Raj Agrawal

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How To Keep Your Inbox SPAM Free

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4 steps every user must follow to fight against E-mail SPAM.

It has been a long time since I registered on Gmail and haven’t received a single SPAM mail. This is because I have cautiously used my E-mail IDs at every web portal I registered with. As a result, my Gmail Account has been clean with a “Zero Spam History”. By zero spam history I mean no SPAM in my inbox and not even in the SPAM folder! I am sure of one technique that Email-Spammers have been flowing since the online SPAM world came into existence. It’s what I call as “Steal and Exploit”.

stop spam here
(Image Credit: messagedefence.co.uk)

The main sources of Email SPAM are websites with Freebies, Porn related content and Get Paid To (GPT). Once a user registers on these websites, their Email ID is available for the spammers. How? May be these website owners “sell” the Email IDs to spammers. The bottom line is, you can’t stop them. The only trick is let them continue with what they are doing and keep your important Email accounts away from them.

Follow these steps to effectively beat SPAM:

  • Use 3 Email Accounts. One only for your important contacts, second for social networking and third as a disposable email account especially for spammers.
  • If your accounts are only on Gmail, use a freeware application called GmailAssistant to check multiple email accounts at the same time for new emails to make it convenient. For other email services, you can use ePrompter (freeware) which supports AIM, AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Yahoo Beta, Gmail, POP3, Earthlink, Excite, Juno, Email.com, Lycos, Mail.com, Mindspring, MSN, MyWay, Netscape, Rediffmail, SBC Yahoo and hundreds of other e-mail domains.
  • Disclose the disposable Email ID anywhere you want. Spammers will be able to attack this disposable account only.
  • You can get a quick and free disposable email from 10 Minute Mail, Guerrilla Mail and Mailinator.

Well, this is my way. Do you have your own way of dealing with email SPAM? If yes, then share your creative ideas to deal with this menace.

Nano Powered Apparels To Charge Our Portable Electronics

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The clothes we wear can generate enough energy to charge our mobile phone batteries, when powered with technology.

Nanotechnology has a better answer to energy efficiency and conservation. Professor Li-Wei Lin at University of California, Berkley is working along with his team to enrich our clothing with more features, to be able to keep our portable gadgets like our mobile phone charged with energy generated by body movements. His idea is to intertwine electric generators into clothing fibre. Thus allowing  the energy generated from our body to be utilized for a purpose rather than being wasted away.

Preview of an experiment where energy is generated by simple hand movements

Earlier, Sciencedaily reported about the Stanford Engineer Yi Cui, is working on a similar concept with a different approach. He is experimenting to code nano material into common cloth with nano infused ink. Thus building a battery that will be embedded into clothing which will act as a energy storing device.

Conductive textile (Cotton dipped into nano-infused ink). Credit: Image courtesy of Stanford UniversityOur future has so much to give. Technologies like these are paving the way for smarter and more energy efficient future.

Upgrade To WordPress 3.0 Manually And Successfully

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6 essential steps to be followed for manually upgrading to WordPress 3.0 or any other version, the error free way

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WordPress 3.0 a.k.a ‘Thelonious’ was released yesterday with a huge bag of improvements like Custom post types, MU merge, menu editor, Twenty Ten theme, over 1200 bug fixes making it more stable, secure and faster than ever before. But, my upgrade attempt wasn’t quite smooth.

On an average, every 4 out o f 10 WordPress upgrades are not successful in the first attempt. This is not a official stats but is in accordance with what is observed on WordPress related forums. I ran into a problem while upgrading to 3.0 where my Admin Panel was not accessible at all and it barfed up a 404 error. My first thought was to re-install WordPress (I never followed the etiquette of disabling all plugins before the upgrade process), but I decided to play wiser this time. I disabled only those plugins that were active in frequent communication with the database like WP Super Cache, WP Database backup and some security plugins to save my efforts. Deleting cached pages from wp super cache did not help. Surprisingly, WP Security Scan plugin was causing all the mayhem!

In simple words, always follow these essential steps before any manual WordPress upgrade/re-install:

  • Put your blog in maintenance mode with a easy to use Maintenance Mode plugin. Follow BloggingWithSuccess’s steps on how to install and use this plugin. Though this is optional, i recommend using it as it communicates with the readers clearly about what is going on
  • Like i said earlier, disable only those plugins that are active in frequent communication with the database like WP Super Cache, WP Database backup and security plugins. If you do not understand what this means, you should disable all plugins before the upgrade to be on a safer side
  • Login to your blog’s ftp server with your preferred FTP program
  • Overwrite all extracted files from the zipped WordPress file except for WP Content folder (It contains your blog’s themes and plugins which you don’t want to lose) and wp-config.php file
  • After the files have been overwritten, append /wp-admin/upgrade.php to your blog’s home url in the address bar and hit the enter key. This is to perform the final step in the WordPress upgrade process. So, you should be directed to the upgrade page which will look like this:
Click “Upgrade WordPress” and you are all done.

Update: I have noticed that on this version of WordPress, the links in admin panel are breaking down when a “certain number” of plugins are activated. If is the case for you then you should deactivate the unnecessary plugins and active only the important ones until a patch is available.

So, how has your WordPress installation experience been ever since you started using it?