An 80-something year-old gentleman calls me saying he is having some problem with his incredimail junk folder & would also like to save his emails onto DVD but doesn’t know how.

I visit & find out that incredimail had a “junk folder” facility, which would allow you to filter spam very nicely. At some point, customer gets an email from incredimail saying “upgrade to junk folder plus” or something like that. So he upgrades, & then after a trial period, incredimail then disables the junk folder & say something like “to continue using the junk folder, you need to pay $XX” per month”

The customer just wants it back the way it was, but after some digging, I found that incredimail has stopped the use of the old junk folder & only offers the “pay per use” JF plus. They might think its a good strategy, but I reckon lots of people will just change email clients. Sure, lots of people really like the fancy graphics & other bells & whistles, but a quick browse through the forums shows that underneath the pretty exterior, incredimail is bordering on spyware, with a greedy company behind the scenes. Most people in the forums don’t seem to like it.

Getting email attachments onto DVD is both simple & difficult… the emails & attachments can be written easily enough. But explaining that there are many different types of attachments & its not easy to make sure that they can all play on a normal tv with a normal dvd player… well thats something else. Most video formats can be converted to DVD format, & most audio can be converted so it will play, but combining the two, & figuring out what can & what cannot be converted, & how to converted it, all requires some in-depth knowledge about computers, which is not easy to impart to an 80-something year old, in just 1 hour.

So, I just show how to save attachments to DVD, so that they can be re-examined at a later date, & explain that deciphering attachments is something for a future time.