HMTech.ca

I’ve always preferred to access email through my ISP’s webmail service, rather than through an email client like Outlook Express or Thunderbird. The main reason for this preference is convenience, in that I can access my email from any computer that has Internet access.

I also like to keep my messages organized, so over time I’ve created several webmail folders and distributed messages amongst them.

Now the time has come where I would like to backup my webmail to my local computer.

Although I trust that my email data is safer from hardware failure residing in my ISP’s data center, there’s always a chance that data corruption could occur or that my account could be accidentally deleted.

After some research, I discovered that there’s no easy solution to synchronizing webmail folders to your computer. The best solution I found is slightly tedious.

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For security purposes, I always run as a limited user under Windows XP. Although it’s more secure to run Windows this way, it also causes a lot of inconveniences. One of which occurred earlier today, when I tried to disable XP’s autoplay feature.

Autoplay would scan my external hard drive every time I connected it to the computer. Not only is this annoying, it’s also a security risk, because autoplay could inadvertently execute malicious code on any external storage device that connects to my computer.

Autoplay scanning the external drive

After quickly searching Google, I found two solutions. Solution #1 is for WinXP Pro users and Solution #2 is for WinXP Home users.

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I’ve been using SquirrelMail to access my webmail for a couple of years now.  Over the past year, the number of spam messages I receive has been increasing steadily.

In an attempt to cut down on the number of spam messages entering my inbox, I enabled SpamAssasin from my Bluehost cPanel.

SpamAssassin in cPanel

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