Today’s question comes from Dawn in Missouri:

I have a yahoo.com account, and I get a TON of email everyday.
What can I do to cut back on the volume of email I receive?

This question has several answers depending on the type of “excess mail” you’re receiving. Dawn didn’t specify, and you could be in one of several situations, so we’ll cover them all.

Spam

This is the junk that you never asked to receive and have zero interest in dealing with. The crudiest of the crud. We want to eliminate this before we even see it, because it’s not worth our time. Your options are pretty limited with webmail like Yahoo, as it’s up to their spam filters to protect you. If you are getting a lot of this, your webmail provider isn’t doing their job, and you ought to get a new address elsewhere. I’ve found that Google Gmail’s spam filters are really effective; I get maybe 1 piece of spam per month, and almost zero false-positives (sidebar: a “false-positive” is when your spam filter falsely identifies a good email as spam).

If you don’t want to give up your email address, some providers allow you to access your mail via a desktop mail client. Using a client like Outlook, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird, or Mac Mail will grant you access to a plethora of spam filter addons made for these programs.

Your email provider will have instructions on how to set up a mail client, if they allow it. Most every email that comes with an internet connection (i.e. Comcast, Verizon DSL, etc.) lets you use a mail client, and Google Gmail let’s you use it for free. But Yahoo Mail can only use a mail client if you purchase their Yahoo Mail Plus subscription. So hopefully Dawn and you Yahoo users aren’t having spam problems, otherwise you’ll have to upgrade to Mail Plus to use a mail client and custom spam filtering, or get an address with a different provider.

High-volume delivery services

After spam comes high volume stuff that you want to see, but may get more often than you’d like. This category includes things like newsletters, coupon emails from stores you frequent, Facebook updates, Twitter follows, etc. It’s not spam — you did request to get this stuff, after all — but at the same time you may get more than you want. There are a few things you can do to stem the tide of high-volume worthwhile content delivery sources. First and foremost, you can just say no. If you’re getting newsletters and other messages that you no longer read, nip the problem in the bud and just take yourself off the list. Every message from a “valid” source will include an unsubscribe link somewhere in the message. If you leave the list and miss it, you can always change your mind and rejoin.

For loudmouthed websites and services, see if you can turn down (or off) the automated notices. Facebook will send you tons of crap, if you let them, and web forums can notify users when someone replies to or begins a discussion. Keeping subscribed sites and services on the quiet side will do a lot to settle your inbox. Hit your user control panel for the site in question and start looking around for email or notification options.

Leverage Rules and Filters

If you’d rather corral messages than not get them at all, let your email client do the corrallin’. Outlook calls them Rules, Gmail and Yahoo call them Filters, but the end result is the same: your mail client automatically sorts and categorizes recurring messages into different folders. You can set up multiple filters to send different types of email into different folders; for example, I have one filter for each of my credit cards, sending all my bills and notices to a single folder. Whenever I see new mail in that folder, I know I need to look at it ASAP.

Between dumping spam, unsubscribing, turning down notification options, and using filters, your email inbox should start to look pretty sane again!

We’re starting a new segment today called UserQ. These are questions submitted directly to us by our users. You get answers to your burning technical questions, a little anonymous notoriety, and you help other people having the same problem. Pretty good deal right? Keep an eye out for more entries here in the future!

Sara from Tennessee posed this question:

How can I backup software installed on my computer? I understand Word documents, etc., but I have a cookbook program that holds all my recipes, and I want to save those as well. Do I just grab the whole program from the C:\Program Files folder?

Let’s hit this in two steps. First, it’s never necessary to backup actual programs. A program here would be anything that has an install process. If your computer crashes or you reformat it, you would reinstall your programs from their CD’s, or download the latest version from the software providers website. Especially on Windows PC’s, programs are tied deeply to the machine once they are installed. They put files and settings in lots of places, so grabbing every folder you can find won’t be enough to make the program work on a fresh computer. Besides, the install process takes care of putting all those files in place for you, and that’s way less work.

In short, keep your software CD’s in a safe place and bookmark any websites where you download software, especially those sites that sell their software.

But while the program is not unique, the data you create inside of it is. Word creates Word docs, Quicken files hold financial data, and Sara’s cookbook program holds her recipes. We do want to save these unique, often irreplaceable files. Sometimes it’s easy; Word docs can be picked up from My Documents and moved anytime.

However some files are handled much more tightly by the programs that maintain them. Sara likely won’t find her recipes anywhere in the My Documents folder. Instead, you must use the software to export the data into a transferable format. Exporting will put the data somewhere easy to reach, like the desktop, allowing you to put on an backup device.

This process goes by many names; some programs call it an archive, export, or backup. It can also be found under just about any menu entry. So the first step is to consult the documentation or support services of the program in question. Check the manual, read the online user guide, hit the support forum, whatever. See if you can find clear steps for how this process works. If you do, follow them and you should be good to go!

If you can’t find anything official, consult Google and search the web for answers. In our past tech support experience, we’ve found countless answers to random problems in completely obscure corners of the web. Try lots of different search terms; for instance Sara may try “backup cookbook recipes” and then “export cookbook recipes.” You never know what might lead to answer.

There is one exception: we typically save company phone numbers, especially of the 800 variety, as as a last resort. No one likes sitting on hold forever, paying for support, dealing with automated systems, or hearing the support agent say “it’s someone else’s problem.” Unless you know the support is fast, easy, and effective, this type of problem is usually better handled on your own.

The startup review site Discovering Startups has posted a review of Fwd:Vault! Simply being included in the lineup is of course awesome, but we’re also eligible for their monthly “Best-Of Discovering Startups” award. Winners get face time on the front page of their website, which is huge for web-based companies like us, and you can help us win!

