Meebo

Access all your messaging services (AIM, ICQ, Jabber, GTalk, Yahoo, MSN) with one online login.

Yes, I know there are various messenger programs around that allow you to login to more than one messaging service at the same time (Yahoo and MSN together, for example). What makes Meebo different is that it isn't a progam that you have to install, but a service that you access online.



There are two distinct advantages to this. First, and perhaps most importantly, Meebo allows you to use your messaging services on computers where you do not have a messaging program installed or where you are not allowed to install one. So, for example, in the school, college, office, or Internet Cafe where you are not permitted to install software, you can happily chat with your buddies using at least four chat services that you would otherwise be unable to. Secondly, providing you can get online, you can easily access your messages and send them from any computer, regardless of your geographical location, and regardless of what chat software (if any) is available.

You do not even have to sign up for an account with Meebo. You can use their free services just by visting the site and logging into your chat services using your existing usernames and passwords. However, if you do sign up for a free account with them, they enable you to login to all your chat services with a single Meebo user name and password, and keep chat logs.

Meeting Wizard

Meeting Wizard is a brilliant free way of helping you book meetings. I now use it all the time to make business and personal appointments.



Once you have signed up for a free account you simply decide whether you have a fixed date for a meeting, or whether you have several possible dates. You then send this information to all the prospective attendees, and Meeting Wizard does the rest. It emails the potential attendees either telling them about the single date, or asking them to confirm dates when they are available. Once it has this information it emails you, lets you select the best date, and then emails all the attendees. There are plenty of options available. For example, you can ask Meeting Wizard to send out automatic reminders before the meeting, and can control who sees who is attending or not.

I have found that the free version has more than enough options to help me run my business and social life. If you want to upgrade, the paid-for version gives you the option of having your logo on any emails and removes any discrete advertising.

The only criticism I have of the service is that existing appointments are listed by the date that you do the booking, not by the date of the meeting itself. I personally have found this confusing. I now get round it by making sure that the subject line of the booking email contains the date of the meeting to be booked.

Try it for free.

Kill 100% of Spam, Yes, Really 100% with SpamArrest

Hey, I'm a cynic too! I didn't believe it either. Surely you can't eliminate 100% of spam. 60%-70% possibly, 90% on a good day, but never 100%. But I was wrong.

My judgement had been based on my previous experience of trying to rid myself of spam. Before discovering SpamArrest I had been using programs that tried to filter spam out. Depending on how zealous I was in creating and adjusting my spam filters, those programs enabled me to achieve some success, but they had at least two to three problems associated with them.

First, they required maintenance. You had to create or adjust the filters to get good results.

Secondly, they were always imperfect. Some spam always got through. You never caught 100%. The spammers were always ahead of the filters.

Thirdly, although not such an issue with broadband connections, you usually had to download the spam before it could be filtered - so the spam was either filtered out or slipped under your defences, it was always polluting your machine (a serious issued given the high proportion of spam that contains pornographic images).

SpamArrest is brilliant because it tackles the issue in a completely different way. Instead of saying: "We will let all email through and then look to see if any of it is spam, with the onus on us, the receiver, to look for the spam in some way", it says: "We will block all emails and put the onus on the sender to prove that they are genuine." Consequently 100% of spam is blocked, and a high proportion of unwanted circular letters because only genuine individual senders bother to authenticate themselves, thus allowing delivery of their emails.

What happens is this. You keep your existing email throughout. You sign up for SpamArrest and get a free 30 day trial. You let SpamArrest know the details of your email address and they collect all mail delivered to your email address. You make a simple adjustment to your email program to download your mail from Spamarrest. Everytime someone sends an email to your email address, SpamArrest sends them a polite challenge email from you (you can personalise the wording at any stage). Basically the challenge email says:
* This email is from SpamArrest User X.
* The email you sent will not be delivered until you authenticate yourself. Follow these simple instructions to prove that you are a real human being and not a computer automatically generating spam.
* You will only need to do this once.
Then sit back and see the immediate end to 100% of spam.

You can logon to SpamArrest at any time to allow particular addresses (you can upload your contacts) or remove/ban a particular address.

I have been using SpamArrest since July 2003. At the time of writing, since signing up, I have received 22,246 emails, of which only 2,743 have been legitimate letters. SpamArrest has killed 100% of my spam (over 87% of my emails). Perhaps you can see why I am so enthusiastic about it. Try it now, for free.

Perhaps the most satisfying thing is the knowledge that the spam is just hanging in cyberspace. It doesn't come within a mile of my machine.

Footnote:
Recently Blue Frog introduced another novel solution to hitting spam before it reached you. Now that Blue Frog has been killed by a spammer, there is even more reason to signup for SpamArrest.

Free, Automatic, Encrypted Backup with Mozy

I used to live in fear that my computer would crash. It contains so much that I wouldn't want to lose. Having already lived through the trauma of lost business accounts, family photos, work documents, and crucial emails, and endured the pain of: "Daaaaaad! It took me hours to download all that music!" I was determined not to go through that again.

"Buy a backup disk," I hear you say. I did. Guess what? It worked for a while and then crashed too.

And then, I stumbled across Mozy. Mozy is a great free little program that you can download and configure to back-up whenever you want it to. You get an initial 2GB of free space (and can purchase more at a reasonable price if you need to in the future). All data is encrypted before being backed up then delivered to the Mozy servers via a secure connection. It works quietly and efficiently in the background protecting what you value.

The initial configuration is very helpful (much more helpful than my backup disk that cost me over £100). You simply select either particular files or folders, or, more intuitively, the kind of files that you want to backup - selecting from types including email, accounts, documents, presentations, spreadsheets & databases etc.

And it works. Why not find out more, or try it for free?

One of my friends said that after she had downloaded Mozy, it wouldn't initially connect. We soon worked out that this was due to Norton, not Mozy. We soon got Norton to recognise Mozy (Mozy has a FAQ answer explaining how) and now she knows her data is secure too. And, OK, depending on your internet connection, the initial saving of data may take a bit of time, but once that is complete, backups usually only take seconds, as only new or changed data has to be backed-up.