Are you pleased with your company’s email and web hosting company? Email is a critical business tool for many businesses, thus one should not change hosting companies on a whim or without adequate preparation. Here’s an overview of the migration process, including pre-migration planning, day-of-migration tasks and post-migration tasks.

Phase 1 – Planning for the Migration

1. Select a new hosting company.

It’s not easy to provide reliable and capable email and web hosting with solid customer support to Macintosh users. If you’re not satisfied with your current hosting company you might like to read the article I wrote about selecting a good hosting company.

2. Sign-up for hosting services with the new company.

Setup email accounts and distribution lists. Don’t forget about setting up email aliases for addresses listed on your web site like info@company.com. Setup web hosting and send the FTP login information to your web site manager. Have your web site manager install your web site and test it.

3. Identify the registrar for your company’s domain name.

One way to determine your registrar is to look it up on Who.is.  Make sure you can login to your account at your domain name registrar since you might need to change the name servers listed here. If you’re not sure how to change name servers, contact your registrar for support. Also, ask them how long it’ll take for this change to go live on their servers. Most companies have this change go live immediately, but it’s not uncommon for this to take up to an hour. I’ve even encountered a few registrars who only update this information every 2 or 4 hours.

4. Identify where your company’s DNS records reside and verify that you can login to this account.

One way to do this is click the DNS records button on Who.is. Make a copy of all of your company’s current DNS records so you can undo mistakes if you make them. If you’re only changing mail hosting companies then you won’t need to change the name servers at your registrar as described in the last step. Instead, you can simply edit the MX (Mail Exchange) records with your DNS hosting company. If you don’t know how to edit your DNS records, ask your DNS hosting company for guidance. Also, lower the TTL (Time To Live) values for your company’s MX records to the lowest value permitted by your DNS host. Five minutes (300 seconds) is ideal, but many companies won’t lower it below 60 minutes (3600 seconds). Briefly, the TTL value tells other companies’ mail servers how long to trust the information listed for how they can deliver messages to you. Since you’re going to change this information, you want other companies’ mail server to check back often to learn the new information quickly. Again, ask your DNS host how quickly changes you make will go live on their servers. Make sure that you ask them how long it takes them (the DNS hosting company) to make this change effective in their systems. DNS hosting companies’ knee-jerk reaction is to tell you that it can take 24 hours or more for the DNS changes that you will be making to propagate around the globe. While it’s important for you to be aware of this fact, you need to know how quickly they’ll make the changes on their servers so you can estimate how long your email and web site will be down (unavailable).

5. Identify all users at your company who will be affected by this migration and collect an inventory of all of their devices that will need to be reconfigured.

You’ll need to build a complete inventory of all user’s desktop computers, laptops, smartphones and tablets, including the version of the operating system on the device and the email application used. Make sure you have instructions for configuring all of these devices. You can configure these devices in advance if there are a lot of them. If there are only a handful of devices then you may just want to configure them the day of the migration. Determine what email data and/or address book contacts will need to be migrated when you make the change of hosting companies. For example, if your users store their mail in IMAP folders on the mail server or contacts in an address book server then you’ll need to set aside time to move this data. Before you move this data, you should verify that all users have a current full backup of their computer.

6.  Inform all users of what to expect on the day of the migration.

Tell the users what time of day the migration will start and how much downtime, if any, to expect. If there will be downtime of an hour or more, encourage your users to use a secondary email account for correspondence during the migration. Some users even need to notify important clients or contacts about the migration and the need to use the alternative email address.

Phase 2 – Migration Day

The big day has arrived. Change your DNS or nameserver records and wait for them to go live with your host. This commonly takes about an hour. Then expect these changes to take 24 hours to fully propogate around the globe. If you haven’t pre-configured all computers, smartphones and tablets then configure them now to access the new email accounts. Migrate the data that needs to be migrated. At the end of the hour, use Who.is to verify that the record changes have taken place. Then start to send test email messages on each device. Test your web site to make sure it’s working properly.

Inform users how to use new system. Users will want to know how to setup an Out of Office message and/or setup email forwarding. It’s useful if they know how to access their email account using webmail. You should also notify them how to contact the new hosting company for technical support.

Phase 3 – After The Migration

About 24 hours after the migration, each user should login to their email account with the previous hosting company, using webmail, to see if any messages were delivered to the old mail hosting company during the propagation period. If so, these messages can be forwarded to themselves and they will now be delivered to the new hosting company’s mail server.

A few days after the migration, contact the old hosting company to completely close your account.

