Our old method was to download the e-mails to Outlook Express, then export them but this client just wants to continue using a web-based e-mail and their mobile phone for checking and sending e-mail.

So, we set up a Google Apps account and created an e-mail address that was different from the one we wanted to pull from.  For example, we set up the Google Apps account at mydomain.com.  We created an e-mail address such as othermail@mydomain.com.   We opened the e-mail address, othermail@mydomain.com, clicked on Settings, Accounts, and set up the POP settings for their e-mail account (myemail@mydomain.com) at the other server.  Once we clicked Next, the e-mails all were pulled into the online e-mail account.  This is before made any DNS setting changes for the MX  records.

So, now all the client’s e-mails are in the new account and we can change all the MX settings and the client is happy!

This alliance will allow both companies to expand their expertise and provide a more comprehensive digital media package to their clients. Along with their combined capabilities, both companies strive to provide the best web marketing tools to their clients while upholding values of integrity, trust and building strong relationships with their clients. The two companies plan to announce a list of their combined services to their current clients over the next several weeks. For more information on the partnership between Giraffe Web and Morrill Technology Group, please visit http://www.giraffeweb.com/?p=157.

About Giraffe Web:

Giraffe Web has affiliated themselves with top marketing firms, graphic designers, programmers and web hosting to better suit the needs of their clients. Their unique perspective for their clients’ website comes from their strong background in business. For more information, please call 864.232.6363 or visit www.giraffeweb.net.

About Morrill Technology Group:

Morrill Technology Group is an internet marketing company which focuses on providing effective and affordable search engine optimization services. They seek to draw relevant traffic to their clients’ web sites using the most current and ethical practices so their clients will consistently grow their business. For more information, please call 864.335.9393 or visit www.morrilltech.com.

Please don’t pay these guys!  It is completely waste of money!

I’ve had 10+ great years in providing web site design to clients in SC and NC, and decided that the next step needed to be the expansion of Giraffe Web’s offerings in SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing), and PPC (pay-per-click advertising).

Morrill offers awesome services to clients throughout the southeast in SEO, SEM, PPC, and related web analytics for making websites rank high among the search engines. Morrill decided it needed to provide coding and programming services for updating client websites with content and design that works to improve search engine visibility.

In simple terms, Giraffe Web wants to expand in areas in which Morrill has significant expertise, and Morrill is looking to add services in areas in which Giraffe Web excels.

In plain English, here’s what Giraffe+Morrill represents:

Giraffe + Morrill = Great digital marketing solutions that help clients increase their profits.

Giraffe+Morrill has a great mesh of capabilities and expertise, but the most compelling part of the alliance is that the entire team shares the same values…integrity…trust…development of great client relationships.

Victor Morrill recently announced our alliance at The Greenville Chamber Links Group, and the responses he received were awesome!

Giraffe+Morrill team members look forward to talking with you about how our combined expertise and services can help your internet presence improve your profitability. We’re going to introduce our combined services to all of our current clients over the next several weeks.

In the meantime, if you’re ready and raring to develop or improve your company’s web presence, here’s how to reach the Giraffe+Morrill principals:

Judy Benedict
Giraffe Web
Judy at giraffeweb dot com

Victor Morrill
Morrill Technology Group
Victor at morrilltech dot com

Giraffe Web and Morrill Technology will provide turnkey updating services – SEO analysis and site updates – as a consolidated package.

The instructions for using the Kindle were so easy.  Plug it in, start shopping.   I was having a bit of trouble mastering the navigation but I forced myself to read the entire users guide, which is a quick and easy read.  Since I am used to the texting on my Treo (yes, I am still using that phone and am about convinced I am the only one left who has not moved onto a Blackberry), the keyboarding is quite simple.  I found that as long as the dog is not jumping on me while holding the Kindle, I can still hold it with both hands and thumb the keys to type.

Sometimes it is a bit hard to figure out where the cursor is on the screen, as sometimes there is a bit of a lag time when moving from page to page, but once you  understand that you have to be a little bit patient, then it is easy to overcome.

The font and backlighting makes it very easy to read during the daytime or with a lamp, and the text is adjustable to various sizes and spacing.  It would be nice to somehow have it light up to read in the dark, but after some thought there would probably be too much eyestrain.

