Bournemouth — Oct 16th 2018
Mick give a presentation on e-mail. Mick offered a 10 item menu of topics for us to choose from. However, nobody felt confident enough to try to improve on Mick’s ordering so we started at the top.
Setting up: Mick covered adding a new account on macOS and on iOS. Holding down the option key when creating the account gives you choice of IMAP or POP - but you will need to enter server settings manually.
Etiquette: This topic covered the correct use of the To, Cc, Bcc fields. This is particularly important when e-mailing multiple people to respect the privacy of their e-mail addresses and minimise exposure to spam and hacking.
Spam: Mick outlined the various actions you can take, once you have decided what constitutes spam mail for you:
* Turn on spam filtering at ISP
* On a Mac, use the Junk mail filter in Mail.
* Run a mail checking program on Mac, eg Mailbox Manager
* Block or white list addresses by using your Email provider’s site.
Security: The main risk is phishing messages, usually claiming that there is some sort of problem with your account. These messages used to be easy to spot but are now looking much more authentic. The best defence is never to click on a link on an e-mail. If you feel the message may be genuine, instead go directly to the purported sender’s website by typing their address into Safari. Log in there to see if your account is okay.
After a coffee break in which we enjoyed selections from All Fired Up’s menu, we returned to Mick’s:
POP and IMAP: Mick illustrated the difference between these two types of e-mail account and the way they operate. Essentially, POP delivers messages to your machine whereas with IMAP, the messages are held on the server, and viewed from your device. With POP, you can select a setting to determine whether/when the server's copy is deleted. If you don’t do this, incoming mail will be bounced when your space is full. With POP you can use the Mac (for example) as the master and then delete messages from iOS devices if you wish. IMAP however keeps mail in synch on all devices so deletion on any device deletes it from the server. So it’s helpful to learn to use:
Mailboxes: Mick illustrated how these can be created in the On My Mac section or on iCloud (for Mac mail). Mail can be dragged manually into these mailboxes or can be placed there automatically by making use of:
Rules: Rules cannot be created on iOS devices. However, with an IMAP account, rules created on Mac should work on other devices if the same mailboxes have been set up there - but not all IMAP accounts support this. Mail only applies rules to incoming messages. Mick overcomes this by using a utility called Mail Act On from smallcubed.com. However, this is not yet Mojave-ready. Smart Mailboxes operate in a similar way to rules but don’t move the message, just mark it, like Smart Albums in Photos.
With time running out, items 8 - 10 were left for another occasion, leaving time for a short Q&A session. This continued the focus on e-mail with questions about Out of Office replies and deleting an account on one (iOS) device.
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Roy Rainford said…
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