An I.T. Problem Shared . . . » Email

iPhone contacts lost after IOS 4.1 update

Steve — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 08:12:00 +0000

I upgraded my iPhone 3GS to IOS 4.1 yesterday and as with the last update it lost all my contacts.

I use Google Apps for my contacts, mail and calendars and sync them with my iPhone (by setting up an Exchange account on the iPhone) and as last time the only way to get my contacts back was to delete the Google apps account from the iPhone and set it up again.

Thunderbird Character Encoding

Steve — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:30:03 +0000

Recently I’ve been receiving email in Mozilla Thunderbird which display odd characters. Changing the character encoding of the individual message solved the problem but only for that message.

Auto detection of the character encoding was enabled but didn’t seem to be working – until I messed around with the settings and did this:

Go to Tools > Options > Advanced > Config Editor and make sure that mailnews.force_charset_override is set to false
Now right click on your Inbox and choose Edit > Folder Properties and make sure that the checkbox “Apply default to all messages in the folder…” is NOT checked.

Use the Config Editor to ensure that mailnews.force_charset_override is false (its default setting). Also choose Edit – Folder Properties… and ensure that the checkbox “Apply default…” is clear.

Backing Up Gmail Email

Steve — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:27:06 +0000

Having switched completely to using Gmail a few months ago I’ve recently started thinking about the consequences of having all my mail in the cloud. If Gmail ever went down or more likely if my Internet connection went down or I was just in some location without Internet access how would I access my existing sent and received Email?

Luckily Gmail allows you to access your mail not only through its website but through POP and IMAP too. To backup your email all you need do is set up an Email client such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird etc. and download your mail onto your computer so you always have a local copy.

To do this you need to go to Settings in Gmail and look at the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ tab:

Gmail Settings

By enabling POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded) and configuring your Email client to download your mail using POP all your Gmail mail will be downloaded. Just run your Email client however often you need to and it will download new mail into your local copy.

You might also want to check the option ‘When messages ar accessed with POP’ and make sure that email downloaded with POP are left in your Gmail inbox plus check that your Email client is set to not remove the messages on the server when it has retrieved them!.