email | Technology Tales

Turning off push notifications in Firefox 46

7^th May 2016

Firefox 44 introduced a feature I only recently noticed when Yahoo Mail offered browser notifications for new emails; I did not need this and could not switch it off permanently for that site. This meant I was bothered each time I checked that email address, an unnecessary irritation. Other websites offered similar push notifications but allowed permanent deactivation, making this a site-specific function unless you take an alternative approach.

Open a new browser tab and enter about:config in the address bar, then press return. If this is your first time, a warning message will appear, which you can dismiss permanently. This reveals a searchable list of options. Find dom.webnotifications.enabled and dom.webnotifications.serviceworker.enabled. By default, these values are set to 'true'. Double-click each one to change them to 'false'. This will prevent push notification offers from web services like Yahoo Mail, reducing intrusions during your browsing.

Changing Outlook usage habits

2^nd August 2010

Given that I have been using it for so long, I shouldn't be discovering new things with Outlook. However, there is one thing that I have been doing for years: leaving messages set as unread until I have dealt with them. Now that I look at it, it seems a terrible habit compared with an alternative that I recently found.

Quite why I haven't been flagging messages for follow-up instead is beyond me. Is it because I worked with Outlook 2000 at my place of work for so long, and the arrival of Outlook 2007 into my life wasn't sufficient to force a change of habits? In fact, it has taken a downgrade to Outlook 2003 to make it dawn on me; it was the sight of search folder for messages marked for follow-up that triggered the realisation.

Speaking of old habits, there is one that I'll be dropping: setting up loads of rules, allegedly for organising messages. Given that they were the cause of my missing emails quite a few times, it's one more nuisance that needed to be left behind me.

Getting Evolution to display images in HTML emails

6^th April 2008

By default, Evolution doesn't display images in HTML emails. It's a good security and anti-spam practice, but it's also nice to have the ability to override this behaviour. While the Ctrl+I keyboard shortcut (View>Show Images is the way to do it through the menus) will do the trick on an email by email basis, you need to add the email address to your address book for a more permanent approach. There's a little extra to make the latter work, and it involves heading to Evolution's Preferences dialogue box (Shift + Ctrl + S or View>Preferences) and selecting Mail Preferences from the sidebar. Clicking on Mail Preferences gets you where you need to be. The part of the screen that's relevant is Loading Images, and there are three options: Load images in email from contacts is the option that you probably want more than Always load images from the Internet because keeping Evolution's anti-spam defaults is most likely an excellent idea. Apart from sender whose images you don't want to see, you should now have images displaying in HTML emails.

Evolution HTML Email Preferences

Aside: The theme in use for the above screen capture was from Ubuntu Studio rather than SlicknesS, which is my usual choice. The latter makes the above screen unusable because the text cannot be distinguished from the background, and it's only for this tab that it happens too, a combination of possible Evolution programming inconsistencies colliding with potential theme design gremlins in my view.

Moving Emails from Outlook to Evolution

3^rd November 2007

It seems a little strange to my eyes, but Evolution cannot import Outlook PST files. On one level, I see a certain amount of sense: after all, Outlook is a Windows application and Evolution remains resolutely on the Linux side of the divide. Nevertheless, it is still a pesky nuisance.

The cure is, very oddly, to import data from Outlook into Mozilla Thunderbird and pop the Thunderbird files into the Evolution mail folder. Both Evolution and Thunderbird share the same file formats, so all is hunky-dory, since Evolution should just realise that they are there and bring them in.

That's what happened for me, and I have now migrated all of my old emails. Evolution's single file import wizard is there for those times when a spot of extra persuasion is needed; the data files are those without the file extensions. As it happened, I didn't need it.

Sending emails with PHP

27^th July 2007

Recently, I got the idea that I'd upgrade a feedback form that I have on my photo gallery so that it would email me comments left by visitors, rather than just storing them on the web server for later perusal. I opened up my copy of PHP Unleashed (John Coggeshall, SAMS), turned to the relevant chapter, when it all started to look rather daunting. Then, another suggestion popped into my head: potter over to PEAR and see what they have there. In the light of my reading, I knew what I wanted and downloaded the Mail and Mime-Mail packages. Another spot of perusal led me to some sample code that I could use with these, and I modified that to suit. Within 30 minutes, the results of my labours were in place, which all works very nicely too. Nevertheless, I still need to learn more about the code that I am using.

What are we like?

22^nd May 2007

Over the history of the internet, I have seen halcyon online dreams turn sour, with the world of Web 2.0 suffering the same lurch. It was only in the mid-nineties that the web was considered a levelling platform and a place for interaction and sharing. It also was a lot safer than it is today, an ironic observation given how e-commerce has taken off until you realise the financial gain from scams like phishing. Human nature does have a habit of spoiling things and the result is the number of patches that Windows has needed over the years, that and the expansion of security software from being all about antivirus packages to the inclusion of anti-spam, anti-spyware and firewall applications.

You would think that the above would have all but killed off the optimism that abounded in the late nineties, only for it to resurface again with the explosion of the blogosphere and, of course, there is Second Life. But there are signs of slippage even in this brave new world: comment spam has become a scourge for blogs, though the likes of Akismet and the WordPress Bad Behaviour plug-in see off most of it for me.

Then, there remains flaming on web forums. In fact, what has prompted this post is my observation of the transformation of a friendly forum thread into a hostile exchange. It started out as a communication regarding the welfare of someone who needed to retire from the annual Rab TGO Challenge with a high fever. Everything was going well until someone poked a hole in another poster's grammar, yet it was the mention of fitness that really turned things sour, especially when someone’s admission of a 20-a-day smoking habit drew the ire from a fitness fanatic. While it was all unnecessary, it shows how people can mess up with technology: to realise those optimistic dreams that I mentioned earlier, we have to change to make it happen. For now, I suppose that we’ll have to live in hope…