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Would you like to build a professional-looking yet affordable web site for your business? Here are some ideas about how this could be done.

This is the fourth and final article in a series about setting up email and web hosting for a new small business. The first article explains basic terminology, the second discusses how to register a domain name, and the third offers guidance on selecting an email and web hosting company.

This article will give you an overview of three affordable options to build a good looking web site. The first option includes template-based systems like SquareSpace, Virb and Zenfolio. Second, I present an overview of how to build your own WordPress-based web site. Third, I describe hiring a professional to build a WordPress-based site.

 Option 1 – Rather than trying to design your own professional-looking web site, you might consider using a template-based web site. Template-based web sites have been around since the mid-1990s, but they’ve come a long-way. The template systems of old often looked cheesy. Today’s systems look more professional and often include features like blog pages, photo gallery pages, a calendar and integration with social networking sites. Both SquareSpace and Virb let you use your own registered domain name, offer free trials and then have prices that start at $10/month and $8/month, respectively. If you’re a photographer then you might want to consider Zenfolio which also offers a free trial and accounts for as little as $30/year.

Option 2 – If you’re fairly tech-savvy and interested in building your own web site, you could build a great-looking site using WordPress. This is the option that I chose a few years ago to build the site you’re reading now. WordPress is a free, open-source tool that is very capable and widely used. I bought a professionally-built WordPress Theme for $30 from ThemeForest. (There are also many good-looking free Themes.) I then hired two friends to make customizations to the Theme and help me with a couple of WordPress Plugins. This out-sourcing cost me less than $500. I use and often recommend WordPress since it’s a tool that can be used by novices to update their own web site. Since so many people use WordPress, there are thousands of plug-ins that let you add a wide range of features to your website, like a calendar, statistics tracking, search engine optimization information, good print layouts and countless others.

Option 3 – If WordPress sounds good to you, but you want some hand-holding getting things setup, you could hire a professional web site developer like Christine The Designer. Christine focuses on WordPress and offers her WordPress Assistance Package for $500. She’ll help you register your domain name (in case you were still intimidated even after reading previous articles in this series), install WordPress at your hosting company, help you select a Theme and modify it slightly. Finally, her package includes two training sessions to show you how to make changes to your site in the future. Wow, that’s a great deal, if you ask me!

Hopefully, one of these options will fit your needs. You can build a great-looking site in a few days if you use a template-based system, already have a logo, know what colors you want to use and have an idea about content you want to include. Alternatively, you could learn to build your own site using WordPress and then have access to thousands of plugins. Finally, you could hire a professional to get you up and running in just a few weeks using WordPress.

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How should you pick an email and web hosting company? There are literally thousands of web and email hosting companies out there. How can you make an informed choice? This article lists some of the factors to consider when selecting an appropriate email or web hosting company.

This article is the third in a series about setting up email and web hosting for a new small business. The first article explains terminology. The second discusses how to register a domain name.

I’ve put together a table which lists some email and web hosting criteria which I’ve found are important to many small-office/home-office companies. My PDF table lists a handful of hosting companies and how they compare. Hopefully this table will help you develop a set of important criteria to find a hosting company that is well matched for your needs.

Let’s talk about each of these criteria in turn.

Cost – It seems that too many people select a hosting company by looking only at the cost. Maybe this is because they don’t know what other factors they should be considering. Costs can vary considerably so it should be a factor, but far from the most important factor. If you are sensitive to startup costs, check out MacHighway. MacHighway’s entry-level hosting plan for $30 per year is the least expensive plan I’ve seen. It provides 3 email accounts as well as web hosting by a very Mac-friendly company with well written help articles on their web site. This is a great value. If you want integrated calendars and contacts within your email account then Big Mountain’s Kerio Connect server is an affordable option for a start-up business that only wants 1 or 2 email accounts. The larger hosting companies often require that you sign up for a minimum number of accounts. Rackspace, for example, requires a minimum of 5 accounts and Intermedia requires at least 3 accounts.

Company Size – If you prefer to work with smaller companies where you might be able to develop a personal relationship with the hosting company, you should check out MacHighway or Big Mountain Internet. Big Mountain Internet is owned by a husband and wife and run by a small team. I don’t know exactly how large MacHighway is, but I suspect they have a few dozen employees in the entire company. When I contact them for email support, I regularly get replies from the same handful of people. HostGator, RackSpace and Intermedia are all large companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. Your experience with them is less personal, but companies of this size can build networks that have greater redundancy and thus offer higher guaranteed uptime, which is an important factor to keep in mind.

