Diary, Datebook, Ledger: Email is your Historical Record.

I was helping my mother clean out the office of my great-aunt, who recently passed away. After spending the afternoon tackling three filing cabinets of old bank statements, receipts and ledgers, we were expecting more of the same from the fourth cabinet. Instead, we were astonished to find her personal letters, spanning more than 60 years. Even more incredibly, she had typed all her correspondence using carbon paper, so both her letters and their responses were included.

My mother spent many months poring over those letters. Both the revelations of family history, and the minutiae of how her aunt had spent the days fascinated her. She said she wished she had been a more diligent letter-writer -- that some historical record had been formed of her years besides photographs.

At that moment, and during many others over the years, I was happy I started archiving my email in 1995.  I reflect from time to time on what kind of record those archives are forming. The personal correspondence varies from brief "want to grab dinner?"s to multi-page ramblings; notices of births and photos and links to sites and pages that have long since been shut down.

In recent years, it's also become a chronicle of many more details. As more services, online and off, send email confirmations, patterns emerge -- what I buy, where I travel, my interests, the wisdom of the day. I get emails about restaurant reservations, clothing purchases, newsletters chronicling milestones for my baby. Imagine finding a cache of papers detailing how they thought babies should be raised at the turn of the century, how much your ancestors spent on items from the Sears Roebuck catalog (surely the Amazon.com of their day) or the restaurants they dined at.

Will anyone ever go back through these archives? I don't know. (I might end up deleting years of the most cringe-worthy material if I did.) The immediacy of a box of paper, versus files on a hard drive, is certainly undeniable. On the other hand, it's far easier to search email!

Do you keep your old email? Do you expect anyone besides you will ever read it?

If you don't keep an archive of your mail, but you wish you did, check out Mailstore Archive.

What to do if you get hacked.

A friend of mine had her Hotmail account hacked today.  A message went out to everyone in her address book, telling them she had been mugged in London, and could they possibly help her get back to the states?  Needless to say, she was safe and sound in New York.  However, scams that prey on your personal contacts are incredibly effective for quick scams.  So, what can you do if your email account is compromised by scammers or hackers?

1. I can't overstate enough the importance of good, single use passwords for your email account.  Keeping people out of your account will always be the best way to protect yourself.

2.  Assume you won't have access to your primary email account.  The first thing the scammers did was change the password on her account, so she couldn't log in.  She had a second account set up, so she could still access her email, and tell people that she was ok.  As a Pobox customer, you can always send mail out through us.  You can also forward mail to more than one account.  And, of course, if your forwarding address is compromised, you can always log in to your Pobox account and change where we send it (or keep it with us by upgrading to a Mailstore account.)

3. Make sure you have a copy of your contacts on your computer.  Especially if you use a webmail provider as your primary email account, you may have many addresses that only appear in your online address book.  Keeping an up-to-date copy on your computer means you can tell as many people as possible that everything is OK. (Find out how to export your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail.)

4.  Set up security questions for all email accounts that are open.  The scammers in my friend's case used her old Hotmail account, which was still active, even though Gmail is her primary email address now.  She has still not been able to get back into the account, because she did not have secondary verification information set up. Update your Pobox security question.

5.  Shut down your old accounts.  An account you don't log into is the one you won't notice getting compromised, until someone calls you from out of the blue to tell you you're spamming them.

What should you do if you get an email from one of your contacts, asking you to send them money in a hurry?  The best and easiest way to verify that they're ok is, as AT&T used to say, "reach out and touch someone."  Pick up the phone and call; until voice replicators become common, someone's voice will be the hardest thing for a scammer to fake.

Getting hacked can happen to the best of us.  Open wireless networks, getting online in a cafe,  using an open terminal to print out a boarding pass from your hotel -- there are many, many ways a malicious user could get access to your password.  Taking some simple steps now can help take the pain out of recovery if something should happen in the future.

Introducing Mailstore Archive!

We're pleased to announce a new feature for Mailstore accounts today -- Mailstore Archive!  Archive offers two new options, in addition to the standard delivery to your Inbox:

• Inbox + Archive: to have your mail to go to both your Mailstore Inbox, and to your Archives folders
• Archive Only: Don't send messages to your Inbox, just store them in your Archives folders

Archives can be separated on daily or monthly basis.  We've been testing them in-house, so I'll tell you how we've been using them by way of example.

I read all my mail on Mailstore.  I'm using Inbox + Archive, and storing my archived mail in monthly folders.  Now, when I read my email in my Inbox, I only move messages that I need to be able to find quickly by topic into folders, and delete other messages as I deal with them or respond to them, and use my Archives folders as my stored copy.

Otto uses his Mailstore account as a secondary backup account.  He  reads his mail at one of his forwarding addresses, and uses his Mailstore account in case his forwarding address is unavailable.  He uses Archive Only, and stores mail in daily folders, so he can quickly look at messages from the last day or two only.

Tim prefers managing his mail manually.  After testing Archives, he switched back to Inbox Only, so his mail just goes to his Inbox, and he moves it to folders as he likes.

The standard behavior for all Mailstore accounts is Inbox Only right now, but we hope you'll check out the Archive options.  If you turn on Inbox + Archives, we'll begin putting all mail that comes to your Mailstore into Archives folders.  If you use Archives Only and you also use email filters to direct messages into specific folders, messages that are not assigned to another folder will go into the Archives folders.

If you have any questions about the new Mailstore Archive feature, or need any assistance, please let us know!

All About Email: How to Read Message Headers

When we at Pobox Customer Service get a question about a particular message, one of the first things we usually ask is, "Can you send us the full headers of the message?"  The full headers are a treasure trove of information, reflecting (nearly) everything that happened to the message from the time it was sent to the time you received it.

This week, we've rolled out a new Help section, How to Read Email Headers, to provide a map of sorts, so you can mine that treasure trove yourself.  From the very basic question of "What are email headers?" to the super-advanced problem debugging of how to use email headers to figure out why you're getting two copies of messages, there's information at every level.  Please check it out.  If you have other questions about email headers you'd like to see featured there, just let us know!

Accounts get hacked. Don't let yours be next!

Last week, I notified you about a policy change to our SMTP relay.  We got a fair number of questions about it, so let me clarify why we made the change.  Over the last few months, we have seen more than 30 paid, active-for-many-years accounts compromised and used to send spam.

At least once a month, a major web service announces that their email database has been hacked.   (Most recently has been Sony; Gawker Media, which includes Gizmodo and Lifehacker; and Fox TV.) Analysts estimate that 20% to 35% of people use the same password for nearly every website.  If you use the same password for your Pobox account for other accounts on the Internet, you have an excellent chance of your account being used to send spam at some point in the near future.

 So, what should you do?  Go change your Pobox password now.  While you're at it, go change the passwords for any other email accounts you still have open.  (Yes, that means the old Hotmail account you never closed down, too.  Haven't you gotten apologies from your Facebook friends yet about the spam they've sent out?)

Make sure you use different passwords, or this post will be up again in another 6 months. But how are you supposed to remember different passwords for all the different sites out there?  Like you, I do not have an endless memory for passwords, so I use 1Password.  Prefer to go for a non-software solution?  Here are some suggestions for alternate methods of generating site-specific passwords.

I know I harp on the topic of password security a lot.  But it's a big, bad Internet out there, and there are a lot of folks who are interested in using your good name to spread viruses and botnets, sell Viagra, and scam your friends.  Keeping your password safe is more than just good for you.  It's good for everyone whose email address you have, from the person who last corresponded with you in 1996, to your boss, mother, and best friend.