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Many websites provide email services. Some provide free email accounts and some provide paid emails. However, some email providers provide value added email services. In this article let us see such unique email providers.

Can you cancel the email that you send? Imagine that you have sent a harsh email to your friend in anger. You may have typed many stupid things in the email since you were very very upset. But after a while you feel that you shouldn’t have sent this email and you want to call back that email before your friend reads that email. Is this possible? No, once you send the email it is impossible to get it back. Well, not really.

What you saw in the previous chapter is a common rule. However Outlook (not outlook express) has a special feature. If you use Outlook then you have the option to call back the email before the recipient reads that email. If the recipient reads the email then you cannot call back.

New Email services such as Big String and Return Receipt provide value added email services.

Using Big String and Return Receipt you can delete the email that you sent to your friend even if he has read the email. If he has not read the email then you can call back that email before he reads. You can even specify that the email you send can only be saved for a specified number of days and then automatically delete itself.

You can even edit the contents of the email that you had sent without your friend’s knowledge. You friend will not even know how the content changed. You can even prevent your friend from printing your email. So if your email has some confidential information and you do not want the recipient to print you can do that.

You can get Big String email at http://www.bigstring.com. You can get Return Receipt email at http://www.returnreceipt.com.

Qualcomm’s Eudora email comes with a special feature. Eudora version 6.1 comes with ‘Mood Watch‘ feature. Just as the name suggests the Mood watch will watch the mood of the email and show it.

How can Eudora email predict email’s mood. Very easy. It will take the key words and key phrases in the email and learn its mood.

POP3 is a term we come across very often when talking about emails. POP3 stands for ‘Post Office Protocol version 3″. This refers to the protocol used in receiving emails from an internet server.

If you are using any of the following email clients, Outlook express, Outlook, Netscapte mail or Eudora then you are using POP3. With POP3, the server receives all your emails and stores it in the server. You can connect to this server and download all your emails to your computer and then read it offline even when you are not connected to Internet.

But some internet websites use web servers to exchange emails. For examples the free yahoo and hotmails are web mails. In these emails, you can read your emails only from these websites. And you can also reply to emails only from these websites. However you can pay a small amount to enable POP3 in these email accounts. AOL server does not provide POP3 access.

But there are some softwares that enable accessing webmails such as yahoo without paying. E-Prompter is one such software. But it is not legal to use these software. Even if you can access the webmail using these softwares you cannot get the attachments. You can only get attachments directly from these websites.

If you ask computer users what is the one thing that can’t forgo in life, their answers will be ‘email’. Yes, emails have become part and parcel of every computer user’s life. But if you want to use emails anywhere, anytime then definitely desktop computers cannot be of help. We cannot carry our desktops everywhere we go.

Can we use notebooks? Compared to desktop pcs, notebooks can be carried around easily. But notebooks needs a lot battery and therefore it can used only for a few hours.

If there is a device smaller than the notebook then it will be easy to carry it anywhere we go. We can also check and send emails anywhere and anytime. PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), Smart Phone and cell phones can be used to send and receive emails wirelessly. But not all PDAs, Smartphones and cell phones support emails. But most of the new ones support Internet and emails wirelessly.

PDA and Pocket PC

For those who want to send and receive emails wirelessly, PDAs are the best choice. In the early days of PDAs, the Palm pilot 1000 was called Mobile email device. Only later, PDAs were referred as organizers. Therefore whichever model of PDA you buy, it will have email facility. Therefore you just have to confirm whether the PDA you buy supports Internet access.

If your PDA does not support Internet connectivity but supports Bluetooth then you also need to buy a bluetooth cell phone. Then you can use the cellphone to connect to Internet and then use your PDA to connect to the cellphone using bluetooth. Then you can use the email feature in PDA to use your emails.

WiFi equipped PDAs can be used to check emails using your wireless network. You can use many PDA email software such as Webis Mail 2.0, Izymail online, Versa mail 2.5, snapper mail standard, Basejet, Rite Mail 2.0 etc. Even when you travel you can use the WiFi hotspots and connect to internet wirelessly and check your emails.

Smart Phone

In SmartPhones such as Sony Ericsson P900 the email software is already installed. You can also install other email software for smart phones such as Outlook, Notes or I’m in touch.

Using Smart Phones you can use the same device to make phone calls as well as use emails and Internet. This is the advantage of smart phones.

If you have POP3 emails then you can configure your smart phone to check emails at frequent intervals and see if you have new emails. For this you should have subscribed to GPRS service from your phone operator.

Some email providers alert the user of new emails through SMS. But for this they charge a premium.

The only problem is in replying to emails. Using the small keys in the smart phone it will take a long time for you to type a long reply and it is very difficult.

Even reading mails in SmartPhones is a bit difficult due to the screen size.

But definitely it is a major advantage to get your important emails anytime anywhere.

In Microsoft Office suite of applications, MS Outlook has many great features that makes it your trusted personal manager. It does all the job of a personal assistant and more. But many do not use MS Outlook effectively. Many people think that it is just an Email Client. MS Outlook is not just an Email client but it is a Personal Information Manager (PIM). In this article let us see the main features in MS Outlook so that you can start using MS Outlook effectively.

