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Welcome to today's edition of the Computer Kindergarten Newsletter.
Today is Sunday, May 11, 2003
We celebrate Mother's Day today. To all the Moms, Happy Mother's Day!
Special Edition
In this newsletter, we’re featuring answer to questions that we receive most frequently from our subscribers. We hope you find this information useful.
Question: How Do I Attach a Picture to an Email?
Question: Is it Safe to Use My Credit Card to Shop on the Internet?
Question: How to I Forward an Email and Eliminate All Those Other Email
Addresses?
Question: How Do I Print Part of an Email?
Question: Can I Stop All that Junk Email I Receive?
Question: How Can I Spot an Email Hoax?
Today's Featured Websites: Mother's Day
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Using Links
A Link is a reference to a website. In this newsletter you will see links to many worthwhile, informative and fun websites. Here are the instructions on how to use links:
A link will be used one of two ways, depending on your email program.
If you see the link in blue, underlined text, all you have to do is click on it and a window with the Website in it will automatically appear on your screen.
If you see the link in plain text, you can copy and paste it into the address bar on your browser. Highlight the link with your mouse, click Edit up on the menu bar, and then click Copy from the menu that you just opened up. Open your browser (click the Start Button, point to Programs, click on Internet Explorer); click on the address bar. Click Edit up on the menu bar, and then click Paste from the menu that you just opened up. Press the Enter key on the keyboard and this will take you to the Website.
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Question: How Do I Attach a Picture to an Email?
I took your Scanners class and now am finally able to use my scanner. I have a picture that would now like to email it to my sister. I can scan it in to the computer but I don’t know how to send it in an email. Can you tell me how?
Answer:
To begin with, save your document (your picture) in an easy to find location. Let's use a letter that you typed as an example (although the same steps apply to a picture you've taken, scanned or created, or any other kind of file). You have typed your document and you're ready to send it. First you must save it; to do so, click on File, and then Save.
In the Save As dialog box, click the arrow to the right of the Save in section; a list will drop down, click on the folder named My Documents. This will place your document in the My Documents folder.
Type a name for your document where it says File Name. Let's name it Letter for our example. Click the button in the lower right hand corner that says Save.
Close out of that program and open your e-mail program. Since you don't say which e-mail program you are using, this part of the directions will be a little more general.
Open a new e-mail the way you usually do. Fill out the e-mail address and subject section of the e-mail, and then look for an icon, button or blue underlined text that says Attach, Attachments, Insert, Browse or has a picture of a paperclip.
Click on that and you will see the same type of dialog box that you used when saving your file. Click on the list of folders (which probably says Look In), and select My Documents. You should see Letter listed in the area in the middle of the dialog box. Click on it and then on a button that will say either Open or Attach. That will do it!
You can learn more about attaching and downloading files at our Newsletter Archives on our website:
http://www.stsico.com/html/downattach.html
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Question: Is it Safe to Use My Credit Card to Shop on the Internet?
Would you recommend giving out credit card information over the Web?
Answer:
Keep two things in mind when deciding to use credit cards on the Net:
First, make sure that the site you're dealing with is using a secure server. That means the computer hosting the online form will encrypt the data so that only it can read the submitted information. Browse around a little throughout the site for information on their server and privacy. While no online system is completely impenetrable, using a secure server is no more risky than giving your credit card to a waiter in a restaurant.
Second, make sure that you know exactly who you're doing business with. Just because a business has a Web site doesn't mean it's a reputable business. While most online sellers are honest, you'll still need to use a little extra effort to determine a site's reliability.
Does the seller have real-world stores with permanent locations? If there's a store at the local mall or a shop in your town, you know it's not a fly-by-night operation that will take your credit card number and go.
Have you ever heard of any problems with this seller? It might be worth it to pay a visit to the Better Business Bureau's website.
How did you hear about the site? If it was through an unsolicited email message - junk email, or Spam - you may be better off avoiding this seller.
These are the kinds of things to think about before making a purchase with your credit card.
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Question: How to I Forward an Email and Eliminate All Those Other Email Addresses?
I frequently receive emails that I would like to send on to someone else but the original email has all the names and addresses of the people it’s been sent to. How can I get rid of these and just send the part I want?
Answer:
In many email programs, you can’t get rid of the names and addresses in the original email but you can send the part you want without sending all the forwarded email addresses.
Here’s how to do this:
Highlight only the text that you want to send (look for a description on how to highlight in the next question). Click Edit on the menu, and then click Copy. Open a new email window. Click Edit on the menu, and then click Paste.
The highlighted text will appear in the new email. Input the recipient’s email address and send the email.
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Question: How Do I Print Part of an Email?
