*** ANSWERMAN INTERNET EXTRA *** For the week of April 7, 1997 This is the free weekly newsletter for the community of Internet users on America Online. This week, AnswerMan covers the essentials of e-mail: links, encryption and other tricks. Also, lots more on cookies, and great news for Macintosh users. =*=*= IN THIS ISSUE =*=*= AnswerMan's Update -- E-mail essentials: encryption, hotlinks, message status -- More on cookies: find them, crumble them -- Happy news for Macintosh users: AOL3 and AOL LINK Upcoming Weekly Focus -- What's coming up The End -- How to contact us or unsubscribe =*=*= WHAT YOU CAN DO THIS WEEK WITH ANSWERMAN =*=*= Go to keyword: For: ANSWERMAN Daily tips and Internet message boards AM FOCUS More information on using e-mail NET HELP Get quick help for your Internet questions NET TUTORIAL A journey of 1,000 miles begins with this keyword AM GLOSSARY Decrypt that Internet jargon Here are direct links for AOL 3.0 users: Go to keyword ANSWERMAN Go to keyword AM FOCUS NET TUTORIAL =*=*= ANSWERMAN'S UPDATE =*=*= -.-.- E-mail Essentials -.-.- E-mail is a wonderful thing. The Web's great, online chat is fun, FTP is dandy, but if I was stranded on a desert island with one Internet tool, I'd pick e-mail. Pound for pound, you can't beat electronic mail for usefulness and simplicity. Yet e-mail can do so much more than you may have imagined. Here are a few e-mail tricks -- you'll find more info about the wonders of e-mail at keyword AM FOCUS. Beloved reader Yeasm writes: "My friend send me a letter the other day and she put a 'hyperlink' in it. I thought that was pretty cool. I didn't know I could do that. I just thought that if you ever run out of subjects you could talk about how to incorporate a hyperlink in your e-mail." I'll never be out of subjects, but that's a great question. Including a hyperlink in your messages is easy. Start writing your message as usual. Then pick KEYWORD from your GO TO menu and enter the keyword of the AOL forum or URL of the Web site to which you want to link and press Go. Now the magic: drag the little heart from the title bar of that window onto your e-mail message. Voila, a named link will appear. You can also drag items from your Favorite Places folder this way. Another neat thing to do: type some text describing the site or forum and select it with the mouse. Drag the little heart onto your highlighted text -- and your words will become a link to that site. Including hyperlinks in your messages works when you're writing to other AOL users who also use AOL 3.0. If you try to send links to Internet users or someone with an ancient version of AOL, the links won't be included. Next up: the wonderful world of mail status messages. Did you know that you can check on the mail you've sent to see if it's been read yet? You can tell when it was read, and (if you sent the message to several people) who's looked at it and who hasn't. This is another feature that only works when you're sending mail to other AOL users (the Internet does not provide a method of tracking messages.) Here's how to do it. On the Mac, pick Read Mail from your MAIL menu. In the window that appears, click on the Sent Mail tab. You'll see a list of the messages that you've sent recently. Click on one and press the Status button. On Windows, its just as easy: Pick Check Mail You've Sent from your MAIL menu. Click on the message that you want to track and press Show Status. Ta da! If you see the text "Not Applicable" in the status window, it simply means that you can't get the status of a message to a non-AOL user. Another beloved reader asks: "There is an AOL user who sends me many e-mail messages daily. This member can determine if I read the message and at what time. Can I block this information from getting to the sender of the messages?" No, you can't. Sorry. But if someone is annoying you via e-mail, you can block all messages from him or her! Go to keyword MAIL CONTROLS. Choose "Block all e-mails from the addresses listed" and add the miscreant's name to the list. That's it, he's persona non grata in your mailbox. Finally, the question that you all bombarded me with since last week's newsletter: "How do I encrypt my e-mail?" Serves me right: in last week's letter I casually mentioned the fact that you can encrypt your mail, but didn't say how. Mail encryption in not built into the AOL software, so you'll have to use another utility to encrypt your messages. There are many programs that do encryption, but for my money, the one to use is PGP -- Pretty Good Privacy. Despite its modest moniker, PGP provides very strong encryption -- and the program is free as air. PGP is available for Windows, Macintosh and many other computer systems. I can't get into the details of how encryption works or how to use PGP--this newsletter is already too long. :) But there are some fine web sites that will provide the details. I encourage you to check them out. MIT's PGP page lets you download the software and includes many useful links: http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html. Also, try the Beginner's Guide to PGP, at http://www.arc.unm.edu/~drosoff/pgp/pgp.html. Although it hasn't been updated since October, I like Benjamin's PGP Page, which features tons of relevant links, at http://members.aol.com/netnavig/pgp.htm. (Benjamin, if you're reading this, update your cool page.) One more thing: for legal reasons PGP is only distributable in the USA and Canada. If you're elsewhere, you'll have to use something else. (Sorry.) Should you encrypt your mail? That depends how secret your messages are to you, and how much (or how little) you trust strangers on the Internet. If you're just gabbing with friends, sharing recipes and telling tales in your e-mail, don't bother. If you're e-mailing trade secrets, your plans for world domination or private love letters, maybe you want to consider encrypting your mail. Here are direct links for AOL 3.0 users: Keyword: MAIL CONTROLS MIT's PGP page Beginner's Guide Benjamin's PGP Page .