Mac Knowledge – If talking to Mac-knowledgeable and Mac-friendly people in technical support is important to you then MacHighway can’t be beat and Big Mountain also has this covered in spades. MacHighway is a Mac-centric company that appeals directly to Mac users. For a large hosting company, I’ve been impressed by Intermedia’s Mac knowledge even though I know that only a small percentage of their customers use Macs.

POP and IMAP access – If you want to check your email account from more than one computer then you’ll want to use IMAP to access your email. IMAP can synchronize your Inbox and other folders across all devices. I’ve talked about the appeal of IMAP in a previous Tech Tip article. I only list hosting companies that offer IMAP accounts. Note: I’ve previously expressed my dislike for GoDaddy and I’ll point out that most of GoDaddy’s hosting plans do not include IMAP access.

Storage Space – If you’re going to use IMAP to access your email account, you’ll care how much storage space is provided by the hosting company since your Inbox and other folders will live on the mail server using up that storage space. These days it’s pretty easy to use up 1 or 2 GB of storage space after a few years. All of the hosting companies in my table provide a minimum of 5 GB of storage space. If you’re willing to spend a bit more money and work with one of the larger hosting companies then you can easily get 25 GB or even unlimited storage space.

Integrated Calendars and Contacts – If you want your calendar and contacts to wirelessly sync between your Macs, iPhones and iPads, you might want to look at a hosting company that offers Kerio Connect or Exchange accounts. Another appeal of these Kerio and Exchange accounts is the ability to have a company-wide calendar or contact list and the ability to share your calendar or contacts with other people in your company. Kerio and Exchange accounts cost more than a regular POP/IMAP email account, but BigMountain offers affordable hosting with adequate storage space. They offer accounts with 2 GB of storage space for $5 per account per month or 10 GB or storage space for $10 per account month. If you need even more storage space or some features which are only available from Exchange servers, you should consider Rackspace, Intermedia or Microsoft. Intermedia specializes in Exchange hosting and Microsoft has recently started offering Exchange hosting accounts. Their prices undercut the competition at $4 account per month for 25 GB of storage space.

Spam Filtering – All of the hosting companies offer some decent spam and virus filtering, but many charge extra to get premiere filtering.  Rackspace and Big Mountain both include their top-tier spam filtering as part of their base package. MacHighway includes SpamAssassin which is a decent spam filtering system. MacHighway’s top-tier spam filtering costs $50 per year.

Guaranteed Uptime – Many hosting companies advertise a guaranteed uptime. While this detail is important, it can also be confusing or misleading. This Wikipedia article gives greater context than I can provide here. Briefly, the higher the uptime percentage the better. However uptime does not mean the same thing as availability. In other words, a mail server may be up and running but not available to you due to a network outage somewhere. Despite Rackspace listing 100% guaranteed uptime, this doesn’t really mean that their mail servers will always be up. Every company suffers from equipment failure or earthquakes or hurricanes. Rackspace and others simply provide you a written guarantee which states that if their servers are not up and running then you’re entitled to some sort of refund of your hosting costs.

WordPress –  Web sites can be built using a variety of tools, but WordPress is a free and popular web site building tool that I recommend to many of my small business customers. If you use WordPress already or plan to use it, you’ll need to make sure your hosting company offers it. MacHighway and HostGator both include it as part of their base package. Big Mountain and Intermedia both offer it for a small additional amount of $10 or $15 per month. RackSpace offers it, but it costs a few thousand dollars per year. I was flabbergasted when I read this. It appears that their WordPress hosting is scalable and is intended for larger companies. The last article in this series will talk about other affordable ways to build a professional web site for your business.

Hosting companies are not all the same. A small business owner should think about their email and web hosting needs, then find a hosting company that is an appropriate fit. I hope this article has helped you to better understand some of the differences between hosting companies.

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The first step in registering a domain name is to find one that is available. This article is the second in a series about setting up email and web hosting for a business. The first article explains terminology like domain names and domain registrars. This article provides you with some guidance on researching the availability of a desired domain name and registering it.

Let’s imagine that you’re starting a new business and want to register the domain name fullymac.com. To determine if this domain name is available I like to use the WhoIs web site. At the time of this writing, a search for fullymac.com at WhoIs shows that this domain name is available. You could perform this search at many other web sites, but I like WhoIs’ simple and easy-to-read listing of the results. It indicates clearly if a domain name is available or not. It also indicates if other versions of the domain name are available, in case you’d like to buy (register) one of them as well. For example, you’ll see that fullymac.org, fullymac.net, fullymac.biz and many other versions are also available.