I would like to print only part of a very long email I received -just a few paragraphs out of many pages. Would you be kind enough to explain how I can do this?
Answer:
Most Windows programs allow you to print part of a document instead of the whole thing. To print part of a page, highlight the part you want to print by moving the mouse pointer to the beginning of the section, holding down the left mouse button, and moving the mouse to the end of the selection. Make sure it's still highlighted - the text will be white on a dark background.
Click on File to open the menu, click on Print, and choose Selection in the Page Range area of the dialog box. Click the OK or Print button.
In some programs, the Selection choice may not be in the first Print dialog box. In that case, look for a button that says Options. Click on it; you should find the Page Range area in the resulting dialog box. Click the OK or Print button.
Only the part of the document that you highlighted will print.
An alternative to using the Selection feature is to Copy and Paste the text into your word processing program, and then print from there.
To do this, highlight the text that you want to print. Click Edit on the menu, and then click Copy. Switch to your word processing program. Click Edit on the menu, and then click Paste. The highlighted text will appear in the word processing document.
Advantages to copying text into a word processing document: if you want to print two or more nonconsecutive areas of a document, you can copy each block of text into your word processing program, then only have to print the word processing document one time.
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Question: Can I Stop All that Junk Email I Receive?
I get so much junk email. Is there anything I can do about it?
Answer:
Junk e-mail or SPAM has been around since the beginning and unfortunately is only going to get worse as more people use e-mail as a primary form of communication.
If you belong to one of the many large services such as AOL, MSN, CompuServe, Prodigy, Hotmail or Juno you are much more likely to receive large quantities of SPAM because these services are targeted by SPAMMERS (people and businesses who send junk email). If you belong to a small regional ISP, your chance of getting large volumes of SPAM is more closely tied to your behavior while on-line.
Typically, a sure way to get junk mail is to give out your e-mail address to websites that request it. Do things a little differently and you can minimize the amount of junk e-mail that you receive.
Here are some tips that may help reduce the amount of spam you receive:
Don't Give Your Primary E-Mail Address to Anyone Who Is Selling Anything
Sign up for one of the many free e-mail services such as Hotmail (www.hotmail.com) or Lycos (www.lycos.com) and use that address for any of your on-line purchases. By doing this, you keep junk mail out of your primary account and if the junk mail becomes too much, simply stop using that free account and start another.
If you want to be able to track who is selling your e-mail address, use a different e-mail address for each of your merchants. For example, create a Hotmail account and only use that account when doing business with Amazon.com.
When signing up for these free email accounts, don't use real information about yourself, unless you explicitly trust the source.
Never Reply To A Junk E-Mail Message
Even though the message claims to be able to remove you if you reply with unsubscribe or the like, in many cases it is simply a trick to get you to verify your address.
For America Online Users
If you're an AOL member, and get spam from another AOL member, forward the email to the address TOSSPAM. Since it is against AOL's Terms of Service to send junk email to AOL members, America Online will take action against the offending member.
Visit our newsletter archives to learn more about steps you can take to minimize the amount of junk email you receive.
http://www.stsico.com/html/spam.html
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Question: How Can I Spot an Email Hoax?
I was fooled by an email hoax. An e-mail that was sent to me about a virus called jdbgmgr.exe. The e-mail gave me instructions to search my C: drive to look for this virus, which has the icon of a little bear next to it. I did the search and found this virus was on my hard drive. The instructions said to delete the file, which I did. Then it is suggested that I contact everyone in my address book, which I did. My son, who I sent this email to, told me that this was an email hoax and that I should not have deleted this file. He wasn’t able to tell me how to get it back though; can you help?
Answer:
Unfortunately, you’ve been deceived by a virus hoax. This particular email hoax has been going around for a very long time now and many people have fallen for it.
The file jdbgmgr.exe is a file that will be present on your computer and that your computer needs to perform some tasks. However, you do not need to reinstall this file unless you use a program called Visual J++ 1.1.
Visit our newsletter archives to learn more about email hoaxes, how to spot hoaxes and how to avoid them.
http://www.stsico.com/html/hoaxes.html
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Today's Featured Websites: Mother's Day
Note: if you're not sure how to use the following links to websites, take a look at the instructions on using links at the beginning of this newsletter.
Take a look at Mother's Day at Biography.com for profiles of famous moms, such as Notorious Moms and Royal Moms, along with links to motherly advice.
http://www.biography.com/features/mother
Taken from the Congressional Record, this website has the 1998 speech made by Senator Byrd as a tribute to mothers.
http://www.senate.gov/~byrd/speech-mothersday.htm
For history of the holiday, tips on how to make it a success, poems, pictures for kids to color and more, visit Holidays on the Net.
http://www.holidays.net/mother
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