When the Kindle is in sleep mode, it has some nice portraits of classic writers displaying in  varying shades of gray (as the Kindle does not display in color).  I guess these are to motivate you to move on from Twilight to some serious, good writers.

The Kindle has a few ‘experimental’ features that Amazon requests some feedback on.  I must say, right now the system is simple with as few gadgets and features as possible, and I am reluctant to request anything more that has been placed on it because then it will become too complicated.  The storage capacity is roughly 3.3 GB, which I easily  found in the User’s Guide just now while  I was checking my facts. It opened up to the last page I was reading yesterday.

I really like the bookmarking.  Yesterday when showing it to my mother, her one comment was asking me what I was going to do with all my bookmarks.  I have not ever found my bookmarks to be totally useful anyway, as they tend to fall out when my children throw my books off my bed so they can watch a ‘chick’ movie their dad won’t watch downstairs.

After reading the User’s Guide, I decided to check out the ‘basic’ browser capabilities.  Of course, the first website I checked was Giraffeweb.net.  I was quite pleased with the way the site gracefully degrades, as the Kindle resembles most other mobile devices.  The browser will not display media plug-ins (Flash, etc.) or Java applets.  This means there is to be no Youtube videos.  Right now I cannot say if that is good or not, but it certainly saves on the free bandwidth.

And, speaking of price, since this was a gift, I will not comment on the affordability issue. However, the cost of bestsellers is affordable, as well as magazine subscriptions.  I am not a fan of online magazine subscriptions because I am on the computer so much. I want to sit somewhere to relax and read.  The magazine subscriptions are very affordable and the best feature I see is the ability to save clippings.  This way I can save the most relevant information for later and store in a central location, instead of ripping out pages and using them as bookmarks later, only to be accidentally thrown away.

Now I am looking for a stretch cover or skin to protect it and that will accommodate a portable book light.  I also look forward to using my earplugs to listen to the books when in the car on long trips at night.

What having this Kindle really means is that I will only be recommending books for friends to read, as opposed to passing them on (unless they have a Kindle or Ipod Touch). I can no longer put the books into the drop boxes at the Library.  I will be taking only magazines out on the beach.  And, my arms will no longer be tired holding up heavy books like The Historian and the 7th Harry Potter book that I have yet to read.

About 2 months ago, we maxed out on the number of website profiles we could have in our account. ‘Maxed out?’ my cohorts exclaimed. Yes, it appears that you can only have 100 profiles. However, you can have more than 1 account in your Google Analytics accounts, so we used one of our ‘extra’ domain names to create another account, and started adding profiles to this account. We have just about maxed out this new account now, so it will be interesting to see how many of these master accounts we can have.

What I consider immediate local media would be: The Greenville News, The Greenville Journal, Greenville Magazine, The Chamber Outlook, G Magazine and GSA Business.

The press release I was sending out was 2 sentences and a photo attachment.  Greenville Magazine did not have anyway to attach a photo to their contact page. After spending a few minutes digging, I found an e-mail address for them, editor@, which immediately bounced back as no such user.  I think searched for the editor’s real address, which I found and sent the e-mail.  

G Magazine‘s contact e-mail on their website bounced back as ‘no such user’ on their server (editor@). 

The Greenville News website is so confusing, I am now thinking I probably gave up (since this was almost a week ago).  No wonder the paper is so lacking in any real news.  The Greenville News made a huge mistake when it stopped the separate business insert, because most people I know stopped reading the paper after that.  Their local business news is lacking because most businesses, unless they have a marketing firm already doing their work, can’t figure out how to navigate The Greenville News monster of a website so they can send out any news!

If I didn’t already think I knew who to send the information for the Chamber Outlook, I would not have been able to send it.  I am still not certain it went to the correct person.

I now think that I got so frustrated and this took so long to find new contact information, I completely forgot to try to send anything to the Greenville Journal!

So, even with GSA Business selling out to another publication, I was still able to send a press release to this publication and it was a pleasure to receive their auto-reply that it was received, instead of a bounced message!  The winner is….GSA Business!!!

Dear Network Solutions® Customer,

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008 10:20:36 +0530 we received a third party complaint of invalid domain contact information in the Whois database for this domain Whenever we receive a complaint, we are required by ICANN regulations to initiate an investigation as to whether the contact data displaying in the Whois database is valid data or not. If we find that there is invalid or missing data, we contact both the registrant and the account holder and inform them to update the information.

