I am writing this with a view to advising clients who have their email hosted on my server environment but much of the discussion is relevent to anyone with an internet email address.

First some definitions:

Email Server: This is the computer out there somewhere on the internet that handles all the mail being sent to individual accounts under a given domain. For example, if you have an email account with Verizon or Comcast (i.e. yourname@verizon.net or yourname@comcast.net) then any mail sent to you is initially sent to the verizon.net or comcast.net email servers.

Email Client: Is the software mechanism that you use to access and read your email. Common email clients are Microsoft Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Microsoft Entourage, and Eudora. These clients just listed all run on your PC, Macintosh, or Linux machine. There are also web-based email clients such as Google GMail, Yahoo Mail, Microsoft Hotmail, Horde, SquirrelMail, and others.

So, if I were to send you an email from my office computer the steps involved would be as follows:

1. I would compose the email on my local computer using an email client (in my case, Mozilla Thunderbird).
2. Once I am ready to send the email (having addressed it to yourname@yourdomain.com), I would click the send button in my Thunderbird client.
3. Thunderbird would then contact an outgoing email server (usually either an SMTP or Microsoft Exchange server) and request that the email be sent. The outgoing email server will usually require me to provide it a login and password combination. In my case, the outgoing email server could be owned by my broadband provider (Verizon), or by my hosting environment (SalemDesign.com).
4. Assuming Thunderbird provided a valid login/password combination, the outgoing email server will upload my email. It then looks at the address yourname@yourdomain.com and sends the email off across the internet to your incoming email server. (It is a tad more complicated than that but we don’t want to get bogged down in those details.)
5. The incoming email server associated with yourdomain.com receives the email and it will check to see if it “knows” about an email account belonging to “yourname”. If you do have a valid account on the incoming email server then the email gets stored in that account.
6. The next time you run your email client, it will query the incoming email server and “ask” if you have any emails waiting to be read. If you do, those emails get downloaded to your email client and (usually) deleted off the incoming email server. You can then open the individual emails and read them.

One would like, of course, all these emails that get downloaded to our email clients to be ones we want to read (i.e. from friends, business associates, etc.). Unfortunately, as we all know too well, most of the email we receive is junk or worse from people trying to sell us something we don’t want or worse.

How do our email addresses get onto spammer lists?

Spambots: These are software mechanisms that “crawl” over the websites (in the same way as search engine spiders used by Google and Yahoo do) and identify and collect email addresses (basically anything that looks like blahblah@blahblah.com or .net, or .edu, etc.). Given the existence of these evil mechanisms, any time you have your email address listed on a website whether it is your own or someone else’s, then you will be getting spam.

SelfInflicted: Anytime you provide your email to someone else, they may turn around and use it to spam you or sell your address to someone else who does. So be careful who you give your email address to… Even if they are apparently legit, ask them if you have to provide your email address and ask them how they use their lists and whether they sell or provide them to third parties.

Domain Registrations: any email used as part of a domain registration is publi

I was reading an email from a friend the other day telling me where she and her family had gone on vacation (Rehoboth Beach, Delaware). I wasn’t sure where Rehoboth Beach was, so I opened up a browser and went to mapquest.com.

The mapquest link showed up in my Firefox address field but nothing appeared in the main browser window. I tried a refresh, and still nothing appeared. I looked at the status window and saw that the browser was trying to load a link from some domain called ar.atwola.com… Which didn’t sound as if it was related to mapquest.com. I was starting to wonder if my browser had been hijacked. But I tried going to a few other sites (CNN, BBC, etc.) and they came up fine.

So I did a google on ar.atwola and found that it is a adserver run by AOL Time Warner. It seems that mapquest has some ad’s on their homepage that are served by the Time Warner server… And it appeared that the Time Warner server was having a bad hair day.

I still wanted to use Mapquest to see where Rehoboth Beach was so I thought about how I could get around the problem with the ar.atwola.com site.

And I remembered reading about the Firefox Adblock extension. I use Firefox as my main browser anyway so I found and installed the Adblock extension. I went back to the mapquest site and it still hung on me but I then used Adblock to identify and block all the ar.atwola.com links on the page. I then refreshed and, voila, mapquest worked and I figured out where Rehoboth Beach is (south side of the mouth of Delaware Bay).

My compliments to the folks working on the Adblock Project http://adblock.mozdev.org/index.html

The short answer is we can help your with your web design and development needs regardless of far you are from our location (Salem, Massachusetts). Most of our customers are relatively local (i.e. within Massachusetts) but that is primarily a function of how we find each other.

The Internet and Web are great means of working at long distances and we have developed websites for customers as far away as Minnesota and we currently have customers in Maine and New York.

And even with local customers we have done web projects where we never met the client in person but communicated solely by email, telephone, and the web.

If you want support for your home or office computing environment then location is more of an issue. We can provide some assistance by phone but any serious troubleshooting or setup of your home or office systems will require an onsite visit.

In general, businesses (in the US at least) should use the .com extension. Non-profit or political organizations usually use the .org extentions. Not surprisingly, the .gov, .mil, and .edu extensions are restricted. If you really want a particular website name (e.g. reallycool.com) and the .com or .org versions are already taken then you might be able to register reallycool.info, reallycool.net, reallycool.us, or reallycool.biz. Or maybe you will have to settle for sortacool.com.

When the Internet was first created by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) the only domain extensions were .gov (for US government sites), .edu (for educational institutions), and .mil (for US military sites). When the Internet was opened up to commercial and other users in the late 1980’s the .com (for commercial sites), .org (for organization sites), and .net (for network related sites) were created. Additional information on these and other “generic” domains can be found here. As the Internet and the World Wide Web has spread around the planet, the “non-generic” two letter country domain extensions were added. (For example, the BBC world news site is news.bbc.co.uk where UK stands for United Kingdom).