Web based email from Google

How we use and access our email is changing. Before broadband most people used a dial up connection to access the internet. This was charged by the minute, and was relatively expensive. So we connected to the internet, received our emails onto our PC’s, then disconnected. We read the emails, composed replies, and then connected again briefly to do another send and receive.

With the introduction of broadband, virtually all businesses, and the majority of domestic PC users now have a permanent internet connection. We now also have internet access on mobile phones as well. This has lead to many people wishing to be able to access their email from anywhere, at any time, on any device with an internet connection, Webmail was born!

Googlemail was created in April 2004, but for the last three years has been under development and testing and only released to test users by invitation. ASL was given Googlemail to test back in August 2005, and for the last fifteen months we have been using Googlemail as our company email system.

So what makes Googlemail different:

1. You get more than enough space for all your emails, and Google are continually increasing the storage space. This means you never have to delete emails to free up space, just keep everything. I have nine thousand emails stored in my GoogleMail mailbox, and it’s showing only 17 percent full.

2. You search using key words to find that email you want, rather than having to file them in folders. Once you have read an email in your inbox just hit the “archive” button and forget about it. You can always find it again using a search, which saves time.

3. Googlemail recognizes related messages, and groups them into “conversations”, where associated messages are listed one after another.

4. GoogleMail contains one of the most accurate Spam filters I have used.

5. All incoming and outgoing emails are scanned for viruses, automatically, including attachments.

6. You can access your emails from any computer (PC or Mac), mobile phone, or PDA, anywhere in the world, as long as it’s connected to the Internet

Googlemail is very different to the other Web based email accounts and it’s innovative features make it in our opinion far superior to all it’s competitors.

To get your free GoogleMail account just go to http://mail.google.com/mail/ and sign up.

Chris Moody
ASL Computer Services
www.aslcomputerservices.co.uk

Switching broadband supplier will be easier from Valentines day

Just found an article on Tech Digest’s Blog on how a new Ofcom ruling will make is easier to switch broadband suppliers.

From February 14th, broadband providers will be obliged to provide the MAC (Migration Authorisation Code) for free to any customer that requests them. These codes are the key to switching service with minimal disruption, but in the past, some providers have withheld them, or charged a fee, making the switch difficult.

 You can read the full article here

http://techdigest.tv/2007/02/switching_broad.html

Chris
ASL Computer Services

OpenOffice - An alternative to MS Office, and totally free

The Microsoft office suite has become the De Facto standard amongst PC users. Everyone expects documents to be in Word format, speadsheets in Excel, and presentations in Powerpoint. But, with every new release of MS Office the price has increased, making it a very expensive proposition for both small businesses and home PC users.

But now there is an alternative, OpenOffice.

• Openoffice will read and write Word excel and powerpoint documents
• It is easy to use
• Download OpenOffice completely free of any licence fees
• Install it on as many PCs as you like
• Use it for any purpose private, educational, government and public administration, commercial…
• Pass on copies free of charge to family, friends, students, employees, etc.

OpenOffice contains

Writer – a word processor you can use for anything from writing a quick letter to producing an entire book.

Calc – a powerful spreadsheet with all the tools you need to calculate, analyse, and present your data in numerical reports or sizzling graphics.

Impress – the fastest, most powerful way to create effective multimedia presentations.

Draw – lets you produce everything from simple diagrams to dynamic 3D illustrations.

Base – lets you manipulate databases seamlessly. Create and modify tables, forms, queries, and reports, all from within OpenOffice.org

Math – lets you create mathematical equations with a graphic user interface or by directly typing your formulas into the equation editor.

Why not give OpenOffice a try. It could save you a lot of money.

You can download it free from the Openoffice.org website

 Chris Moody
ASL Computer Services

Manage all your digital photos

Digital cameras and mobile phones containing built in digital cameras are now commonplace. You may even have received a new one for Christmas, or bought one in the January sales. But as well as making photography instantaneous and free of film processing costs, digital media introduces new problems. All these hundreds, even thousands, of photos just sit on your computer hard drive. How can you possibly organise, search, edit, email, print, or even view a slide show of a specific set of pictures.

The answer is Picasa.

Picasa will:

* Organise your entire collection of photos automatically sorting them by date

* Make it easy to move pictures around on your computer’s hard drive

* Group photographs into albums

* Password protect individual pictures

* Make it fast and easy to crop, remove red eye, fix the contrast and colour, and enhance your digital pictures.

* Allow you to turn your photos into black & white, or sepia, or soft focus at the click of a button

* Create captions for your pictures

* Take the guesswork out of emailing photos. Picasa automatically resizes and attaches pictures to email messages at sizes your friends will be able to open.

* Make it fast and easy to put your photos on the web.

* Turn a group of photos into a presentation with one click, then share your slide show on a CD

* Resize and print your photos at home

* Backup all your photos to CD or DVD, or to a network drive.

And now the best bit, this software it totally free, courtesy of Google.

Download Picasa now and give it a try, you will not be disappointed. It’s not a feature packed image editing tool like Paint.NET, but it will organise, edit, print, email, and display your photos effortlessly and easily. You can get Picasa from http://picasa.google.com

HTML E-mail newsletters

For a while we have been looking into the best way to send formatted HTML e-Mails.

We want to send a monthly Newsletter to our Customers, and I run a Mailing list for our local FSB (Federation of Small Businesses) branch. Writing HTML E-mails manually and trying to send them via Outlook just doesn’t work properly.

We have just completed testing a HTML Emailing service from MailChimp and it seems to work really well. So if anyone else is looking for an easy way to send HTML Emails take a look at MailChimp

Paint.NET image editing software

Paint.NET is free image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing.

It isn’t a replacement for Photoshop but it has more than enough features for most peoples needs. I particularly like the feature that turns your photographs into an oil painting.

 You can download it from the Paint.Net website.