It can be difficult to find a domain name that is available. In 2003, I wanted to register  soundsupport.com for my own business, but found that somebody else was squatting on this domain name. The name was and continues to be for sale, but I didn’t want to play that game. Instead, I picked the less well known .biz domain and never looked back. People still occasionally comment “Oh, I’ve never heard of dot biz,” but it’s never been an impediment. Everybody seems to want a .com domain name. It’s possible to do this, but you might have to be creative with your name since .com is so popular. One way to find a .com domain name that is available is to add your city name. For example, some clients have chosen to add Seattle to their domain name, such as fullymacseattle.com or seattlefullymac.com.

I typically recommend that you try to keep your domain name as short as possible and avoid hyphens. Remember you’ll need to print your domain name on a business card, so you don’t want it to be too long. More importantly, visitors to your web site will often need to type your domain name. Hyphens can lead to confusion since visitors may not always remember to type the hyphen.

Once you’ve found a domain name you want to register, you’ll need to pick a domain registrar. As I mentioned in my first article, GoDaddy and Network Solutions are two of the best known domain name registrars. They have their fans, but there are other options. I tend to avoid both of them for a number of reasons. Briefly, Network Solutions charges higher than average prices and they always try to entice you to buy additional features and services that you most likely don’t need. GoDaddy also tries to bundle extra services at every turn and I think they have the single-most confusing web site on the planet. I also don’t like their sexist advertising either. As a consequence, I recommend Hover.com. I have not done exhaustive research, but I use Hover.com and have been pleased with them. Their web site is easy to navigate, and while their prices are not the lowest, they are reasonable. I’ve found their support articles well-written. They even have specific articles about how to transfer your domain registration from GoDaddy to Hover if you ever need to do this.

I should elaborate on pricing. You’ll find wide-ranging prices for domain names. For example, WhoIs lists the price for fullymac.com as $10.99. Hover charges $15 and Network Solutions charges $35. Network Solutions, however, doesn’t show this price up-front. First, you have to add the domain name to your cart, wade through 3 offers for extra services and finally they show you the price for a 5 year registration. Their price for a 5 year registration drops to only $23 per year! What a bargain. (That’s tech sarcasm.)

If you choose to register your domain name at Hover, visit their web site and enter your desired name in their prominent search field. Then, add the domain name to your cart and check out. You’ll be required to create an account and pay using your credit card or PayPal. It’s a straight-forward process that can be finished in 10 minutes or so. If you want to use Hover to register your domain name, please consider using this link so that I’ll get a referral bonus, which I would appreciate.

I hope this article has helped you to find a domain name that is suitable for your needs and available, and that you went ahead and registered it. In our next article, we’ll look at how to select a web and email hosting company.

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Are you setting up a business and need to know how to setup email and web hosting?  Are you confused about terms like domain name and DNS records? This article is the first of a series that will guide you through the process of setting up email and web hosting as well as explain terms you’re likely to encounter along the way. This article gives you an overview of the entire process and defines important terms. Each of these steps will be explored in detail in future articles in this series. Here’s the overview:

1. Select a domain name and register it with a domain name registrar.

2. Select a company which provides email and web hosting and sign-up for service.

3. Configure your computers and smartphone, if you have one, to access your email account.

4. Build a web site and place it on your hosting company’s web server.

Sounds pretty easy doesn’t it? It can be easy, but it can also be confusing. There are a lot of choices to be made and you’ll encounter a lot of jargon along the way. Let’s explore some of these terms.

Domain Name – Even if you’re not familiar with the term “domain name” you know what they are. Examples are apple.com and mail.comcast.net.

To over-simplify slightly, a domain name is a human-memorable name assigned to an individual computer or a network of computers. Thus, it makes it easier for a person to remember your email address or web site name.

Domain Registrar – A domain registrar is a company that will help you register a domain name. One pays an annual fee to register (own) a domain name. It’s common to register a domain name for several years at a time or have your registration set to automatically renew every year. Make sure you don’t accidentally let your domain name registration expire or else your email could suddenly stop working and your web site would no longer be visible. GoDaddy is a very well-known and now infamous domain registrar. Network Solutions is one of the oldest registrars.

There’s actually very little money to be made in being a domain registrar, so most companies that register domain name also offer email and web hosting services since they can make a bit more profit in that business.

