Chapter 1. Email and Spam Annoyances

Let us all praise email. It's the great instant communicator. And, of course, the source of instant annoyances.

No other software is so spectacularly useful and so spectacularly annoying. How annoying? One word: spam.

Of course, there are a lot more email annoyances beyond spam. Like why, when you travel, you sometimes can't send email, no matter how hard you try. Like not being able to access your corporate account. Like getting notices that mail you've sent can't be deliveredeven though you never sent it.

There are so many annoying things about email, in fact, that I've had to break up this chapter into several parts. It starts off with general email annoyances. Then it covers that plague of the Internet, spam. After that, it delves into email software that Windows users love to hate, Outlook and Outlook Express. It also shows you how to fix annoyances in that old email standby, Eudora, and dips into the future with a look at Google's Gmail, which has its own set of annoyances. America Online users, don't worry; AOL's email and other annoyances get their very own chapter later on in this book.