Tammy asked me about the “Junk E-mail” folder that she noticed when she installed Microsoft Outlook 2007 recently.  Today we will all take a look.

The “Junk E-mail” folder is another form of spam protection for your e-mail.  For you newbies out there, spam is the term widely used for unsolicited e-mail.  This e-mail usually has a plan to get money out of your pocket into someone else’s.  Think of it as regular postal mail that you receive addressed to “Occupant”.  Spam is most times sent simultaneously to hundreds or even millions of inboxes and can sometimes contain viruses.

This junk filter is turned on by default with the protection level set to “Low”. This level is supposed to catch only the most obvious spam messages. You can make the filter more aggressive, but if you do it may sometimes remove legitimate messages. Any message that is caught by the Junk E-mail Filter is moved to a special Junk E-mail folder.  Before deleting messages from this folder you should review them to make sure that genuine messages that you need didn’t end up there (bad illustration below).  To delete them just right click on the Junk E-mail folder.  Once deleted you cannot get them back.

There are two parts to the Junk E-mail Filter: Junk E-mail Filter Lists create by Microsoft and technology developed by their researchers that evaluates if an unread message should be treated as a junk e-mail message or not.  This evaluation is based on several factors, including the time the message was sent and the content of the message. The filter does not single out any individual e-mail message. The filter is based on the content of the message in general and uses “advanced analysis of the message structure to determine the probability” that a particular e-mail message is spam.

To make you Junk E-Mail suit your needs, while in Outlook, go to Tools / Options / Preferences and then click the Junk E-Mail button.  Just be careful you don’t set it too aggressively or you may miss e-mail that you need…read on.

An example and a personal plea here.  I looked in my Junk E-mail folder recently and found 75-100 emails.  I chose to delete them after a very quick visual scan.  Right as I clicked delete I saw an email from one of you that mentioned something about your wireless internet.  The name had “William(s)” in it.  If that was you, email me again and I will make sure to look for it.  So don’t be mad at me if I occasionally don’t respond to your emails, try again and then yell at Bill Gates the next time you see him.

Several months ago I wrote about how frustrated I was in the computer age when the following can occur.

1. Items from unknown, online vendors can be ordered on a Monday from a foreign country and be received at my home in Harrisonburg, VA, USA by the following Thursday.  This is a non-emergency, unneeded item.
2. I can place a Netflix DVD in my mailbox on a Monday and by Thursday (and a couple of times by Wednesday) they will have received it and a new movie will be back in my mailbox. This is also a non-emergency, unneeded item.
3. I order prescriptions from “a company I choose not to name” online for life preserving drugs and receive them in, oh, one to three weeks and sometimes longer.  This could be an emergency, much needed item.

But that is enough of the inequities of life that we all deal with from time-to-time.  Now I just want to thank Netflix for being the apparently well run and oiled machine that it is!

There were reports all over the news (online and offline) about the problems that Netflix faced this week with their delivery system actually collapsing and not sending out any, to very few, shipments from Tuesday through Thursday.  I, along with the other members got a nice form email stating basically that Netflix had the most severe outage in its history which stopped distribution to a third of its 8.4 million customers.

They also went on to say (get ready for this one as I know my drug company wouldn’t do this), “If your DVD shipment is delayed, we will be issuing a credit to your account in the next few days.   You don’t need to do anything.  The credit will be automatically applied to your next billing statement.”

I got some of this information from CrunchGear; however, it was available in a multitude of locations and of course even in direct email from Netflix.

Here is the way it played out for me:

1. Put DVD in my mailbox Monday morning.
2. They received it Tuesday.
3. I got the email about delivery problems on Tuesday afternoon.
4. I receive the next DVD in my queue on Friday, not late by my standards.
5. I checked my Netflix account just now and have a 15% credit which will be added to my next billing statement.

Now I am still waiting for prescriptions that I ordered the week before I dropped my DVD in the mail!

Netflix appears to me to be a quality company with good, pro-active customer service.  Netflix rules and the drug company that my insurance company requires me to use-drools.

Hemigal sent me a good question this week dealing with usernames and passwords.  I was really surprised that this is the first time I have received a question regarding this since it is something that may affect all of us from time-to-time.