Features in MS Outlook

1. Of course the main feature of MS Outlook is to send and receive emails.
2. You can use the Outlook ‘calendar’ to record all your appointments and set reminders.
3. You can use Outlook ‘Contacts’ to store your contacts addresses, phone numbers emails etc.
4. You can list your tasks and monitor them so that you don’t forget your ‘to do’ lists.
5. Outlook Journal is used to integrate your emails and other documents.
6. Outlook Notes, is used to note down your short notes and short news.

These basic features such as Email, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Journal and Notes are the core of MS Outlook application.

Tips for Effective Use of Outlook

• To assign a task to someone using MS Outlook

  If you think that a particular person can handle a particular task well then you can assign the job to him and Outlook will automatically email this task to that person.

  You can also ask Outlook to monitor the status of the task. And Outlook will inform you of this status.

  If the task is completed, Outlook will alert you of the status.

• To conduct polls using Outlook

  If you have a doubt about something why don’t you hold a poll and ask people to vote to find a popular answer.

  In outlook there is a Polling feature. Instead of polling machine, emails will be used thats all. Select ‘Use Voting buttons’ in the email and give your message and an agree and disagree button or an ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ button. Then send this email to everybody. When they reply with the answer, outlook will consolidate this answers from everybody and will tell you the final result.

• To confirm meetings using MS Outlook

  Outlook has a wonderful, ‘Meeting Requests’ feature. Let us assume that someone wants to meet you. To check whether you are available on that specific day and specific time he can check your calendar and see your appointments. If you are free then he can send you a ‘Meeting request’.

  If you agree to his request then you can accept his meeting request. Then Outlook will update both your calendars and show as ‘Busy’ on that day and time. And Outlook will inform the sender that you have accepted his meeting request. Even if you reject his meeting request outlook will inform him.

  Outlook will also arrange for both of you to meet using ‘Net Meeting’. Outlook will remind you of this appointment so that you don’t forget.

• To send automatic reply using Outlook

  Assume that you are going on a long leave. If someone sends email to you during this time you will not read these emails. The senders may misunderstand that you have not replied.

  You can use ‘Auto Respond’ feature to solve this problem. Just inform outlook the starting date and ending date of your leave and the message that you want to send as a reply. Now Outlook will automatically respond to all emails with this message.

There is always a danger that your emails are snatched on their way and be read. Luckily there are ways that you can use to make these emails unreadable by others on the way. In this article we shall see methods to secure your emails by encrypting them.

Assume that Jack is sending an email to Stella. This email can be read by anyone who has access to this email on the way. If Jack wants that no one else other than Stella should be able to read this email then what can he do? Here’s where public key and private key can come to the rescue.

What is public Key and Private Key?

Here KEY is referred to the string made of 0s and 1s. There are 64bit, 128bit and 256bit keys. A 64bit key means that it contains a combination of 64 0s and 1s.

If the number of bits in a key is more then it is more difficult to crack it. Each one has to create a public key and a private key and inform other s about the public key. The private key should not be revealed to anyone else.

A readable text is called ‘clear text‘ or ‘plain text‘. To make this message unreadable you have to encrypt it using your public key or the private key. This encrypted text is then called ‘cyber text’. So ‘clear text’ is encrypted to make a ‘cyber text’.

To convert the encrypted text back to its readable form is called ‘decryption’. In order to decrypt you should use one’s public key or the private key. It should be noted that a message that was encrypted using public key can only be decrypted using its private key. And the message that was encrypted using the private key has to be decrypted using its corresponding public key. So a person’s public key and private keys are pairs and has to be used in pair.

How will we know the public key of someone?

We can send our public key to others through email. Or you may want to publish it in your personal website for your friends to see. You may even print your public key in your name card. You can also publish your public key in a ‘Public Key Directory’.

To confirm the recipient of the email.

Let us go back to the same example. When Jack composes an email he will use the public key of Stella to encrypt the message. Then he will send this cyber text(encrypted email) via internet to Stella. If someone gets this message in between he cannot read this message as it is encrypted. The reason is because the message is encrypted using Stella’s public key. So this message is readable only if it is decrypted. To decrypt this message Stella’s Private key is required. Only Stella knows her private key. So others cannot read this message.

In this method the recipient is confirmed because only Stella can read this message. But how to find that this message is from Jack and not anybody else. To confirm the sender follow the method as described below.

To confirm the Sender

If Jack creates an email and encrypts the message using his private key and encrypts the message and sends it to Stella. So whoever knows Jack’s public key can decrypt this message and read it.

By this method the sender of the message is confirmed as Jack. But not only Stella, any others who knows jack’s public key can decrypt the message. In this method therefore the recipient is not secured only the sender is confirmed.

To secure both the sender and recipient.

In both the methods discussed above the message is encrypted only once. If instead the message is encrypted twice then both the sender and recipient can be confirmed.

So to achieve this, Jack should encrypt the message using his Private key first. After that he has to encrypt again using Stella’s Public Key and then send it to Stella.

By this method only Stella can decrypt the message fully and read it.