While I understand the convenience of having your registration, email and web hosting all with one company, I prefer to keep them separate. I like to use one company as my registrar and a second company for my email and web hosting.

Hosting companies – A company that houses or stores your company’s web site and processes incoming and outgoing email messages is a hosting company. More specifically, they could be called a web and email hosting company. Obviously, one pays a monthly or annual fee for email and web hosting services. In order to get your email and web hosting setup and working, a hosting company will configure their name servers with DNS records for your company.

Name Server – A name server is a server which maintains authoritative records for your company’s domain name. Put more simply, a name server stores information about your company’s domain name. A name server then responds to requests from anybody trying to find your company’s web site or trying to send emails to your company. The information stored are called DNS records. DNS stands for Domain Name System. The Domain Name System is a hierarchical system for naming computers and for keeping track of and locating the millions of computers that are connected to the Internet.

DNS records - DNS records include information about the names and locations of your company’s servers, like a mail server or a web server. DNS records are stored on DNS servers. DNS servers are often described as the phone books of the Internet since they translate human-memorable server names like www.apple.com into IP addresses like 23.49.45.15. Another example is mail.apple.com might be translated to 17.171.2.21. Humans find it difficult to remember strings of digits like this and easier to remember names like www.apple.com. However, computers are just the opposite, so DNS servers play a critical role in making the Internet easier to work with.

If you use just one company as your domain registrar and as your hosting company, they’ll setup all of the DNS records on their name servers and you won’t have to deal with any of this. On the other hand, if you choose to use two or more companies for your domain registration and hosting, you’ll need to deal with some of these details. For example, if you register your domain name with one company then pick a separate company for your email and web hosting, you’ll need to list the hosting company’s name servers in your account at the domain registrar.

This concludes our introductory overview about what you need to know about setting up email and web hosting for a new company. The next article in this series will cover picking and registering a domain name.

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When you’re on vacation or out of the office for a day-long meeting, would you like to send an auto-reply to email messages that you receive? If your email provider uses cPanel then follow these instructions.

Login to your email account using webmail. Typically, the web address you would use to do this will follow this pattern, http://www.yourcompany.com/webmail.

You’ll then see cPanel’s main screen, which will look similar to the photo below. Click the Auto Responders button near the bottom of the main screen.

You’ll then see a screen that looks similar to this:

Fill in the form that appears, using the image above and the following details as a guide.

• I recommend leaving the Character Set on utf-8.

• Set the interval to 8 hours. This interval controls how often a sender will receive your auto-reply. You don’t want your colleagues to get an auto-reply every time they email you if they send you a handful of messages throughout the day.

• Enter your full name in the From field.

• Enter something like Auto Reply or Out of the Office in the Subject field.

• Leave the HTML box unchecked.

• Enter the message you’d like to auto-send as a reply to incoming emails.

• Use the Start and Stop options to set start and end dates and times.

• Finally, click “Create/Modify”.

• Click the Log Out button in the upper right corner. That’s it.

If you configured it to start immediately, you can now send a test message from another email accounts to make sure it’s working.

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Do you use Apple’s Mail application on your Mac? It’s a capable email application. One of its best features the ability to extended its functionality using plug-ins. These plug-ins let you customize Mail so it can better meet your preferences and needs. Here’s a list of 10 plug-ins for Mail that’ll let you increase your productivity.

MsgFiler lets you quickly file email messages into one of your existing Mailboxes (aka folders). Using either a menu command or a keyboard shortcut you can file a message into a folder. Simply type the first few characters of the mailbox’s name and select the desired mailbox from the list of matches.

GrowlMail temporarily displays a small notification window on your screen every time a new email message arrives. By glancing at this notification you can monitor your Inbox while you’re working in another application. [Update March 2013: This functionality has now been included in Mountain Lion, OS X version 10.8, as a part of the Notifications feature.]

SpamSieve offers better spam protection than Mail’s built-in junk mail filter. It accomplishes this by using Bayesian filtering methods. It requires some initial training, but it’s very effective.

MailAct-On is an incredibly robust plug-in which lets you use keyboard shortcuts to quickly file, label or flag incoming or outgoing mail messages. That is an over-simplified description of its capabilities. This video introduction and video review will give you a more complete understanding of it’s capabilities.

MailTags let’s you assign keywords, priorities, categories and due dates to actions mentioned in an email. It lets you escape the constraints of folders by allowing you to organize and find your messages by keyword or other metadata that you’ve assigned. Made by the same developers, Mail Act-On and MailTags can be used together or separately.

