This article is from the February 2003 Issue of Update.
I read your spam article in the December Update with interest. Do you have any tips on how to deal with the spam that we already get?
If you're getting plagued with spam at work you need to talk to your technical support department and get them to install filters on the network that will capture the spam before it gets to you. If you're a home user you need to take care of this yourself.
First of all, make sure that you have POP3 enabled. This allows you to read your email on your internet service provider's server, rather than having to download it on to your own machine first. If you don't know how to do this your ISP can provide you with instructions.
Once you've got POP3 enabled I suggest you get hold of a couple of programs. The first is Spambutcher (www.spambutcher.com). This is a commercial product (but it's very cheap) which will automatically check your account for you and siphon off about 95 per cent of the spam. You can then view what it's caught and recover or delete emails.
The second program is Mailwasher (www.mailwasher.net). This is a free program (though you're encouraged to make donations to the author) which looks at your account and filters out the other five per cent. (Using this program you can also read and delete your mail on the server rather than downloading it.)
Since I've started using these programs the amount of spam on my own machines is down to less than one per cent. Between them they take about five minutes to set up, and it's worth doing to a achieve spam-free existence!
I want people to see the most recent version of my web page, and I'm concerned that their browser may simply use a previously cached version. How can I ensure that their browser always visits my site to get the newest version?
I was a bit stumped with this one for a while, but one of my contacts came to the rescue and suggested adding the line: <META HTTP-EQUIV="no_cache"> in the <HEAD> tag on the page. I've not tried this myself, since I don't have pages that change that regularly, but I read up about it, and it should do the trick.
Some time ago you recommended a product called Backflip which allowed you to keep your favourites online, rather than just on your own machine. Can you suggest any similar products, since I didn't particularly like Backflip?
There are now a whole host of these available. You could try the following: http://useful.webwizards.net/wbbm.htm [broken link removed 14 April 2005] which lists more than 50 different utilities that do the same job.
My web page is constructed from tables and, looking at the results I'm getting back from search engines, they're picking up the text in the menu table on the left-hand side of the page. Do you know how I can still use tables but get the search engine to pick up the description of the site, which is in another table?
Go to: www.delorie.com/web/ses-hint.html. This explains the problem and a neat solution.
Site of the month
My site of the month is www.seo-reporter.com/output.html which is very useful for any of us who want to get better rankings for our websites. It's constantly being updated and is a fund of useful information.
Phil Bradley is an internet consultant, trainer, web designer and author. Visit www.philb.com for free information on internet introductions, search engine articles, web design tips and a host of other free information. Recently published: Getting and Staying Noticed on the Web. If you have any questions about the internet send an email to philb@philb.com with the subject header 'column query'.