en Passant

So, here I am sitting on my computer, filtering my 200 unread messages in my personal mailbox. Of these messages, I have the MLS listings, the tech newsletters and my regular dose of spam, ham and scam. Nope, I am not trying to confuse you here.

In the last 10 years, email has evolved from the uber-geeky tool into the corporate mainstream solution that no one can live without. At the base, Internet email is a 40+ year old technology that was originally designed to provide a reliable (not time sensitive) solution for communications between colleagues. As it has gained popularity corporations have started to rely on it for business critical communications with their customers and vendors. Nowadays, IT departments learn about their outages by how well the email solution is performing.

In the rest of this article, I plan on covering a few of the troubleshooting techniques I use to resolve Internet email issues and what may have caused them.

I just received the latest joke/hoax/chain-mail from a family/friend/co-worker regarding some new issue, scam or sentiment. When this person forwarded along the message, I had to skim through pages upon pages of valid e-mail addresses to get to the actual message, which ended with "forward to all your family and friends".

Thanks to this person, I made $$$ with very little work. How? I extracted out all 200+ (validated and real) e-mail addresses, then forwarded the file off to a website that collects e-mail addresses. (Spammers pay extra for validated e-mail address like these, you know!!)