WideMail reconfigures Mail’s layout. It moves the message preview area from below the list of messages to the right of it. This layout uses your screen’s space more efficiently. Apple realized this layout was very popular, so they made it the standard layout in Mail 5.0, which comes with Lion, Mac OS X 10.7.

Attachment Tamer gives you control over Mail’s handling of attachments that you send. Be default, Mail will display an attachment, such as an image, in the body of the email that you’re composing. Attachment Tamer lets you change this behavior and send the image as a regular attachment instead.

MessageFont lets you set Mail’s default font when you reply to or compose a new email message. Mail’s preferences appears to let you set the default font, but this affects only what you see, not what the recipient sees. MessageFont changes which font is seen by the recipient.

MissingAttachments scans an email message and notifies you if you have referred to an attachment, but forgotten to attach a file. Unfortunately this plug in hasn’t been updated to work with recent versions of Mail.

MailUnreadStatusBar displays an icon to the upper right corner of your screen which lists the number of unread email messages you have. You can customize it to track multiple folders. Its icon then displays a menu listing the unread message count for each selected folder and lets you go directly to any of the listed folders.

In my opinion, these are some of the best plug-ins for Mail, but you can read about many more in this Macworld article.

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RSS is a convenient way to stay abreast of news stories or articles added to a particular web site. Rather then needing to visit your favorite web site over and over, you can use RSS to be notified when a new story or article has been added as well as read some or all of that article. I like to read my RSS feeds in my email application, Mail.

Below are instructions on how to add an RSS feed to Apple’s Mail application.

1. Open a web browser, like Safari, and go to a web site that offers an RSS feed. I’ll use Tidbits.com as my example. Go to http://www.tidbits.com .

2. In the right-hand end of the address field you’ll see an RSS icon as depicted in this picture. Click on the RSS icon.

3. If the web site offers ONLY 1 feed then the address of the feed will be listed. In this case, Tidbits.com offers 3 feeds so I choose the “Full Text Feed.” Then you’ll see a window like this one:

4. Copy the feed address, feed://tidbits.com/feeds/tidbits.rss by highlighting it and selecting Copy from the Edit menu.

5. Open Mail and select “Add RSS Feeds” from the File menu.

6. In the Add RSS Feeds window select “Specify the URL for a feed” and select Paste from the Edit menu to paste the feed address (aka the URL) into the field. Use the picture below as a guide.

7. Click the Add button.

8. In a few seconds, you’ll see the Tidbits feed listed on the left-hand window of the Mail window under the “RSS section” as depicted below. The number to the right of the RSS feed’s name is an indication of the number of unread articles.

9. If you have added a number of RSS feeds, you may want to rename them so they sort in a particular order as I’ve done by adding number prefixes.

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Update May 2012: If you need to open win mail.dat files on your iOS device (iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch) try Winmail File Viewer which currently costs 99 cents in the iTunes Store.

Did you receive an email attachment named winmail.dat or winmail? Here’s a brief explanation of what this file is and instructions for opening it.

Winmail.dat files are sent by people using Microsoft Outlook as their email application. Under certain circumstances Outlook will encode attached files, like Word or PDF files, in this winmail.dat format.

Mac users can open the winmail.dat file using a free application (donations accepted) and extract the files hiding inside. Unfortunately, this application has a goofy name which is TNEF’s Enough. I won’t bore you with an explanation of this name, but if you are interested you can read about it on the developer’s web site.

Here are instructions on how to open the winmail.dat file:

• Save your winmail.dat file on your Desktop.
• If you use Mac OS X 10.7 or 10.6 then download the most current update of TNEF’s Enough version 3. If you use Mac OS X 10.5 then download TNEF’s Enough ver 2.2. If you use OS X 10.4 or earlier then download TNEF’s Enough ver 2.0
• By clicking on one of these links, you’ll download a .zip file which contains TNEF’s Enough inside. Your Mac should automatically open the .zip file so you should see TNEF’s Enough sitting in your Downloads folder.
• Move TNEF Enough into your Applications folder.
• Double-click it to open, then go to the File menu and select Open…
• Select the winmail.dat file which you previously put on the Desktop.
• You’ll then see a window listing the embedded files which are the files that you actually want.
• Click on each file, one at a time, and click the Save button.
• Save these files to your Desktop or any other desired location.
• Quit TNEF’s Enough.

You’re done. You can now throw away the winmail.dat file since you’ve extracted all of the files from inside it.

