Lost Yahoo Email

Rory, a yahoo mail subscriber, recently wrote to me because emails had vanished into thin air.  I am not offering a solution just an observation.  As an email provider myself, I only use the free email services for testing purposes. I can only speculate as to what happened to Rory’s emails.

Question: I am with yahoo.com. I have now had two incidents in which the yahoo.com system has mysteriously ‘vanished’ my entire inbox contents, (dating back to 2008, about 1700 emails ) I need for record purposes as a film-maker and journalist, so my work and research has been seriously affected . Why would Yahoo do this? There are no routes to recover this research, and none of the items went into trash.

It seems we should not entrust Yahoo with the duty of delivering email safely. Any suggestions apart from migration to another server? And does Yahoo not ‘park up’ our ‘vanished’ emails in their hostage cloud? Or does it go deeper than this? Continue reading “Lost Yahoo Email”

How to spot an email scam

Wow. These things are rampant. I receive calls and emails on this often.

This scam, or phishing attempt, goes like this: You receive an email that claims you made a purchase or sent money to someone.  If you have never seen one of these emails, you will be amazed at the detail. The email looks like it actually came from the place they claim to be. Continue reading “How to spot an email scam”

Password Selection Rules

Disclaimer: This article is meant to be humorous.

CORPORATE DIRECTIVE NUMBER 88-570471 In order to increase the security of all company computing facilities, and to avoid the possibility of unauthorized use of these facilities, new rules are being put into effect concerning the selection of passwords. All users of computing facilities are instructed to change their passwords to conform to these rules immediately.

Rules for the selection of passwords:

1. A password must be at least six characters long, and must not contain two occurrences of a character in a row, or a sequence of two or more characters from the alphabet in forward or reverse order. Example: HGQQXP is an invalid password. GFEDCB is an invalid password. Continue reading “Password Selection Rules”

Restoring Shortcut Functionality

Question: I do certain work in Microsoft Office and for some reason my shortcut (on desktop) won’t open it anymore. How can I get it to function again? I did a chkdsk and defrag last night. Did that have anything to do with this problem? Thank you.

Answer: CHKDSK and Defrag are not the cause of missing files. A shortcut is a small file that points to the real program. When you activate (run) your shortcut, it sends a message to the real program to start. If for any reason the program for which the shortcut was created is missing or has moved to a new location, the shortcut will not be able to activate that particular program. The question is, “how can you get the shortcut to work again?”

In simple terms you can do this by pointing the shortcut to the new location. I believe that the best option, here, is to create a whole new shortcut and forget about fixing the old. But, if you must know, I’ll go over the process of fixing it too. Continue reading “Restoring Shortcut Functionality”

Removing Addresses from the Address Bar

Question:
Juan, how do I delete all of the addresses on my address bar? Thanks for you help! Minnie

Answer:
I think this is the easiest question I have been asked yet. It is very easy to clear the addresses that have been collecting in the address bar each time you type a web address. In Internet Explorer click Tools, then Internet Options. You will find a button toward the bottom of the pop-up window that says “Clear History.” Click on it. You’ll get a confirmation message asking if you are sure. Click on “Yes” and you are done.

For Firefox users, Subscriber Red Southern wrote:
Just a quick note about the 1st Q & A in the March 17th issue. For those of us using Firefox, (which we much prefer), we had to go to Tools, Options, Privacy tab, Click on “Clear Browsing History Now” then click on OK. Note: When you click on OK, they are GONE.