Internet Tips

Home

Training

Make the Internet Work for You.

Internet Tips

Bigfoot.com, email for life. Have you ever had to change email addresses, and go through the hassle of notifying everyone you correspond with? With Bigfoot, you can have a single email address for life, regardless of how often you change ISPs. What Bigfoot does is redirect your incoming mail from your Bigfoot address (your-name@bigfoot.com) to whatever address(s) you want. Thus, when you change ISPs, you tell Bigfoot to redirect your email to the new address, but your Bigfoot email address remains the same. Your friends and business partners are not inconvenienced by the change, in fact they never know about it. In addition, Bigfoot can redirect your email in accordance with rules that you set up. I use this in conjunction with my "email the cell phone" trick. I have Bigfoot look for messages from my boss. When it sees one, I have it send a copy to my email account and another copy to my cell phone. Thus, I am immediately notified that I have an important email from the boss, whether or not I am online at the moment. Best of all, this wonderful service is free of charge! There are a variety of additional features that I don't have room to describe here. To learn more about it, check it out at http://www.bigfoot.com.

Email management. If you get a lot of email, you may find it difficult to manage and sort all the information you receive. Most good email software will automatically process your incoming mail in accordance with your needs. Outlook refers to this as "rules," Pegasus, Calypso and others refer to it as "filtering," but the concept is the same. In Outlook, you can have mail from a certain person show up in a special color. In almost any email package, you can create folders for different categories of email, and have the system automatically sort incoming mail into those folders. You can go so far as to have the system automatically forward certain messages to someone else, and delete others so that you never see them! If you haven't looked into the rules/filtering capability of your email program, it might be worth your while. If your email package doesn't have this capability, it might be worth upgrading to get it.

Any browser - to view the most current information on a site that may change frequently, use the Reload or Refresh button on your browser.

Creating and maintaining a variety of individual and specialized folders in my email programs helps keep me organized with research projects and acts as my "memory".

Go into My Computer -> Dial-up Networking and change your ISP's phone number to include *70w (an asterisk, numeral seven, numeral zero, letter w) in the front. This will disable your phone company's Call Waiting feature, so people trying to call you when you're online get a busy signal instead of wondering why you never answer your calls.

Make your modem dial faster. Go into My Computer -> Control Panel -> Modems -> Properties button -> Connection tab -> Advanced button and add s11=0 in the Extra Settings box.

Make the Internet Work for You.

Internet Tips

At A+, Solutions is the name of the game.