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Windows Live Mail and Yahoo! Accounts

My official (Vishwak) email is configured with Office Outlook for last 6 years+. My personal, blog and newsletters are with Hotmail. And I have been a paid Hotmail user for years, so I read my Hotmail through Outlook Express ON & OFF. When about a year back Microsoft came out with Windows Live Mail Desktop (now desktop is dropped and for short WLM) I switched to that. With Hotmail, WLM works great – it syncs up all folders in Hotmail including Inbox, Sent Items, Junk e-mail, Deleted Items, Drafts & custom folders.

I like a lot the new Yahoo! Web 2.0 Mail interface. This email ID is being used by me for a lot of my memberships including INFITT, so I wanted the convenience of using it offline with WLM. Yahoo! mail doesn’t expose Web Interface, so you need to use conventional POP3/SMTP interfaces. Yahoo! requires you to be a Paid user for that – so I paid $20 or so per year. I could easily get the POP3/Inbox configured, but sending emails was becoming an issue. Finally here is the configuration that works for me:  

Yahoo! mail configuration with Windows Live Mail (WLM)

And recently when I wanted WLM to be moved from my desktop to my Laptop so that I carry the emails with me. Yahoo! mail works with SMTP, so it doesn’t sync the Sent Items folder from WLM to Yahoo! mail online. Though WLM did have an export option, it didn’t work – pains of using a Beta software . After few tries I found a quick ‘n’ dirty way to solve it. I dragged all the mails from Sent Items of Yahoo! account in WLM to a new folder I created under Hotmail account in WLM. Installed WLM in my laptop, synched my Hotmail account. Then I configured the Yahoo! account in WLM, did the reverse process of Hotmail folder to Yahoo! Sent Items. In short, I used Hotmail as a backup and restore for Yahoo! mail :-)

Don’t leave your search trails

In the fierce war on Search Engines this can be a new page – for all of you out there who are wondering what war, hasn’t it been won by google I do believe it is not. Anyways, as the book “The Search” talks about how much can be known about you by Search Engine companies with your search behaviour/data. Accussing Google is doing this today and tracking everyone is rubbish, as it will take enormous processing power and no one has yet figured out a way to monetize that information for profit. But in the future this will become a possibility when computing power and data mining software become more sophisticated.

So online users worry about their privacy will become a genuine concern. I was happy to see a news today that Ask.com is planning to do something on this. They promise to protect your privacy by not storing information on your searches in their database with AskEraser (to be introduced by this year-end). If People like and flock to this feature, Google can implement the technology overnight – they have to stop doing their logging :-) . But the challenge for Google is not Technology but business, because of the impact this will have on their advertisement business.

All said, privacy has every chance of becoming the next battle ground in search. It will be interesting to see any path-breaking innovation Google Engineers can come up with which protects Advt. revenue and privacy.

Till then, let us continue searching on the net as usual …