E-Mail Problems and What To Do About Them

When it works well, e-mail can be great. It's hard to beat e-mail for everything from staying in touch with family to requesting information from businesses or other organizations. Want to send the same message to several people? Communicate with someone across the continent? Transmit photos, manuscripts or other information? For speed and efficiency, this virtually instantaneous medium is one of the most convenient features of modern life.

But e-mail is not without problems. If you key in the name of an intended recipient but your message keeps bouncing back, you might not be singing e-mail's praises. Ditto for attachments that won't open or other such nuisances. With just a little patience, though, you can readily overcome most e-mail problems. What follows are 4 common e-mail problems along with solutions for overcoming them.

Problem – Returned Messages

This may be the most frustrating of all e-mail problems. After taking the time to create a message, you click on the “send” button and consider your task accomplished. But the next thing you know, the message pops up in your in-box with a heading that it did not reach its intended recipient.

Solutions

First, take the simple step of checking to see that the address of your recipient has been entered correctly. This may seem obvious, but sometimes the only thing wrong is a misplaced letter, the use of “com” instead of “net”, or some similar error. If you know the correct address, this is a straightforward matter of double checking each character. If not, you might need to experiment by sending multiple messages, or by entering alternative addresses with slight variations. Under this approach, you simply keep track of which messages are bounced back and compare them with the overall list of addresses you used. If you sent four variations but only three were returned, you have solved the problem by the process of elimination.

Sometimes the source of your problem lies with the recipient. If messages to other addresses go through but fail here, try to contact the intended recipient by other means and report the situation. The cause may range from a temporary problem with the recipient's server to a switch to another e-mail provider, to a full in box. In this case, simply waiting may be the best recourse. Or a phone call or other communication may be required on your part to obtain the correct e-mail address. If all your messages are being returned, you may have a connection problem. See below for more details.

Problem 2 – You Have Lost Your Connection

Sometimes a failure to send or receive e-mail can be traced to a lost connection with your Internet service provider.

Solutions

If you see a “failure to connect” or “no response” message or have otherwise determined that you have failed to connect, double check to make certain there are no physical problems.

First, check your cables and connections. If you use a dial-up modem, listen to make sure it produces the normal high-pitched dialing sound. If not, the problem could be a loose connection. Locate the phone cord that runs from the back of your computer to the phone jack, and then make sure that each end is plugged in snugly.

If you will don't hear the expected dialing sound, check to make sure your phone cord is undamaged. If it seems worn, replace it with a new one. Other steps include making certain the line is plugged into the right port, and checking the phone jack by plugging the cord into a different jack. If you hear the dialing sound after any of these steps, you have made a successful connection.

Connection problems may be more common with dial-up modems than with broadband connections, but the latter are also dependent on physical connections. A loose wire or poorly connected cable can easily be problematic. Sometimes a glitch occurs that can be best addressed by repeating portions of the initial set-up process. A simple fix touted by Verizon technical service reps for some DSL (digital subscriber line) customers is to disconnect the three lines from the back of the modem and then reconnect them in a specified order. When this action is taken, the online connection is immediately regained.

If you are online but keep getting bumped off, the lost connection can be the result of an unintended software command. In Outlook Express, for example, you will find the command “Hang up when finished.” If the box in front of this phrase is checked, the connection will automatically be severed each time you send or download e-mail. Sometimes a misdirected click of your mouse will cause you to place a check in the box even though you do not realize it. Simply click on the check mark to make it disappear, and the hang-ups will cease.

These 2 common e-mail problems are quite easy to determine and when rectified will make your emailing experience more enjoyable.

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BigString.com Is The Coolest Email In The World

BigString email service for secure, private, recallable, erasable email. Free and premium email accounts for business & personal e-mail address. Video in email, email marketing, small business webmail, web email hosting
Ask Darin Myman about an email that should never have been sent, and he likely will tell you about a friend who was caught cheating on his wife when she examined the contents of his sent email. Of course Darin himself, like almost everyone who uses email regularly, must have made his own email mistakes - perhaps a wrong attachment, a wrong email address (autofill is a convenience, but you really have to pay attention!), unintentional use of 'reply all', or indiscreet contents that might be regretted only nanoseconds after clicking the 'send' button. But even though his mistakes may not have experienced the same degree of consequences as his red-handed friend's, they were enough to inspire Darin to do something about the problem, and that is how he came up with the idea for BigString.

BigString Corporation (http://www.BigString.com) now offers BigString 3.0, a web-based email service that gives the user control over sent mail - even once the mail is delivered to the recipient. BigString.com webmail service is the only service that offers this. This type of feature is already familiar to users of certain email services, such as AOL mail. In AOL, however - as in any other mail system - this can only be done within the AOL network (i.e. if the recipient is also using an AOL address) and only if the email is not opened. However, the idea that you could reach out to a different server and snatch back your errant emails at any time, from any place, is a function that was not available until now.

The name 'BigString' deliberately evokes an image of a long string, attached to your sent emails, that you can pull on to yank back an email that you should never have sent. Of course this is a transparent process - composing and sending an email is just like doing so in, say, Yahoo Mail or Gmail, except that the sender can also choose different security options. Also like its well-known competitors, BigString 3.0 includes traditional email features, such as: Sticky Notes, Automatic Message Highlighting, Calendar, Advanced Message Sorting and Advanced Spam and Virus Filtering. Under the covers, though, it's actually more like sending out the end of the string, while you keep the email contents, retaining the ability to cut the string and remove access to any secure material from the outside world.

BigString has clearly given some thought to the various ways that this technology might be used. One option is to have an email 'self-destruct' (along with your choice of visual effects, such as a little bonfire) after a certain amount of time, or after having been read a certain number of times. Or, you can specify that the email is non-forwardable, non-printable, or non-savable. This can help ensure that the embarrassing video you sent to a friend doesn't end up posted on YouTube. You can make he email trackable, so you know if and when it been opened and forwarded. And most intriguing of all, you can edit mail after it has been sent, or substitute one attachment for another. This feature is especially useful for emails that have time-sensitive price quotes, business offers or dated legal material.

Free video email is another offering on BigString.com's long list of great free features. Bigstring.com offers all of its users a free video email forum where people can send out audio/visual greetings and messages to anyone and any webmail service throughout the world. This is a fun feature that is also hard to come by for free.

Secure email is a natural feature for BigString to offer. "Our customers, both consumer and businesses alike, have told us that they want even greater email security and control for their sensitive correspondence," says Darin. "With our Three Layer Secure email, we are enabling the sender to have that additional control and security. Now users can freely communicate via email with their lawyers, accountants, stockbrokers or anyone they want to send sensitive, personal or proprietary information without the worry that it will be seen or forwarded to anyone but the intended recipient. Their confidential emails will stay confidential."

BigString, like many webmail services, provides its users with a free email account and a free email address, including a generous 4 Gb of storage . It also provides the ability to send free embedded video emails up to 10 minutes in length, a feature not available with most other free email services. In addition, there are certain premium services targeted at small business and more demanding users. For a low monthly fee, BigString offers users the ability to increase their Video Email capabilities and storage capacity. Small businesses can set up their own email system (10 email accounts and up) using the BigString email service, which is POP3 compatible to allow its use with email clients such as Outlook. Premium customers can also add video email marketing tools.

Darin's inspiration to protect himself from indiscretions (like the one that tripped up his friend with the marital infidelity problem) has yielded a product that will be useful to anyone who values privacy, security, and freedom from one more of modern life's worries.

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