Rich's Ramblings Special to the Monitor
Rich Schinnell
My E-Mail program of choice is Eudora for many reasons. To find out more check with: http://www.eudora.com
There are different flavors of Eudora E-Mail based on whether you like the advertising banners that show up on the screen ,and can put up with them. I prefer the paid version so that I don't get any more junk than necessary on my screen and at $39.95, it is pretty cheap.
I have been a devoted user of Eudora since the 2.0 days. I still use my copy of version 2.2 which is a really elementary e-mail program. It does not install any files in your windows directory and is literally stand alone. All you do is copy it to a sub directory and create a shortcut. Of course I use 2.2 for testing purposes, as my main E-mail program is version 5.1
One of the nicest things about the newer versions is the option for different personalities. IE.. You can send and receive e-mail on most any of your e-mail accounts. I personally have about 5 different e-mail accounts and Eudora 5.1 goes and downloads the mail from each of these different accounts.
One problem that crops up is that many ISP (Internet Service Provider) or email SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Programs) do not allow you to send out e-mail unless your logged onto them. Or at the least using their mail address as your return and from address. Most will allow you to receive your E-Mail without problems.
This SMTP problem can be overcome quite easily if you modify your SMTP server options in Eudora to the SMTP address of the ISP that your logged onto. IE. SMTP.SAFEPAGES.COM if your dialed into CPCUG as your ISP. Or SMTP.MAIL.MD.HOME.COM for some cable users. It varies based on how your normally connected to the Internet. I don't think that AOL will allow this but I know that many others do. Many DSL (digital subscriber line) customers of Verizon have been told that you must send and receive E-Mail using their email address's but there is options to use the Return Address line different from Verizon if you wish. Confusing but not that hard to accomplish with Eudora. It allows you to specify a reply to, and then any replies will come in via an alternate email address.
There are lots of options in Eudora, One that I like, "Do not to preview messages in a separate pane."
This can prevent spammers from determining whether you have read their email. (Of course you should turn off the option for auto reply in your options panel) Outlook is famous for defaulting to preview of email. Many messages (IE.. Spam) insert graphics in their messages to track that you have read their spam. Many of you probably did not know that.
If you are on-line and open a E-Mail message with graphics references in it. Then many mail programs actually go out to the internet site where the graphic is located and retrieve a copy of the graphic to display inside your message.
Lo and Behold, that site now knows that you visited it and are reading their spam. Each time you access a site, your IP (Internet Protocol) address is captured by the log file on the Web Server that you visited. There is more info that you divulge when you do this. Like what kind of program is accessing their site and other miscellaneous information.
One option that some spammers use, is to embed a unique id in the graphics request. This way they know that the email that was read and who read it. Very similar to links in WWW pages that tell you to visit some site and buy some product, especially if they get a commission when you purchase. CPCUG.ORG does this on their commission pages. There is a part of the WEB link address available to smart programmers that will uniquely identify the userid of the person that visited the site.
Would open my personal web page and your IP would be captured by my web server statistics program. If the spammers included an ID number in the web link then more information could be disclosed to the web server statistics program..
http://cpcug.org/scripts/env.cgi
Is another interesting URL (Uniform Resource Location). CPCUG's web master has created a environment CGI (Common Graphics Interface) script that you can use to find out lots of information about your self and the web browser your using.
By clicking on the last URL, The site knows what browser you are using: Consider that I just moused on that site, the following is displayed.: (give it a try yourself)
HTTP_USER_AGENT = Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461)
So it appears like I am using Windows XP with the latest Microsoft fix for browser security about cookies.
To Digress: (As I am prone to do at times in my advanced age)
"Quoting from the MS site on Q312461"
"A potential security vulnerability exists in Internet Explorer versions 5.5 and 6 that may allow a malicious user to create an URL that allows a Web site to gain
unauthorized access to cookies that are stored on your computer and then (potentially) modify the values that are contained in them. Because some Web sites
use cookies that are stored on your computer to store sensitive information, it is also possible that personal information could be exposed.
"
Many web browsers have not had this security hole fixed. Might want to do this. Remember that Netscape is not invulnerable,
Back to your regularly scheduled program:
Another pet peeve is sending or forwarding a message and leaving all the junk from each of the prior senders of that message. Sometimes it ends up to be so scrambled, that it is difficult to figure out what the message is all about. But you did accomplish one thing: harvested a lot of valid e-mail address's to sell to some spammers. As many send the whole message including the hoard of email address's that it had been previously sent to in the forwarding process.
BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) is the best way to send out e-mail to several people without junking up the heading lines with all those email address's. Put your own email address in the TO: line and then put all the real e-mail address's in the BCC: line. This is the preferred method but others might have another dummy email address to use. Also, you might get more creative and informative in your Subject line, this precludes people deleting the message before reading.
