Cactus TurboNet Newsletter 8/1/06

 

Computers hate the heat, too.

 

The rule of thumb is, “If the room is uncomfortably hot for you, it’s too hot to run your computer.”  The failure rate for hard drives and other computer parts skyrockets if they can’t keep their cool.  And be sure the computer is not in direct sun – that also makes it hotter.

 

Spam update

 

We’ve all been getting more spam lately.  If it’s something that’s aggravating to you, we can do several things:

 

1. Change your email address.  This slows it down for a while, but it will build up again, of course.  We can leave your current email address active while you let everyone know your new one - just let us know.

 

2.  Set up your Spam Folder.  That way, any email whose subject is marked with [Spam] will go into a special folder on our mail server, and not to your inbox.  This email is kept for 7 days just in case you really need it (where did those airline tickets go?) and then it’s deleted.  You will have a white list, so if you subscribe to a newsletter which is regularly marked as [Spam], you can add the newsletter’s email address to the white list and it will no longer be marked.  See http://www.turbonet.com/mail/Intro.htm for a more complete explanation.

 

Note that it’s tempting to try to black-list the spam senders, but this doesn’t work.  Spammers constantly change the “from” address to keep you from being able to target them.

 

3.  Set up kid-safe email.  We designed this for kids, but other people can use it, too.  If you want to receive email ONLY from a certain list of addresses, and reject anything else (which is a way to completely eliminate spam) it’s fairly easy to manage through your white list.  Again, instructions are at http://www.turbonet.com/mail/Intro.htm.

 

The mail server checks your white list in order.  So if the "from" in an email matches anything in your white list above the last entry, it will succeed, and you'll get the email.  If it doesn't match anything above the last entry, it will definitely match the last entry we’ll use, which says to reject everything else.  This system is suitable for young kids (where you REALLY don’t want that ugly adult spam) and for anyone else who doesn’t use their email for business or ordering things.

 

Free Dial-up Web Accelerator

 

Our dial-up web accelerator is included with the standard account.  No extra charge.  It does require some "oomph" from your computer, though, so be sure your machine is at least Windows 98, 500 MHz, and that you have more than enough RAM to run your operating system, modem, browser, virus checker, and the web accelerator at the same time. Go to http://www.turbonet.com and click the link in the first article to sign up. Save the installer to your desktop, restart your computer, disable your virus checker, chat programs, etc.   Then double-click the Proxyconninstall icon to install.