E Mail Messages

Lately I've noticed a lower form of communication that negates some of the convenience of technology. People who owe me a call but who don't want to reach me -- either because they're busy or embarrassed by what they have to say -- leave a voice mail message when they're pretty sure I won't be at the office.Like at 6 in the morning or 8 at night.John Gisler calls that "drive-by" voice mail, a deliberate effort to avoid direct contact or conflict. "I work hard to keep communication in person and candid, especially that of a somewhat critical nature," says Gisler, president of Twin City Co-Ops Federal Credit Union.

I sent my son an e-mail a couple of days ago with directions to a family gathering in Philadelphia. When I didn't get a response, I called his college dorm room to find out whether he'd received it.It turned out he'd been busy. He's a student computer aide, and his mailbox was so jammed with messages that he'd missed mine."It's this Melissa virus thing," he complained."Were that many people infected?" I asked."No, I don't know anybody who's infected," he said, "but everybody's worried about it."

iPhone checks e-mail, surfs Web with compact deviceIf you don't think the Internet appliance has arrived yet, you don't have an InfoGear iPhone ($299) on your desk. This desktop phone, with a built-in, 7.4-inch monochrome LED touch screen and pull-out QWERTY keyboard, allows you to access up to four e-mail accounts and surf the Web.The iPhone out-of-box experience couldn't be more satisfying. You take it out of the box, plug it into the wall and your phone line, choose which Internet service plan you want, enter credit card and user information and you're ready to surf.

Microsoft Corp. just finished a pretty rough few weeks, and I was planning to ease up on them. And then along came Bubbleboy.By now you may have heard of this computer virus. If you use Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 browser and the company's Outlook or Outlook Express e-mail programs, Bubbleboy will send a copy of itself to everybody in your address book. Other than that it's pretty much harmless.The scary part is the way it works. You get Bubbleboy by reading an e-mail message. Just display the message on your screen, and your computer can be infected.

Phone takes messages, tells you when e-mail messages await youCasio PhoneMate's new IT-380 E-Mail Link ($149) is an unusual telephone that combines normal desk phone functions with a digital answering machine and an "e-mail advisory" feature. At intervals you schedule, the IT-380 will dial your Internet service provider and alert you to new messages waiting for you online.A three-line, 18-character LCD screen displays the headers of up to 40 e-mail messages, showing subject lines, senders' e-mail addresses, and time-date stamps.

SAN DIEGO -- America Online Inc., the No. 1 online service, filed another lawsuit yesterday to stop its customers from being flooded with millions of unsolicited pieces of "junk" e-mail.The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego against Michael Persaud, claims that he committed fraud by using various names to send millions of e-mail messages to America Online customers. Those messages solicit money in exchange for a directory of companies that offer home employment.The lawsuit is one of nine filed by AOL in five states against people who send out "spam," a term for unwanted electronic mail.

Most of Jimmy and Bonnie Nolen's two-year search for the perfect home was decidedly low-tech.But after reading stacks of Cecil County home-shopping pamphlets and driving to look at dozens of houses, their homebuying unexpectedly took a high-tech turn onto the "information superhighway" last fall.A few weeks after Jimmy Nolen, a ship's captain with the U.S. Merchant Marine, left home on a four-month assignment at sea, Bonnie Nolen found the house they'd been seeking.It is a 6,000-square-foot contemporary home with high ceilings and angles and curves that look like "a little gray castle," said Mrs. Nolen, 51.The house has three fireplaces, five bedrooms, an in-law suite and a floor plan that is open and spacious.

It doesn't take an expensive poll or an exhaustive round of phone calls for Joe DiGiacinto to check the mood of the Maryland electorate. All he has to do is switch on his computer.Every few hours, between other chores, the office manager at Ellen R. Sauerbrey's campaign sits down at the keyboard in his cubbyhole. He quickly sorts through the latest batch of e-mail messages -- compliments and criticisms, policy questions and personal gripes, requests for lawn signs and for help with school projects.

BIG Brother is watching you! Especially if you're at work reading this article online on your employer's computer.Companies are installing new computer systems for their employees and opening up a whole new world of Internet and e-mail usage.Some experts predict that by the year 2000, 40 million computers users will send 60 billion e-mail messages each year. Many of these people access the Internet in connection with their work.Most employees using this new technology are probably unaware that their employers have the capacity to monitor and read their e-mail messages.

SHERRY IS JUST 13, but she is dating a much older guy who is pressuring her to have sex. Nadine is the same age and she's already had sex, but she was too drunk to remember it, and now she has an STD.Dhani is doing drugs, and a couple of his friends might be gay. Bobby's parents are divorced, and his mother's ex-con boyfriend is roughing her up. Tasha is 13, too, incredibly hip and very wise, but she's already given up on her future.Meet your child's new friends. Nervous yet?These kids all "attend" Edgar Allan Poe Middle School, an authentic mix of reality and virtual reality.

