Smartalyx Computer Musings

Hello and welcome.
This is a second post regarding using some of the online EMAIL providers to access separate existing EMAIL accounts. The first post covered GMAIL . This post will cover another provider called ZOHO . Looking at ZOHO’s homepage you will see they provide a lot of great tools (many I will be covering over the next few posts). This post will focus on ZOHO Mail.

To make any of this work you will need the POP server settings from your current EMAIL provider- look at the FAQs or give Smartalyx a nudge and we may be able to help. Remember, not all providers have this ability (Yahoo! Basic Email, as an example, does not). You will also need to sign up for a ZOHO mail account. You can create a brand new account with new user and password or you can use your Google credentials if you have them. I like this feature- allows me to use the same user+password combo across two different sites. Google will confirm ZOHO access to your Google account.

Main Login

Once you get the POP server settings and signed up for ZOHO- let’s add an account.

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This is a follow-up to Matt Singley’s great article at his site- mattsingley.com That talks about 4 ways you can manage Twitter. I would just like to add some additional steps to make it the same thing happen with GMAIL and Mozilla Thunderbird. Matt mentions Outlook in his article.

So you have jumped into Twitter and you are starting to get people following you. This is great and hopefully exactly what you want. Most people do use Outlook, but the rules that Matt talks about can be setup in Mozilla Thunderbird and GMAIL. First I’ll talk Thunderbird and then GMAIL.

Thunderbird uses what is called “Message Filters”. Open Thunderbird, menu item “Tools” and choose “Message Filters”. The following Dialog shows up, choose “New”:

Dialog box to create message filters in Thunderbird

Next you get to enter the fields you want to use to filter your messages.

Dialog box showing fields used to filter message

You will notice I use two fields. By default you will only have one field- just click the ‘plus’ symbol to get additional. The first, is using the a keyword “following” in the subject line and then using the phrase “twitter-follower” in the “From” field. The message must match both for the filter to run- make sure the radio button nest to “Match all the following” is selected. There are numerous ways to do this, Matt suggests using a different EMAIL address which would allow you to only use a “To” field. Either way works-completely up to you. The bottom portion shows what I want done with the filtered message. In my case, I move the message to a separate folder and away from my other EMAILs. Keeps my Inbox cleaner. Then I click “OK” and now the new Filter is active and ready to go.

Final filter dialog box with New filter highlighted.

Thunderbird allows you to choose the new filter and run it immediately if you want. Or you just click the “X” to close the dialog. Now all your Twitter Follower messages will move to another folder.

Hope you enjoyed and let me know what you think. Share other ways you have found to manage your Twitter follower emails or any of your emails for that matter.
And speaking of Twitter- follow me @smartalyx and

a shout out to @mattsingley as well.

Decided to extend my look at online solutions for your business. You will see in my previous post I mentioned moving away from local EMAIL and begin using one of the online solutions. I will show you how Smartalyx has been doing that. This post will deal directly with GMAIL, but over the next few posts I will also show how to setup a similar experience using ZOHO tools and others.

First off, you need to make sure that you have POP access to your account. Not all providers allow this (Yahoo basic email does not for example), so you will need to check with your email provider. Once this is confirmed you can then begin using GMAIL to check those accounts. The feature is called “Mail Fetcher”. Smartalyx owns and runs the domain “smartalyx.com” and all our emails are managed by us as well. We have setup POP access and therefore can use any tool we choose to access our EMAIL.

Why even use an online EMAIL provider when we have local access to our email? Well, online access allows us to use any tools available at the time to review/respond to email. Also if we lose any of our equipment we do not lose the EMAIL. Using an online provider makes the synchronization of information automatic. I can jump on any of our systems (desktop or laptop) login to our online EMAIL and see all my EMAIL. No longer do I need to use a add-on piece of software to sync across multiple systems or devices. I see the same email on my desktop, laptop and even iPod Touch. So how do we do that? That’s next.

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