If you’d like to read more about how and why this happens please read this Microsoft Support article or this other article. These articles also provide instructions that you can pass on to the Outlook user who sent you the winmail.dat file so he or she can make changes to no longer send you winmail.dat files. Essentially, they have to edit their record for you in their Contact list to indicate that you should only receive plain-text emails.

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Did you know that Apple’s Mail application automatically builds a list of all recipients to whom you’ve sent email? I think it’s very useful to review this list a few times each year. By reviewing this list you can easily add useful email addresses to your Address Book and delete outdated email addresses or ones that contain typos.

Before we review this list, it’s important to understand how it is used by Mail. When you are creating a new email message and you begin to type a person’s name or email address in the To: field, you’re typically presented with a list of email addresses which match the letters that you’ve typed. This list of email addresses is a composite of email addresses from your Address Book as well as addresses listed in your Previous Recipients list.

If you ever made a typo in an email address and then sent the email message, this incorrect email address was likely added to your Previous Recipient list. By reviewing this list you can remove such undesirable email addresses.

To view your Previous Recipient list, open Mail, click on the Window menu and select Previous Recipient. You can search this list using the search field in the upper right corner. You can also sort this list by any of the columns listed: Name, Email, or Last Used. You can also sort by the left-hand most column which is not named. This column indicates if the email address is saved in your Address Book. If it is then you’ll see an icon which resembles a Rolodex card. If the address is not in your Address Book, this space will be blank. I like to sort by this column to find common recipients whose email addresses I want in my Address Book. I then select them and use the Add to Address Book button. If you don’t typically add people to your Address Book, this can be a fast way to add a whole lot of people to your Address Book.

In order to remove an email address containing a typo, I often use the search field to locate it. Then I’ll click on the address to select it and use the Remove From List button.

I like to sort the list by the Last Used date. I review the oldest addresses listed and if I don’t recognize them then I select one or more and remove them from the list too.

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Do you often want to get driving directions from Google Maps for somebody’s address which is stored in Address Book? If so, then you should use Brian Toth’s Google Maps Address Book Plugin. I’ve used this great little utility for several years and rely on it regularly to get driving directions either from my office to a client’s office or from one of my client’s office to another client’s office. You can try the plugin for free. If you like it then please send a donation to Brian Toth, the developer.

Installation is easy. Click the download button on the developer’s web site. You’ll start to download the compressed zip file. Your Mac you automatically unzip this file, if not you can double-click it to get your Mac to unzip this file. You’ll then see the Google Maps Plugin installer application. Double-click it to install it.

It’s easy to use as well.

1. Open Address Book and hover your cursor over the “work” or “home” address label.
2. Click on the address label and select Google Directions.
3. To change the starting address click on the pop-up list near the top of the window to select your starting address. Then click the “Map” button.

Your default web browser will open and you’ll be shown Google Directions for the selected addresses.

Here are images to illustrate these instructions.

Google Maps Plugin Instructions

Extra Tip – I also use Brian Toth’s PostCheck plugin for Apple’s Address Book. PostCheck will fill-in an address’ missing zip code or verify that you have the correct zip code. You’ll notice that once you’ve downloaded and installed it that you can select it from the pop-up menu. Just look for PostCheck.

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Dealing with spam or junk email in your Inbox is a waste of time. If you run a small business, the time wasted identifying and deleting email can add up over weeks or months. This is true whether you are one person or a multi-person team. Here are a couple of ways to reduce the amount of spam that you receive in your email Inbox.

First, make sure that your email provider’s email filtering feature is turned on. Almost every email provider has such a feature so let’s take advantage of it if it’s offered. Many of them, however, are not very capable and thus I often recommend an additional layer of spam filtering such as SpamSieve or Big Mountain’s spam filtering service. Both of these services are described below.

For the general Mac user I recommend SpamSieve. SpamSieve is an application which gets installed on your Mac and it has plug-ins to let it work in conjunction with your email application. You can try SpamSieve for free and, if you find it effective, then buy it for $30. SpamSieve works with the most common email client applications including Mail, Entourage, Eudora and Thunderbird. This is a good solution for individuals. SpamSieve is a good option if you don’t have your own custom domain name. In other words, SpamSieve is a good choice if you have an email account provided by AOL, Comcast, Earthlink or other major email service providers.

