Email

If you are in Berlin and able to get to this event, I strongly recommend you do so! Especially for people working on sensitive issues, ONO the robot viewing parties offer an important opportunity to learn and discuss how to strategically use mobile phones, Twitter, email, Facebook etc. It is also possible to organize your own ONO screening party in your own community and download the films from onorobot.org to watch on your own. If you do, please let us know here how it goes!

ONO in Berlin (and on TV)

crossposted from: http://www.onorobot.org/screening/957

Last month I warned about scam messages from known contacts urgently requesting money. The case that prompted that post has now thankfully been resolved and everyone who received the messages acted with the appropriate caution and it appears nobody lost money. Kofi Odum, a Kabissa member in Ghana, has given me permission to post the message he sent to all of his contacts after Yahoo!

I just read the Guardian Tech post Facebook set to launch 'Gmail killer' email system, excerpted below, about a new @facebook.com email service apparently slated to launch tomorrow. I think it's important for people working in African civil society to reflect carefully about what this means about how we all will be using Facebook and the Internet for work and play.

I like Facebook, but it is not a central tool for me or for Kabissa, and I use it despite serious concerns I have had all along about privacy on the service. I've blogged about my concerns about privacy and security issues on Facebook here and here, which have not yet really been addressed to my satisfaction. I am seriously concerned for activists who may be put in danger through unwittingly sharing their personal data and activities on Facebook. This feeling was not helped today when I also read a TechCrunch post How To Mass Export All Of Your Facebook Friends’ Private Email Addresses - which Facebook does not actually allow you to do but which apparently can be done easily using Yahoo email.  

What do you think? Is it a good thing that Facebook is positioning itself to be the only place that we all go to when we get online to get our work done as well as stay connected with friends and colleagues? 

I can't believe that these types of scam messages are still circulating and making it through my Google Mail spam filters - but they are dangerous if you fall for them. They typically come from people you know and share the same hallmarks - see the example I received from a trusted Kabissa member below. The You can learn more about Internet Fraud at Wikipedia. You can make sure you know how to fight Phishing by taking the PayPal Fight Fishing Challenge, or About.com has multiple phishing explanation pages. 

After two weeks of testing email discussions in Kabissa groups with only positive results, I have now made some changes to start encouraging Kabissa members to start using it more actively to connect, share information and help one another - directly by email. Please give me your feedback!

From now on, when members join groups at signup or via the groups directory, they now automatically start receiving new posts by email - and their replies to posts are distributed to all other subscribers and added to the site as comments.

Update 1 September: I uninstalled @wisestamp because they added a cumbersome link on the Google Mail menu that displays popup updates from Wise Stamp. I remain impressed by the app and will miss it, but don't want to have my email experience cluttered with apps. I've have had a good correspondence with their support team, but I don't like the direction they are going - what if all the google mail extensions I use added an item to the menu and popus? No thanks. I will only reinstall if they provide an option to disable the alerts and menu. What are your views? Alternative apps for this purpose? I welcome comments.

I just installed the WiseStamp Chrome browser plugin and am impressed! Read on to see a screenshot of the signature I created for my Kabissa mail on Google Apps and lessons I learned setting it up. Not only do signatures look attractive, but they can include the latest content from Twitter or any RSS Feed which is really quite neat.

What do you think of this tip?

I was pleased to receive the announcement below regarding the release of the latest version of Dada Mail, a powerful listserv tool. It's free software that is fairly easy to install on a traditional server supporting the Perl programming language, and very easy to use once installed. I've always been a big fan, not least "Since Justin is an Artist, he has decided that Dada Mail is an Art Object." Check out the Dadamail Manifesto for more details about what Dada Mail can do and how it can be viewed as an art object.

We always resisted implementing Dada Mail for Kabissa because we wanted to create an integrated community platform, which we were able to do with Drupal. This doesn't mean it can't be a perfect email companion to your website.

I was pleased to get the PingER update from the University of Trieste - it was the first time I had heard from PingER since 2002, when it was presented at the eJDS Open Round Table on "Developing Country Access to On-Line Scientific Publishing: Sustainable Alternatives". I was there talking about (and hoping to breathe life into) the www4mail tool, and am pleased my www4mail presentation (PPT) is still up on their website! www4mail was developed at the University of Trieste and for a time there were a few really good servers running including ours at Kabissa and another at Bellanet in Canada. These servers played a critical role for a time, enabling people with limited access to the web to request web pages to be sent to them by email.