Tag: email

How many Email addresses can you have?

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Perhaps you remember the days when your ISP or internet provider gave you a ‘free’ email address. Most of these addresses are now no longer available, at least not for free. But there is a multitude of email providers out there. Some better than others, and most of them at no cost. Of course, there is Gmail.com from Google, Outlook.com from Microsoft, and iCloud.com from Apple, but there are plenty more not associated with the ‘Big Three’, such as Yahoo.com, Yandex.com, ZohoMail.com, and ProtonMail.com, to mention just a few. Most of them also offer some free cloud storage or other apps like calendars, documents, and spreadsheets.

There is no law that says you can only have one email address; in fact, it is a good idea to have a few addresses for different purposes, like one for friends and family, one for official correspondence, like job applications, insurance, and the like, and one for newsletters or a ‘junk email’ that you can use when a website requires an email address without offering you any other service. (I’ve covered this topic in more depth on my website, askursula.org – no email required. All my articles are freely accessible.)

All of these email addresses can be accessed through their own websites, but if you have more than one email address, swapping between them can become tiresome. For that, and also to have an offline copy of your emails, there are so-called email clients. These are mostly independent email apps that allow you to have all your different emails in one place. A well-known one of these is Thunderbird, which is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux; then there is Outlook for Windows and Apple Mail for Mac. Others include Mailspring, Canary, SeaMonkey, and more.

So again, you have plenty of options and do not have to stick to the one email address you have been given or even to a particular app. Your setup should work for you, not the other way around.

How to recover your email

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Some time ago, you set up an email account, and you have been using it for ages. To make things easy,
you set your phone to log into the email account automatically -who wants to enter the password all the time. That’s fine, sort of.


BUT, and this is a big BUT, did you set up a recovery method? What will happen if you drop your phone in the water, if you accidentally run over it or just loose it? Can you log into your email account on the new phone? You have long forgotten the password you used, and when clicking this great ‘forgotten password?’ link, it wants to make sure you are who you say you are: by sending a code to your email address (which you cannot access at the moment); if you haven’t given the email provider another way to contact you and confirm it is you, you might be locked out of your email account for ever. And not even your email provider can recover it for you.


In your email settings there will be a ‘Recovery options’ entry; make sure you find this now and check
that you provided your phone number or another email address (with a password that you have
hopefully engraved onto your memory). And then make sure you keep this information up-to-date. Now you can happily forget your email password, and you will be able to regain access to your emails by using these recovery options.


Of course, another way to never forget your passwords (and create very secure ones on the fly) is to use
a password manager. A small program that keeps track of all your passwords for every account and every website and all you have to remember is the one Master Password that allows you access to this
program. But that is a subject for another article

Attach photos to emails and messages

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How do you attach a photo to an email or send a photo with your mobile?

For emails it is usually easier to first write the email and then attach the photo – for messaging, selecting the photo first and then writing the message is best. But either option can be used in both cases.

The principle is always the same, regardless of which device or tool you use. Go into your photos folder/gallery and find the photo you want to send. Select it and then find the ‘share’ button. This can look for example like this: or like this: or you might have to right-click on the photo and select ‘Share’ from the menu that appears – it all depends on the device you are using. Once you have clicked ‘Share’ more options will appear, again depending on the device you are using. You can select email, SMS (MMS), messenger apps (Messenger, Whatsapp etc); try and avoid the person icons that might appear – it is not always obvious which app is going to be used to send. Once you click on the app you want to use, it will open and you can create and send the email, message as you usually would and the photo attaches itself to it. Try it out to see how it works!

If you want to send more than one photo it is generally easier working the other way around: create your email or message and before you send find the attachment icon. Now this time it might be a paperclip, a small picture or variations of these – you will have to do a little looking around. Once you click that icon you will be given options to look for your photos in their folders and you can select more than one, just by clicking on the individual photos. When you are done, select Done or similar and you will be taken back to your email or message and can send it.

Just a word of warning, photos can be quite large and sometimes you can only send 2 or 3 photos at once before you get an error message, in that case send multiple messages or use a cloud sharing option.

You can use most cloud services (Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive…) for this. Just upload your photos to your cloud and then ‘share’ (usually a right-click will offer this option) using email or messaging. It will create a clickable link that allows the recipient to access those photos (but nothing else on your cloud drive). The receiver of the link does not need to have the cloud service themselves, as the photos are displayed directly in a browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox…). If you are using Gmail it might even do this automatically for large files.

Another way is offered by file transfer services like WeTransfer or SendAnywhere, usually without having to sign up, but these links have a limited lifespan (lets say 7 days) before they expire.

Of course, there is always the option to load the photos onto a USB drive (thumb drive)and give that to the recipient.

There are other more technical ways, but this is not the place to explain those.

A tidy inbox

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Are you one of those people who can’t find the important emails among all the spam, advertising and
newsletters?
It is quite easy to control your inbox with a few simple steps:
Go through your inbox one email at a time and check each email for its worth:

  • If it is something you want, there is nothing you have to do. Go to the next email.
  • If it is a newsletter, special offer etc from a business you have bought from in the past, again ask
    yourself if you really want these emails. If not, there should be a ‘unsubscribe’ link most likely
    right at the end of the email (generally quite small and faint). Click that, it will direct you to a
    website, and sometimes you have to confirm that you want to unsubscribe. They might ask you
    why, but you don’t have to answer that. That’s it! You might get a confirmation email, or it might
    take a couple of days to go through their system, but you should no longer be bombarded with
    ‘special offers’.
  • If this does not work, or if it is an email you really don’t know how they even got your email
    address, you can block them. Depending on your email program or provider, there should be an
    option somewhere (typically where you find the Reply and Forward buttons) to Block, Mark as
    Spam, Mark as Junk or similar. Simply press that, and you should no longer receive emails from
    that address. Sometimes you even have the option to ‘report as spam’, but that is optional.
    If you follow these steps for a few days (or weeks, depending on the amount of emails to go through),
    your inbox should look a lot more manageable and contain mostly wanted emails. Also, keep
    unsubscribing or blocking any new emails that will turn up.

Changing your email provider

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Do you still have the email address your ISP (internet provider) gave you? What will happen when you change internet providers? Will you still be able to access this email for free? It might be time to hoose your own email provider, here are a few points why:

  • Access your emails from any program (Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird) plus from the web and you can customise how the pages look and function
  • Spam filters are generally much better with other email providers
  • Your inbox is usually much bigger, a few fancy catalogues or pictures won’t fill it up and prevent you from getting new messages
  • Some email providers allow you create ‘dummy’ email addresses or aliases that allow you to sign up for newsletters and more without disclosing your real email address. If they get difficult about cancelling the newsletters or other email, you just discard that address and all is good.

So how do you change your email address?

  • Have a look on the web what is around (e.g Gmail.com, Outlook.com, ), compare what they provide and choose one (or even 2 or 3, you can have an unlimited amount of email addresses, not just one) of them.
    Sign up and make sure you provide recovery methods (like a phone number, another email …) so you can get to your emails if you happen to forget your password.
  • Send an email to all you contacts informing them of your new email address
  • Make sure you contact any businesses, websites, streaming services and other online accounts (bank, myGov…) etc on THEIR WEBSITE OR PHONE to change your email address, they generally do not accept changes any other way.
  • If you can, set up automatic forwarding from your old email address to your new address and monitor this for any senders you missed
  • You could also set up automatic replies from your old email address to inform any senders of your new address

It requires a bit of work, but it is definitely worth it.