And while your at it, please get a small program to strip all the >>>> marks from your message. Each time it is forwarded and the sender does not do this. Another line of >>>> marks get sent. I have seen as many as 10 of these in each line of a message. There are several place to download free programs to strip out >> marks and some even will re-format the text into regular sentences and paragraphs. One source is http://www.dsoft.com.tr/stripmail/ which is free and works.
To upgrade some of you that have read my Ramblings in the past, I am running Windows XP on a 1.9GHZ Pentium 4 with 1.0Gigabyte of RAM. Sure is a speedy beast. I also have been spending some of my free time helping out CHI (Centers for the Handicapped) with their computer networks and systems. They are located in Montgomery County on New Hampshire avenue near the beltway. They have a web site.
CHI has been around for over 50 years and do good work. It is enjoyable working with them.
Router/hubs : These neat little devices that sell for less than $100 are t he neatest things for homes where there are more than one computer that is interested in using the Internet via your DSL or Cable modem line. Easy to setup and just sit there running and doing their thing. One of the neat things that they do is provide you a semi-secure firewall. The do what is called NAT (Network Address Translation).
What that means in plain English: The router is logged onto the internet via your ISP, i.e. cable or DSL modem and the IP that is assigned to you is captured by the Router from your modem. To the rest of the internet, your IP is almost invisible. This prevents those idiots out on the internet looking for DOS (denial of Service) hosts, from using your system to drive Microsoft or anyone else on the net crazy with DOS requests. What is at stake here is your vulnerability to having your machine taken over. With your computer directly tied to the internet by having your Ethernet card plugged directly into your DSL/CABLE modem. You are really a node on the internet. If you are not running a firewall of your own, there is the possibility that your machine could be compromised and end up as a robot on the internet, doing dastardly deeds of someone elses's bidding. The router/hub prevents this from happening. I have set-up and used Asante, Linksys and NetGear router/hubs. All are easy to setup, They come with pretty easy instructions. The hub part of the system allows you to connect other computers via Ethernet cables and Ethernet Cards in your other computers. This creates a small peer to peer network between all the computers plugged into your Hub. The Router provides what is called DHCP (Distributed Host Configuration Program), simple terms is that when your computer is turned on, your network software requests an IP (address) be assigned to it from the nearest DHCP server which is your router/hub.
Normally they are IP's in the range of 192.168.0.0 thru 192.168.255.255. These are IP address's that are considered by the internet to be non-routable IP's. In other words, they do not get transferred around the internet. Thousands of people use the IP address 192.168.0.1 and never interfere with one another due to it's non routable address. No internet station will pass that one on. It would be chaos if it did. In comes IP Translation:
What IP translation does for you is to keep straight your browsers requests for internet information and translate it from the internal network address your computer is assigned to/and from the Internet address assigned to your Router by your ISP. It does this for all the computers attached to the HUB part of your Router/Hub. And it keeps them separated.. These devices are pretty smart.
Clear as mud?
Now comes another interesting part. While it is pretty easy to protect yourself from others, by using a NAT router and an anti-virus program, you should not get in trouble. These protect you from prying eyes outside and make sure that the files you receive are not virus's.
But there are many programs on the market that can work from within your computer to do you harm. Like to send out to another site someplace where you have been surfing on the internet. They can give out your userid's and passwords. Send out your financial data to some strange site. To protect yourself from your self, you should really get a program that monitors all outgoing programs from your computer to the internet. I personally use ZONEALARM PRO, it costs $39.95 and it won't let anything come in or go out of your computer via TCP/IP to anyplace without your permission.
One case in point is the Real Player by RealNetworks. If you download and install the free version, it continually checks with RealNetworks to see if you would like to pay the $29.95 for the Pro version or update something. I am not sure that it is a good thing for these programs to keep going out to the internet. No ever knows what they are sending. Same thing with Microsoft, they have a couple of programs that continually want to check the Internet for updates and such. I always say that I will be glad to check for myself.
Just as a point, you might want to log onto a site that has programs to check your system for vulnerabilities. Http://www.grc.com is a site run by Steve Gibson, I highly recommend his programs to verify your systems vulnerability to attack.
"Three little words of wisdom"
Remember the three words that I used to preach incessantly "BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP" Please do so, especially if you would cry when your hard disk crashed and became inaccessible. Primarily your data files from Quicken, Quick books, word processing or data base files. In fact, any file(s) that would cause you grief if you lost them. should be backed up to Tape, floppy or ZIP disks.
Rich Schinnell is a founding member of CPCUG and is presently retired, He has been snared by The APCUG (Association of Computer User Groups) as a Board of Directors member. It seems that he always get involved with something worthwhile. He does a bit of small business consulting on the side to be able to afford his new toys. Rich can be reached via email at schinnel@cpcug.org, and voice at (301) 949-9292. He subscribed to COMCAST as his ISP for a cable modem which is really fast. Now I can receive all the SPAM at lightning speeds.