ItsGeekToMe.co

Q: Is there a way to contact my Outlook Express account at work from my home computer?

– Jennifer M.
Fort Walton Beach, FL

A: So many questions about e-mail lately!  I hate give an answer like this, but unfortunately, the answer is: “It depends.”  Without knowledge of the infrastructure of your company’s LAN, the settings on their e-mail server, and their policies on remote access, it’s really impossible for me to give you an accurate answer.

The person you should be talking to about this is your LAN administrator, or the person who sets up your company’s e-mail accounts.  He or she can tell you whether your company’s e-mail supports SMTP and/or POP3, which are typical ways of accessing remote mail servers.  Alternately, your company may support webmail, as I discussed in a recent column, which would give you access to your work e-mail from any computer connected to the internet.  One other alternative would be remote terminal control (such as Windows Remote Desktop, PCAnywhere, or LogMeIn), which basically give you full access to your computer at work from any other computer.  That would allow you to run OE and access your mail as if you were actually sitting at your desk at work. 

TIP OF THE WEEK: How often do you receive e-mails recounting some horror story that’s being passed along in the hope that you might avoid the same fate?  What about e-mails that portend to get you a lot of money for doing something simple, like forwarding an e-mail?  A few other weird e-mails that have crossed my e-mail box recently include “You can cook an egg with two cell phones” and “Entering your ATM PIN backwards summons the police.”  Almost all of these seemingly helpful or informative e-mails are actually hoaxes, propagated around the internet by well-meaning people duped by a form of SPAM known as a psychological virus.  These viruses spread not through computer technology, but by exploiting people’s natural tendency to want to help out their family and friends.  Like most computer problems, resources exist to help you combat these items, if you know how.  The first step is identification.  The old rule that “if something seems too good to be true, it probably is” certainly applies.  For example, nobody is going to send you money for forwarding e-mails, even if technology existed to track them (which it doesn’t).  One big clue to hoax e-mails is that they often encourage you to “forward this to everyone in your address book.”  When you read that, it should immediately raise a warning flag.  Also, watch out for virus warnings that say “[Some big name company] has classified this as the most destructive virus EVER!”  If such a virus appears, you’ll hear about it on the news, not via e-mail, unless you subscribe to some virus-alert news feed.  If you’re not sure whether an e-mail is phony, check into it before sending it on.  Search for keywords on Google, or visit well-known hoax-busting sites such as Snopes.com, or UrbanLegends.com.