Smartalyx Computer Musings

This is the first part, swing on back next week for the follow-ups.
This past weekend was all work, don’t let anything you read below convince you otherwise. Really, really hard work. I spent two solid days of character study. 48 hours, a lot of it spent in the hot sun of Southern California, keenly noting and observing small businesses as they presented themselves to their customers. After the initial presentations, I was able to observe the direct effect of the efforts and see if the customer base grew. .And all of this was done without any PR hacks, marketting veeps or silky smooth ad campaigns with glossy videos of all the ‘cool kids’. I stood with the masses and gauged how the small businesses came across. It was hard, hard work and don’t let anything else I tell you convince you otherwise.

Where did I get this great exposure to these small businesses (some I would call early stage startups) and their audience? Where was I able to see successful small businesses stand side by side with unknowns hungry for attention? Was I at some Techcrunch 50 event, some Startup Mash Weekend or Pitch your Biz to TV meetup? Nope. I was at a music festival of course. Specifically Bamboozle Left in Irvine, California. The small businesses were the bands. There were major bands with record deals, labels, cred and history. Bands/performers that you would know even if you don’t listen to them specifically. There were some you could tell were in the middle, not yet signed to a major label, but touring around getting their name out there. And there were the early stage startup bands. Some of them were hungry (literally and figuratively I fear) with demo CDs cut on their own computers. Why is this a good lesson for the small business?

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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.