You've seen plenty of e-mail trying to trick you into sharing sensitive data. Now the Federal Trade Commission is urging consumers to be even more cautious of online scammers looking to take advantage of upheavals in the financial marketplace. The FTC is warning consumers to be wary of e-mail messages that look as if they come from a financial institution that recently acquired a consumer's bank, savings and loan, or mortgage. These messages, the FTC says, may be from "phishers" looking for your account numbers, passwords and Social Security numbers.

Two spam e-mail messages floating around the Internet contain a malicious virus that forces you to wipe your hard drive clean to get rid of the infection, warns the Better Business Bureau of Greater Maryland. One e-mail purports to be from UPS, telling the recipient that a shipment could not be delivered. The reader is asked to open an attachment to gain access to an invoice waybill in order to pick up the shipment, the BBB says. The attachment contains the damaging virus. The second e-mail, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, directs the recipient to click on a link to read an article about the FBI vs. Facebook.

Bogus e-mail appearing to come from universities and colleges is making the rounds to "phish" for personal or sensitive information such as passwords, credit card account data and Social Security numbers. In a warning last week, Penn State warned its students, faculty, staff and alumni to beware of e-mail messages from addresses such as The Psu.edu Team, websupport@webmaster.com, and ALERT@psu.edu. One version of the message states that it's from the "webmail messaging center" and that the university is upgrading Penn State WebMail so recipients should "upgrade their user accounts."

As e-mail messages, text messages and social network postings become nearly ubiquitous in the lives of teenagers, the informality of electronic communications is seeping into their schoolwork, a new study says. Nearly two-thirds of 700 students surveyed said their e-communication style sometimes bled into school assignments, according to the study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in partnership with the College Board's National Commission on Writing. About half said they sometimes omitted proper punctuation and capitalization in schoolwork.

Be wary of e-mail that says someone has filed a complaint against you or your company with the Department of Justice, Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration or Better Business Bureau. According to the FBI, the e-mail messages are intended to appear as legitimate communications from the various agencies and they address recipients by name. Other personal information may also be included in the e-mail. Consistent with similar schemes, the e-mail likely will attempt to obtain personally identifiable information, the FBI says.

This is the time of year for greeting cards, and a growing number of them, conveniently, will come via the Internet. There's only one problem: Some of the e-mail messages saying that you have an e-greeting card from a friend or family member may instead be from a scam artist intent on obtaining your Social Security number, credit-card data or even brokerage account information. "People like receiving greeting cards this time of year, and they are likely to click on these greetings" if they are in their e-mail inbox, said Stu Elefant, senior product manager for McAfee Inc., an Internet security firm that markets products that detect unsafe Web sites or e-mail.

While using Outlook Express 6, it occa- sionally offers to compact folders to reduce space on my hard drive. What happens to the folders when they are "compacting"? What does this process do? Where do the removed files go? Also, I can't find my Outlook Express folders stored on my C drive searching for DBX files, so what extension is OE6 using to store e-mails? A good explanation of the "compacting" process would be welcome. - Jim Wren, columbus.rr.com Quickly stated, compacting a database gets done in most information collecting software, including Outlook Express with its databases of address books, e-mail messages and such.

WASHINGTON - Republicans and Democrats drew new lines yesterday in the battle over John R. Bolton, issuing rival reports to stake out their positions for the next stage of the Senate debate over his nomination to become ambassador to the United Nations. The reports reflected the deep divisions on the Foreign Relations Committee that prevented Bolton from winning its endorsement last week. The panel's Republicans, who took the unusual step of voting to send Bolton's nomination to the Senate without a recommendation, submitted only an eight-page brief that described him as "a highly qualified nominee" who had not sought to manipulate intelligence, despite the claims of his critics.

BEIJING - The thousands of people who poured into the streets of China this month for the anti-Japanese protests that shook Asia were bound by nationalist anger but also by something more: They are China's cell phone and computer generation. For several weeks, as the protests grew larger and more unruly, China banned almost all coverage in the state news media. But it hardly mattered. An underground conversation was raging via e-mail, text message and instant online messaging that inflamed public opinion and served as an organizing tool for protesters.

In 2000, amid rising concerns that its painkiller Vioxx posed heart risks, Merck overruled one of its scientists after he suggested that a patient in a clinical trial had probably died of a heart attack. In an e-mail exchange about Vioxx, the company's most important new drug at the time, a senior Merck scientist repeatedly encouraged the researcher to change his views about the death "so that we don't raise concerns." In subsequent reports to the Food and Drug Administration and in a paper published in 2003, Merck designated the cause of death as "unknown" for the patient, a 73-year-old woman.