Greetings, readers! Welcome to the March 2010 issue of ZooNews, from professional Web site design company Zoonini Web Services.

A ZooNews reader – let's call her Jane – recounted to me a fascinating, but hair-pulling, tale of email woe and has kindly allowed me to share it with you as a cautionary tale.

Jane recently gave her client the business card of a company she wanted to refer her client to – let's call it Company X.

Jane emailed the address on the card to let Company X know they may be hearing from Jane's client soon.

The email bounced back as undeliverable.

Jane found an alternate email for Company X and sent the note there, letting them know that the email on their business card didn't seem to be working.

Company X replied: "Oh, that's not the right email address – you should really be using this one: [new email address]."

Jane said: "But that's the address on the business card of yours that I gave my client, and the one they will use to try to contact you."

Company X responded: "Yes – I know – but it's not good. (Just FYI)"

I think you can all deduce the moral of this story, so I won't even state the obvious!

Staying with the email theme for GeekSpeak, two terms anyone who uses email should know are whitelist and blacklist. These lists may consist of one or more individual email addresses, parts of email addresses such as a domain name (i.e. zoonini.com), or an IP address – the numerical identifier of a particular computer. You can maintain these lists to force your email provider or email application* to either always deliver messages on the list no matter what – in the case of a whitelist – or, for a blacklist, to always treat messages from these addresses as spam. (The way your spam is handled can vary depending on your email service: messages flagged as spam might be put into a special folder, automatically discarded, or assigned a special subject line.)

So, let's say those all-important chain letters from your uncle Joe or the soul-rejuvenating cute-kitten videos from grandma Millie are constantly being marked as spam. By whitelisting your uncle Joe and grandma Millie's email addresses, their messages will never be treated as spam and will always get through to your inbox for careful perusal.

Watch out for possible confusion: some email programs, including many Microsoft ones such as Outlook, may call whitelists by another name – such as Safe Senders, Safe List, Friends, or Allowed Senders. Blacklists may go by another name as well, like Blocked Senders or black hole list. Here is a handy chart describing how to add legitimate email senders to several types of whitelists.

*Your email provider can consist of your Internet Service Provider, a web-based email program like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo, or a hosting company for those who handle their email on their own domain. Common desktop email applications include Outlook, Entourage and Mail.

Got a technology term you'd like demystified in ZooNews? Send it to questions@zoonini.com.

This month we launched the standalone site for The Alchemy of Great Work, the extended "director's cut" edition of the movie inspired by Michael Bungay Stanier's book Do More Great Work. Animated by the über-talented Robert Kabwe of Protopop Design, it joins Michael's other inspirational Flash animation shorts as part of the Box of Crayons Movies series.

This month has been full of interesting occasions, both sombre and celebratory. The ubiquitous .com domain extension fêted its 25th birthday while a mock funeral was held for the much-hated-by-web-designers but long-lasting Internet Explorer 6.

Coming up, the second annual Twestival (Twitter + festival) Global fundraiser will take place on Thursday, March 25, in hundreds of cities around the globe to raise money for Concern Worldwide. If you'd like be part of a fun event for a good cause, do check it out.

Next weekend I'll be in Toronto to present a session called WordPress for Newbies at WordCamp and look forward to saying hello to some of you in person.

À la prochaine,

kp
aka Kathryn Presner