If you own your own domain name then you have additional options to consider. You could sign up for a email filtering service such as Big Mountain Hosting’s MailFoundry spam filtering service. In order to set this up you need to modify the MX (mail exchange) record within your DNS (domain name system) records. Specifically, you set your MX record to deliver all incoming email to the email filtering server. The server then scans all email messages and delivers legitimate email messages to your Inbox. All email messages that were identified as spam or contain a virus are put into a quarantine. You then receive one email that lists all quarantined messages. If a legitimate email was quarantined then you can  click a button to release the message from its quarantine and have it delivered to your Inbox. I use Big Mountain’s spam filerting server and find it highly effective. Their plans start at $2 per month per mailbox. They have tiered pricing for larger groups of users.

If you own your own domain name but only want to filter some of your email accounts then you could consider GFI’s MaxMail Protection. This is also a robust spam and virus filtering tool. The setup and day-to-day operation is very similar to Big Moutain’s MailFoundry, but GFI MaxMail Protection offers a unique feature of allowing you to filter only some of your email accounts. Thus, you also only get charged for each email account that you filter. The cost is about $2 per month per mailbox (aka email address).

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Here’s a list of features in Apple’s Mail application which I use regularly and people appreciate when I point them out.

1. Connection Doctor – Go to the Window menu and select Connection Doctor. A small separate window will appear. It quickly tests all of your incoming and outgoing connections to your mail servers. After a few seconds you should see green dots to the left of each item listed. If you see yellow or red dots then there’s a problem. If you’re having problem sending or receiving email, open Connection Doctor. It might give you some information that helps you figure out where the problem is. If you see green dots next to all items and you still can’t send a particular email message, then it’s time to look for typos in the recipient’s email address.

2. Send Again – To use this feature just click on a message in your Sent mail folder or any other mail folder, for that matter and then select Send Again from the Message menu. I use this feature when I want to send the same email message to different people but I want to address the message individually to each of them. This feature is also handy if I send a message and immediately remember that I forgot to include a piece of information. I’ll select the message I just sent from the Sent folder and add the missing information at the top of the message.

3. Remove Attachments – To use this feature select one or multiple messages and then select Remove Attachments from the Message menu. One can use this feature to quickly stip email messages of all attachments while preserving the message itself. This is useful for housekeeping purposes. Most people don’t need to hold onto the attachments for messages that they sent since that document is typically saved elsewhere on your hard drive.

4. QuickLook – This feature requires that you have Mac OS X version 10.5 or 10.6 installed. As you may know, QuickLook is feature of the Finder. Click on a file in the Finder and press the Space Bar key. OS X will show you a quick preview of the contents of the document without having to launch the application that created it. QuickLook doesn’t work with every type of document, but it works with the most common file types such as jpeg image, PDF and files made with Word, Excel, Pages or Numbers. Apple built QuickLook into Mail. If you have an email message with an attachment, look for the QuickLook button near the Attachments line of the email’s header information. It’s just a quick way to look at the attachment.

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Do you access your email account from multiple computers? Have you added a smartphone to the mix as well? If so, you should be aware of IMAP. IMAP-enabled email accounts offer better email handling than old-fashioned POP email accounts.

Both POP and IMAP are communication methods used between email programs, like Apple’s Mail or Microsoft’s Entourage, and an email server. POP has been around for many, many years. It works just fine, but it’s model is outdated. IMAP was developed around the realization that people increasingly want to check their mail from multiple computers (or cell phones or other devices). Thus, some or all of your email is stored on the server, not on just one computer. Then you can setup a home computer, a work computer and a smartphone to all access (view) that email (using IMAP). You’ll see the same list of messages on each device plus you’ll see which messages are “new” or have the “replied to” mark next to them. If you delete a message from one device, it’ll be deleted from the server, then subsequently from each of the other devices when they next talk to the mail server.  In other words your Inbox stays synchronized across multiple devices. This same type of synchronization can be setup for other mail folders like Drafts, Sent, and Trash, as well as saved messages.

IMAP is very useful. Personally, I think everybody should be using IMAP, even if you’re only using one computer currently. If you’re interested in using IMAP you could contact your email provider. Not all email providers offer IMAP service. Or if they do offer it, they sometimes charge more since IMAP requires increased storage space on the server and increases the server’s workload.

There is a common myth that if one uses IMAP that email messages ONLY reside on the mail server. This is not true. Each computer will store it’s own local copy of email messages on its hard drive. This way you can read or review email messages even if you don’t have internet access, such as while on a train or plane.

This recent article in TidBITS gives some more detail about IMAP and its features. You don’t have to read the entire article, just a few paragraphs about how IMAP works.

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