-.-.- C is for Cookie, that's good enough for me -.-.- My goodness! I mentioned cookies in last week's newsletter -- those notes-to-themselves that some web sites leave on your hard disk -- and you folks started banging on my door like never before. (Well, not since all the requests for info on how to encrypt e-mail. :-) The question of the week was "OK, now that we know what cookies are, how do we get rid of them?" If you're using AOL 3.0 for Windows 95, look for a directory on your hard disk called C:\WINDOWS\COOKIES -- each text file in there is an individual cookie left by a web site. Erasing the cookies is easy: just throw them in the recycle bin and you're done. There's another way to control the creation of cookies on your computer: from the Web browser (keyword WEB) press the Preferences button. A whole slew of customizable choices for the browser will appear -- click on the Advanced tab. There you'll see a checkbox called "Warn before accepting cookies." Click it, and the next time you happen upon a site wants to toss its cookies on your machine, you'll see a message giving you the chance to opt out. (Go to http://www.infoseek.com -- one site that uses cookies -- to try it out.) Some people who hate cookies always say "no"; others choose to just accept cookies from well-known sites that they trust. Many others just don't worry about cookies at all. I can't tell you which attitude is best. I do think that cookies are safe 99.9% of the time, but some users resent the perceived invasion of privacy. Using AOL for Windows 3? It doesn't support cookies... Unless you've downloaded the Microsoft browser upgrade from keyword NEWBROWSER, in which case it will work just like the Win95 version. If you're using AOL for Mac 3.0, you can't prevent cookies from being installed on your system, but it is easy to delete them after they're there. In your System Folder:Preferences:America Online:Browser Cache folder you'll see a file called cookies.txt. Just throw it in the trash to kill the cookies that are stored there. Unfortunately, the file will re-appear with the next web site that wants to store one. Using Mac 2.7 or earlier? No cookies. Upgrade, why dontcha? If you shut off cookies or throw them away, some sites will forget what ads you've looked at (big deal) and some will forget your preferences. Some sites, such as the New York Times site, use cookies to store your username and password (for that site, not your AOL password) -- so deleting your cookies might make it harder to log in to that site. If you take a look at a cookie, you'll see a jumble of characters that means something to the web site that placed it there. To satisfy the curious among you, here's the cookie that InfoSeek put on my system: InfoseekUserId 27684527A6141576D8B09A9756F9CF70 infoseek.com / 0 3099888317 Looks innocuous enough. I deleted it anyhow, and the site didn't care the next time I visited. For more information about cookies, check out Andy's Cookie Notes at http://www.illuminatus.com/cookie.fcgi. There you'll find lots of additional links, a FAQ, and a very good description of the whole cookie process. Also, the information about cookies that I've shared in this newsletter will be available at keyword AM FOCUS. Here are direct links for AOL 3.0 users: InfoSeek (uses a cookie) Andy's Cookie Notes Go to keyword AM FOCUS -.-.- Happy News for Macintosh users -.-.- I've got several news bites for my fellow Macintosh users. First of all, the final version of AOL 3.0 for non-Power Macintosh (that is, 68K Macs) is available at keyword UPGRADE. There are improvements to the web browser and, oh yeah, no more crashing problems because of Apple's fixed CFM (Code Fragment Manager.) If you are currently using a beta version of this software, you must upgrade to the final version. Minimum system requirements for AOL 3.0 are: a 68030 CPU, System 7.1.0, 8 MB RAM and a 9600 BPS modem. More big news: two new forums for Mac users! Check out keywords AOL LINK and TELNET. AOL Link is a part of AOL 3.0 that allows you to use external Internet applications such as Netscape Navigator, Internet Relay Chat, Anarchie and just about any other third-party Internet software, through AOL. Keyword AOL LINK provides the details on using Netscape, IRC, and other tools, and keyword TELNET delves into the details of connecting to Internet games, databases and other computers with a text-only interface. You may even be able to use Telnet connect to the computer at school or work in order to check your e-mail there. Windows AOL users have similar functionality -- the software that lets Windows users use other Internet applications with AOL is called Winsock. Similar information has been available for Windows users for some time at keyword WINSOCK -- but now Mac users who want to use more Net tools via AOL will get 100% Mac-specific information. Here are direct links for AOL 3.0 users: Keyword UPGRADE Keyword AOL LINK (Mac) or WINSOCK (Windows) Keyword TELNET =*=*= UPCOMING WEEKLY FOCUS =*=*= Every week, AnswerMan focuses on a particular facet of using the Internet. Here are the Weekly Focus topics we'll be covering in the near future: April 14 - April 20: Dealing with Spam April 21 - April 27: Getting Help Online April 28 - May 4: Playing games on the Internet also this month: genealogy sites and a look at Casablanca (the next AOL) =*=*= THE END =*=*= That's all for this week. Got comments about this newsletter? We want to hear them! Send 'em to AnswerMan. The e-mail address is AnswerMan@aol.com. We would hate to see you go, but if you must leave, there are two easy ways to unsubscribe yourself from this newsletter. You can use either. #1: Send an e-mail message -- To: LISTSERV@LISTSERV.AOL.COM Subject: UNSUBSCRIBE Body: UNSUBSCRIBE ANSWERMAN #2: For AOL 3.0 users only: Click here then press "Unsubscribe". The difference between a cow and a bean is a bean can begin an adventure. Copyright 1997 by America Online, Inc. All rights reserved.