Please note: ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) regulations state that the WHOIS Administrative Contact may initiate and approve domain name registration transfers from your Network Solutions account to other Registrars. If you are not listed as the WHOIS Administrative Contact a transfer can occur without your knowledge if Domain Protect is not enabled for the domain name registrations listed above.

To change the WHOIS Administrative Contact Information for any of your domains, please login to Account Manager:

1. Log in to Account Manager at: https://mail.yourdomainname.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=https://mail.yourdomainname.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.networksolutions.com.sys78.biz” target=_blank>http://www.networksolutions.com.
2. Click on the “Profile & Accounts” tab in the left navigation menu to be taken to a page listing your account details.
3. Click on “Accounts” and select the account you wish to edit.
4. Click “View/Edit WHOIS Contacts” to make your updates.

If you believe someone requested this change without your consent, please contact Customer Service.

If you would like to order additional services or to update your account, please visit us online.

Thank you for choosing Network Solutions. We are committed to providing you with the solutions, services, and support to help you succeed online.

Sincerely,
Network Solutions® Customer Support

What you need to look at is the ultimate domain name of the url: http://www.networksolutions.com.sys78.biz which means that if you click on the link, it actually goes to the sys79.biz website. This is just one example as there are several others going around out there.

What you need to do is make sure you know where your domain name is registered and keep up with how to log in and check on the expiration dates. If you have a company managing your domain name, like we do at Giraffe Web Development for out clients, then contact your domain manager to double-check on your domain before clicking any links.

This also set me up to be able to upgrade the web server easier because I spent the last few months of 2007 and first few months of 2008 changing about 100+ domains DNS settings.  Since I have several clients that purchased their domains elsewhere, this presented a challenge because some of these domain resellers do not offer any DNS services.  This is when I turned to ZoneEdit.com.  I was able to set the domain to ZoneEdit’s nameservers, then log into ZoneEdit and split out the DNS records so that the e-mail flowed through Google Apps and the website points to my server.

My domain registrar also offers DNS servers for domains that are not purchased there, so I plopped a few of them over because of the number of hits on their websites it was cheaper to do that then worry about them going over their bandwidth limits on ZoneEdit, which are really quite generous as they are.

So, if you find yourself needing some DNS services and your domain registrar does not offer them, check out ZoneEdit.com!

We are now so entrenched with POP3 that along the way everyone forgot the IMAP. There were several reasons why IMAP fell by the wayside, but one of those reasons was the cost of online storage for mailboxes. GAYD offers 6GB per mailbox on their free service. If I were to equate this to what I have stored in my Outlook, my .pst file is about 2 GB. If you have a version of Outlook prior to 2007, your maximum storage is 2GB, and Outlook starts to “wig out” when you get close to 1.9 GB. So, it would make sense to say that 6GB should be plenty of mailbox storage for the average e-mailer.

GMAIL, as well as GAYD, offer an icon download for your Blackberry that once it is installed on the Blackberry desktop, you just have to click it to view your e-mail. For the Treo, it gets a bit sticker. Verizon’s Treo allows you a PC/Windows based interface or a Palm interface, so setting up your e-mail is a bit different between the two. The Palm website offers a great tutorial on setting up your e-mail account, which requires downloading a program to the phone. You can search the Palm website for the appropriate program.

If you have desktop/laptop and want to be able to send/receive from both your computer and cell phone, the easiest option is to enable the IMAP feature in your e-mail account, then reset up your Outlook according to the IMAP settings up at Google. Then on your phone, you can set up an IMAP e-mail account.

What will then happen is that if you send an e-mail from your phone, when you open up your Outlook on your PC, it will also be there. So, what is the difference between the IMAP & POP3? The main difference is that your e-mail is stored online with an IMAP account and Outlook just “manages” the organization of how you view your e-mail. You can set up folders, etc. just like you do with a POP3 account. You have the advantage of not losing e-mails, or of needing to view or see an e-mail that you already downloaded to your computer if using POP3.

Because GMAIL has great spam filtering, it is in your best interests to disable your spam filter in your Outlook if using IMAP.

The only disadvantage with IMAP is that you still need some way to be able to back up your e-mail should the online system crash. Right now it appears that the only way to save the online e-mails is to set up the POP3 and download them all to your system. Another option is to have your computer use POP3, but your phone IMAP so that at least you will have the e-mails you sent from your phone in your e-mail box.