Go to your settings and then accounts/import. For your USCM email settings you’ll have to make some changes.
Your settings should look thus:
The specific things to note
Make sure your check boxes look like mine, you can label them however you want.
Last summer my email & eBay accounts were hacked. I don’t know who hacked into it, how they did it, or why they were inquiring into purchasing industrial water tanks on eBay. I had used the same 2 passwords for all of my online accounts for more than 10 years – one for personal stuff, one for work stuff. Let me just say – that is a bad idea, when someone gets one of your passwords they have all of them (or, in my case half of them).
When I was finally able to get back into my account I immediately changed all of my passwords on every online account I have. And, I changed them all to something different than every other one.
I know what you’re thinking – perhaps the water tanks were for a giant hot tub. You may be right, I’ve thought of that too, but that’s not what is important here. The question you should be asking is, “How do you remember a different password for every site?”
Following the tips that I found at another tech-blog Lifehacker, I was able to create a password that is different from each other, but I can remember based on the site that I’m using it for.
I’d suggest reading Lifehacker’s full article, but here are the two basic tips:
I used all of these tips to create my new password – obviously I had learned the danger of having one password for all of my sites. An example of using these rules can look like this:
Say your old password is “password” or “1234″ (always the worst passwords), first let’s improve it by putting the letters together with some numbers (or the other way around). You could use the digits in your phone number, your childhood address, your dad’s belt size, whatever. In our case we end up with:
password1234
You could improve it from here and scramble it creating something like this:
p1a2s3s4word
You’re still using your favorite number and your old password and you can remember it pretty easily. But, this would still leave you with using the same password on every site. The simple way to fix this is by somehow incorporating the name for the site into your password. You can add just the first letter, or the last few letters or whatever you choose (I had thought about using the first word on the page, but that can change far too easily).
So, if our imaginary password was going to be used at eBay, it could turn into any one of the following:
p1a2s3s4worde
ep1a2s3s4word
p1a2s3s4wordbay
ayp1a2s3s4word
ebp1a2s3s4worday
You could even scramble the word with the password and get the easy-to-remember monstrosity of:
p1a2s3s4weobrady
Some sites, like our email system, require you to also scramble in capital letters (which I just learned can also be called majuscules) while others may enforce adding special characters:
!@#$%^&*?><:”;’[],.+=_-♠♣♥™↑‡
All you need to do is make a rule for what you’re going to do when that’s the case and turn it into something like:
P1a2s3s4wordE!
Now, the only thing you need to remember is which site requires which… though you could use the special characters for all of your sites as well.
No, I will not suggest that you hire someone just to remember your passwords for you. These are programs that will keep them secure (behind a password of its own). Some of them can even auto-type the username and password in when you tell them to. Next week I’ll talk about one of those programs and I’ll show how useful (and secure) they can be.
As I posted previously (1, 2) Gmail can be a powerful tool for doing everything involved with managing your email. One huge thing that I’ve not addressed is setting up your email to pull in messages from other email accounts – including your work accounts. Today we’ll walk through how to do that.
First, make sure you’ve read/watched the previous posts regarding Gmail:
After you’ve gotten trough the basics of gettings started with it, let’s get you going on importing your other accounts. Because, despite the advantages that Gmail has, your workplace/ministry/school will not probably forward all of your mail to your Gmail account from now on – and the reality is that they will expect you to be reading those emails as well.
WHY? Going to one website for many updates is better than going to many websites with no updates.
Ever since I began talking about opening this site for tools, tips, and tutorials for technology, I began getting requests to explain something called RSS. I decided I’ll take a few days to go over this because it’s just that good! Before you freak out and stop reading, all I ask is you hang with me a moment. I’m going to take us through this nice and easy and I think you will at least know why RSS can be a very useful thing for you.
Let’s get the irrelevant stuff out of the way first. RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. All that means is that there are agreed-upon rules for people to allow their online content to be rebroadcast somewhere else. Just like when you watch an old rerun of The Brady Bunch, Frasier, or What’s Happening? what you are watching is the syndication of it. Like I said, this stuff really is irrelevant for us.
Today it’s my goal to get you motivated to the idea of taking advantage of RSS. Later in the week we’ll get into some more tips of how to use it better.
The Problem
Let’s say you have several websites you like to check for new articles or content on a regular basis (like CNN.com, 170spoons.com, Facebook, and your best friend’s blog). The traditional way to find out what’s new is to either remember all of the web addresses and go there, or go through your bookmarks clicking on each. When you get to the sites, you may not be able to tell what’s new, what you’ve already read, or if there is anything new at all. It could turn into a colossal waste of time!
If only there were some way to have these updates delivered to us when those websites have an update…
eMail is to People as RSS is to Websites
I’ve seen many, many attempts to explain what RSS is and I’ve tried different analogies in the past and I think this is the one that makes the most sense. When you get an email, you are basically getting an update from a person. When you get a RSS update, you get an update from a website. To read eMail you need an eMail reader (like Outlook, gMail, Yahoo Mail, etc). To read RSS, you need a RSS reader.
What RSS is Solving
When you set up a RSS reader and tell it which websites to check for updates, you then have one place to go for all of your website updates. You don’t have to go all over the web to find anything new. Just go to one place and it’ll tell you if there is anything new or not in all of the sites you’re monitoring. In fact, using a RSS reader allows you to monitor even more sites if you like since you’ll only know when something is new.
Later this week we’ll go over how to use RSS to your advantage. Today I just wanted to help you understand a bit about what RSS is.
RSS in Plain English
I admit that I may not have done the best job in explaining RSS. So let me show you a short video that was made about a year ago called RSS in Plain English.
If you use RSS to receive notifications of new website content, leave a comment as to why you do it this way instead of the traditional way.
Editor’s Note: This post is a part of our “RSS Awareness Week” Festivities. It was originally written by Rob Williams for his website 170spoons.com and is copied here with his permission.
This week I’m going to take a “week off”. It’s not that there won’t be anything posted this week for you to learn, it’s that it won’t be me writing those posts. I’ve asked Rob Williams (former staff at HQ in Orlando) to share some posts that he wrote a few weeks ago for his own tech blog 170spoons.
In celebration of May 1st, which is both May Day and RSS Awareness Day, they will discuss the nature and advantages of newsfeeds (also known as RSS or “Really Simple Syndication”). Most of you reading this are already taking advantage of a form of RSS Feeds in the email that is sent out when I update the site.
Let me suggest at this point that you go ahead and sign up for a Google/Gmail account as it will help you understand better what he is talking about in the upcoming posts.
See you all again next week!
I do all of my emailing through a single Gmail account. I am able to do this simply because of Google’s amazing thoroughness in the implementation and design of Gmail. Let me list off a few of the many advantages and post a walkthrough of how to sign up for a Gmail account.
If I have convinced you (and really, what more could you ask for?) take a look at the walk-through that I put together a few months ago.
We’ll walk through the Inbox next.
