menu, then choose Work Offline in order to stop Outlook from trying to send all mails:

   

2. Switch to the Outbox.
3. You now have two options:

   a. Move the message: you can drag-and-drop or use the Edit: Move to Folder menu item to move the e-mail to your drafts folder. This will allow you to re-open the offending e-mail and slim it down by removing the large attachments before attempting to resend it.

b. Delete the message: this will immediately remove the message from the Outbox and put it in Deleted Items.

1. Go to the File menu, deselect Work Offline to start sending and receiving mail again.

Instead of sending a large attachment, consider putting the file on a local network share or a SharePoint site inside your company and then sending a link around:

For details on how to add a link, see: Use hyperlinks in Outlook items and/or Add links containing spaces to an e-mail message.

If you’re sending it to users outside your company or are just sharing files with friends, you can use Windows Live SkyDrive as a cool and convenient way to store and send large files around.

Hope that helps get you unstuck!