Click the badge below to check out our review, then click the “Vote” button in the upper righthand corner. No website registration necessary.

Tell your friends to hit the site as well! The more votes the better our chances!

Update: We’re out to an early lead! Make sure you vote from work and home!

While we were down in Knoxville, we traded limited edition Fwd:Vault pins with expo attendees, building quite a sizeable collection. We then raffled the entire set off to one lucky winner. This year it went to Sister Linda Martin, Principle at the Gesu School in University Heights, Ohio. Her school’s team, “The Team to be Named Later”, competed in the Elementary Level of Do or DI.

Sr. Linda accepting her winning cache of pins

She is donating the entire set to her school, and will put it on display in the school’s trophy case. How cool is that!? Sr. Linda has promised us pictures once the pins are set up in their new home, which we’ll share here.

Congrats to Sr. Linda, her team, and all the students at The Gesu School who will get to enjoy this collection of national and international culture!

All our pictures can be viewed from our last post.

The Destination Imagination (DI) Global Finals Exhibit Hall showcases many organizations that promote creative learning, healthy living, and positive values. We are so proud of Fwd:Vault’s inclusion in this event. It’s no surprise companies like 3M, Promethean, HOPSports, and Fwd:Vault find value in supporting the development of creative problem solving. We’re grooming these minds for the jobs of the future, jobs that require innovation and ingenuity. Physics and math based competitions cultivate engineers and teachers. Improv sessions squelch fear of public speaking. And the best and the brightest gain leadership skills and personal accountability critical for future success.

Here’s a few highlight pictures from the event. A complete album is available at the bottom.

Our finished booth

Chuck Cadle, President of Destination ImagiNation, swung by to say hi.

The band Mae was at the expo taking pictures with some of the team. I couldn’t resist…

Our complete photo album from the event

Destination Imagination Global Finals 2010 kicked off in high style on Wednesday night with a special performance by Mae! Over 13,000 teams competed for a coveted 1,031 slots. Competition is underway and concludes Saturday. The excitement from children bubbling with enthusiasm for creative learning and problem solving is so contagious you can’t help from singing along, tapping your feet, and getting into the pin trading business. Below is a clip from last night’s opening ceremonies!

To kick off our new partnership with Destination ImagiNation, we’ll be exhibiting at the Innovation Expo, a portion of DI’s year-end Global Finals celebration event. The event is closed to the public, but we are looking forward to meeting all of the lucky attendees.

In the spirit of previous tech support posts on this blog, part of our exhibit includes Q&A sessions with answers to participants’ nagging technical problems. We’ll record those sessions and post them right here. We’ll also have stories and pictures throughout the 3-day event, so check back to see what the DI community thinks of Fwd:Vault!

I am proud to announce that Destination ImagiNation, Inc. has signed on as Fwd:Vault’s first partner. “DI” is an international non-profit, recognized worldwide as a leader in teaching teamwork, creative problem solving, and imaginative outside-the-box thinking. Annually, their programs touch some 20,000 volunteers and 100,000 participants.

From an announcement to their core volunteers:

We know that teams generate a fair amount of digital information over the course of a program year, doubly so for our regional and affiliate volunteers. Until now, the requirements of available data storage services were simply beyond our support capacity. Fwd:Vault works without any software or hardware, making it easy for the entire DI community to implement and use.

Every DI participant, volunteer, and supporter who signs up for a Fwd:Vault account will have a portion of their subscription donated directly back to Destination ImagiNation, and I’m really excited for the opportunity to provide direct financial support to such a worthy institution.

The geeks behind Fwd:Vault understand that computers are practically a foreign language to “normal” people. That is the idea behind our backup service, after all.

So anytime we come across information that easily lifts the fog surrounding the rest of your computing experience, we love passing them along.

Today we’ve got an article that reveals 10 concepts about your PC that you may not understand. If you want to know about that extra software that comes preinstalled on your new computer, or what parts to bring to the repair shop, read on.

I never remember to defragment my hard drives, but scheduling the task doesn’t work. Invariably, I am either in the middle of something, or the computer is turned off.

Instead, I use a nifty program called MyDefrag to defragment all my hard drives whenever the screensaver kicks on. By using the screensaver as the trigger, it ensures that (a) the computer is on, and (b) that I’m not using it. When I’m ready to go back to work, just shake the mouse like you would to stop any other screensaver, and back to work you go; the defragger will pick up where it left off next time. Perfect!

Installation is pretty straightforward, it even asks you if you want to set the defrag process as the screensaver…

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The only thing you have to watch out for is how the program sets up the scheduled task, if you select the option (see image above). It brings up a command prompt asking for your Windows user password. The command prompt is the classic white-text-on-black-background text-only interface that usually scares the crap out of regular users.

(click to enlarge)

Just enter the password of the username listed, and hit enter. If, like a lot of people, you don’t have a password set, just hit enter and you’re done.

Once the installation is complete, the only change I needed to make in the default installation was to max out the delay between complete defrags. By default, the defrag screensaver will run if a complete defrag was performed over 4 hours ago. That’s pretty hardcore, so I upped the setting to every 24 hours. Right click on the desktop, choose “Properties,” then click the “Screensaver” tab…

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Note that the defrag screensaver may still come on more than once in a 24 hour period, but only until a single defrag is performed completely.

Also don’t be alarmed when you see the defrag for the first time. It displays the usual colorful lines representing the sectors on the disk, but does so in full-screen mode (it is a screensaver after all). Upon seeing it for the first time, several of my friends were afraid that my computer had died. Just keep it in mind the first time it runs, you may even want to use the screensaver “Preview” option (from the screen pictured above) to familiarize yourself with the look of it.