She said, “I accidentally entered the wrong password for a site and my browser asked if I wanted to save the username and password.”  She went on to ask, “After I saved them I realized that it was the wrong password but now when I return to the site and put in the username it automatically fills in the wrong password…what should I do now?”

This happens to me often.  If your usernames and passwords are not being saved in MSIE go to TOOLS / INTERNET OPTIONS / CONTENT then choose AutoComplete Settings and check the correct boxes to activate this feature.  For Firefox use TOOLS / OPTIONS / SECURITY and under Passwords check, “Remember passwords for sites”.  For other browsers just poke around under Tools and you will find it.  If not contact the browser’s manufacturer and ask them.

What happens at a site when you have a saved username and password, is that you can click in the empty textbox and your username will be prefilled along with your password.  This is a very convenient feature although not that secure when someone else uses your computer.  Note that most financial sites will not allow your username and password to be saved as a security precaution.  This is a very good thing.

If you save the wrong password how do you correct it?  There are several ways this may be solved.  Microsoft Internet Explorer’s (MSIE) and Firefox’s (FF) solutions are similar.

The first I suggest is to click in the textbox and the saved username will appear.  Now highlight the username with your mouse and then press the delete key on your keyboard.  That should take care of it and when you retype the username you will be asked to save it again.  In FF you don’t really have to do that, just retype a new password over the old one and it will ask you if you wish to save the new password.  It should work like that in MSIE too, but not often for me.

A more aggressive way to correct this is to delete all of your saved usernames and passwords.  For MSIE go to TOOLS / INTERNET OPTIONS / GENERAL under “Browser History”, click the Delete button and finally click on the Passwords button.  For FF use TOOLS / OPTIONS / PRIVACY then under “Private Data” click “Clear Now” and check “Saved Passwords” and “Clear private data now”.

There are, as always, other ways to perform this same task but these are two of the more common ways.

OK, I didn’t want to come back from vacation; however, since I like to eat…we did.

Today we will continue on with my Orbitz.com train of thought.

One of the more interesting things for me (now keep in mind I am new to flying in this century) was that Orbitz sent a voice message to my phone about three hours before each flight.  Along with other things, the messages let me know the flight number, the departure gate and most importantly if my upcoming flight was still on time.  A drawback about our one late flight… even though they did message me that it was late I received the message about 10 minutes after the flight had left the airport.  Of course seeing how poorly the preflight was managed I imagine Orbitz let me know as soon as they found out.

All-in-all, we feel that Orbitz.com was a beneficial way to go and will use it the next time the president provides us with a tax rebate.

Now I have a general technological comment or two about airports.

I found it nice that each airport provided Wi-Fi (although, I didn’t check that in SHD) which allowed me to use my computer to check mail, find out information that I could use on the trip, etc.  The bother was that of the three airports, two of them provided it free of charge.  But not Dulles!  They required me to pay AT&T to use their Wi-Fi system.  Needless to say, I didn’t pay for something that I didn’t really “need”.

Next, I noticed that most everyone had a cell phone at the airports even down to one little kid who looked to be about six or seven.  That pleases me corporately since I work for NTELOS but personally I wonder a kid that young needs one.  Many travelers also had iPods or other MP3 players with them.

Additionally I noticed that a large majority of people had notebook computers.  That was neat since it meant that I wasn’t the only geek out there…I was surrounded by them.  I believe we may have been in the majority.

There was a table in an airport eatery where it appeared a mom, dad, daughter and son sat dining.  The mom was messaging on her notebook, the dad appeared to be doing the same on his and the daughter, with the standard teenage, “bored-with-the-world” look on her face was listening to her iPod.  And then get this, the son, maybe eight, was writing in a paper notebook. WOW!  That was refreshing.  They were eating as they visited, oh wait, that’s what bothered me, there was no visiting at all.  They were each so intent on their own little worlds they didn’t communicate with each other – not one word for over 30 minutes.  The parents couldn’t even take time to look up when the boy showed them what he had been drawing.

Maybe we need to learn to communicate less to communicate more.