Firewalls
Windows XP has a standard Firewall.
A firewall is software or hardware that protects your computer so that others cannot reach it.
Compare it to a porter, who determines whether or not you may enter.
If you have a broadband connection (ADSL or cable) to the Internet, your computer is always online. So the odds that our computer is attacked by hackers, viruses and other pests is also huge.
A hacker is also a person who tries to intrude on people’s computers.
You can imagine what all this person can do when he has infiltrated your PC, compare it to a thief who has invaded your house, you’re better off without them.
The firewall that comes with Windows XP, protects us when we connect through a phone line and broadband connection (cable or ADSL).
We can use the Firewall on or off by clicking the Start button in the taskbar and choose “Control Panel” – Network and Internet connection.
And the bottom right of the dialog box “Network and Internet Connections”, we click on Windows Firewall.
This opens the dialog “Windows Firewall”
It is recommended to leave this as “Enabled”.
You can assign a number of exceptions in the tab “Exceptions”, but I recommend you use extreme caution while doing this.
Email is an electronic mail, that anyone with an email address can read and send.
To send an email, we primarily need an e-mail program. The e-mail program that comes with Windows XP is Outlook Express. Normally there is a shortcut on your desktop:
In case this is not present as a shortcut, you can still open it by clicking Start on the taskbar and choose “E-mail Outlook Express” from the pop-up menu.
When we open Outlook Express for the first time, by clicking on the icon or the Start button, following screen appears:
From this window, we can send or receive e-mail.
The “Inbox” folder displays all the received e-mails.
The e-mail that the Outlook Express still have to send is in the folder “Outbox”.
The folder “Sent Items” stores a copy of emails which have been already sent .
The folder “Deleted Items”, stores the email removed from “inbox”.
The folder “Drafts” stores the e-mails which we have already created, but have not yet sent.
An e-mail account
Before we do anything we need to setup at least one e-mail account.
It is possible that your email account has been created by ISP, otherwise you must do it yourself.
To create an e-mail account we click in the top menu “Tools” and select “Accounts”.
The dialog box “Internet Accounts” window appears, where we choose the tab “Mail”.
We click on the button “Add” and choose “Mail”.
In the first page of the “Internet Connection Wizard”, we give a name, as we want to view, if we send an e-mail.
In the second page of the Wizard, we give the e-mail address that you assigned by your provider (Eg peter@pandora.be)
In the third window you will have to enter information provided by our Internet provider will deliver:
The server type, usually POP3
Incoming mail server (for Telenet customers is usually in.telenet.be)
and the Outgoing mail (for Telenet customers is usually uit.telandet.be)
In the fourth panel we give the Account Name and Password where we have configured our ISP.
Click “Finish” in the fifth and final panel.
You will see your account will appear in the list of the “Internet Accounts” dialog box, E-mail tab.
Click “Close” so the dialog box disappears.
From now on we can send and receive e-mail.
A message send, receive and reply
Click the “Create Mail” icon in the toolbar of Outlook Express
The “New Message” window opens:
We find here a number of options such as To, subject and body of the message to be filled.
The top displays your email address, which will be automatically filled.
The second is the “To:”, here we type the email address of the person to whom we want to send an email.
In the third box “CC:” we can enter multiple email addresses, if we want to send mail to different people.
The fourth box “BCC:” is the same as the “CC” box, with a DIFFERENCE, the recipients in the Bcc box do not know other receipients of the BCC who have also received the message.
The fifth section will give you a subject of your email.
And in the sixth and largest box you type the message.
Click the “Send” button when you’re done.
To receive messages we open Outlook Express, click on the arrow next to “Send” button, and choose “All received.”
I still remember, that in previous versions of Outlook Express, you need to click on the button “Send and Receive”
To reply to a message posted, we select the message and click the “Reply”.
To provide answers to all of us who received the message, we click, you guessed it right, the button “Reply All…”
We can also forward a received message to another person. For this we first select the message and click the button “Forward”.
We can also print the message.
We first click the message that we want to print, and next click on the button “Print”.
And to delete a message, first select it, next click the “Delete” button.
Once we click “Delete”, the deleted message gets moved to the folder “Deleted Items”.
If we click on the folder “Deleted Items”, we see all of our deleted messages.
Right click on the folder “Deleted Items” and choose “Empty Deleted Items Folder”, then all these e-mails shall disappear for good.
Add attachment
You can add an attachment when you send an e-mail, it could be either a photo or any other document and send it. Just click on the “Attach” icon.
In the dialog “Insert Attachment” select the document, and click the button “Attach”.
In the e-mail you want to send, it will now display a box “Attach”, containing the document you have enclosed.
! Note: If you get an e-mail with an attachment, this attachment might be a virus.
So my rule is:
1. NEVER open attachments where you do not know the sender, and
2. even if you know the sender, then first scan the attachment with an Anti-Virus program
You can never be sure enough.
Spam filters
I think everyone already heard or read something about spam.
Spam is nothing more or less than e-mail (usually advertisements) that you receive when you have not asked for it.
In Outlook Express, we have the ability to filter spam, or it is limited, but anything to help to avoid this confusion is welcome, especially if it is free..
We open Outlook Express and click Tools – Message Rules – Mail.
The dialog “Message Rules” opens:
In the tab “Rules for e-mail” click the “New” button.
In the “New Mail Rule” we have different choices.
My experience teaches me that in the first box, the first two choices are the most used ones.
The first determines whether the Subject line in the email contains a word that we have specified in the third box, by clicking “contains specific words” .
Do we want to move such an email to another folder, for example to the folder “Deleted Items”, then we determine in the third box which folder by by clicking a “specified” folder.
Or we can directly remove the e-mail by selecting “Delete it” checkbox.
We give our “rule” a name in the fourth box, and click OK.
The second choice “Where the subject line contains specific words” is the same as above but instead it looks for the specific words in the Subject.
You can create as many new rules as you want.
This will stop a lot of spam, but certainly not all.
You will find on the Internet called the code needed to stop Spam, like eg Spam Killer, Spam Fighter and a whole lot different.
You should look at different locations, but search using Google or Yahoo, there are a number of freeware which can prevent you from such attacks.
