I had Incredimail for all of about ten minutes.
Chuck it all and get Thunderbird.

Or your could do it yourself, with animated gifs and pics in OE from your own comp! That's what I do when I want to send something silly to my friends...and if your ISP notifys you when you have mail, mayhap you could find a nifty sound clip and change the default sound to that! I personally have a Piccolo Finale sound when I have new mail waiting...cheerful! Oh, yes, you could even have a COW bell sound if that would make you happy!

lovesblessing hopes that The Journeyman is happy to see a mention of the COW! MOOOOOOving on....

Nevermind, I got it all working now

Incredimail is installed now, and I have it working with AVG, ran Spybot and Adaware, system is clean

No Spyware whatsoever



[Message Edited]

I know SpyBot is flawed....Adaware found things it missed....fair to say 'nothing found' does not mean 'nothing there'...

I think it's safe to say that all spyware programs are flawed in that sense. No single product out there catches everything. I run Pest Patrol, AdAware, and Spybot and each catches things the others miss. It also changes week-to-week as the updates change. Each of them have at times detected/removed something the others haven't included yet in their updates.

I think the safest bet is to run more than one of them on a regular basis. However, having said that, each of those I listed, depending on the version you have, have an active monitoring/blocking feature. I would not run more than one of these programs with that feature enabled as it can cause conflicts.

PS: If you want to be proactive and make any/all of these programs better, when one catches something the others miss, send a report of it to the developer of the program that missed it. They all have fairly simple reporting mechanisms for this purpose, either within the program interface, or on their websites.



[Message Edited]

I installed 'Spybot Search and Destroy' today....and there are 4 DSO Exploits found that it's not able to get rid of....the explanation is that it's some kind of IE flaw....I seem to have 4 altered registry entries....among other problems....I'm not happy with whatever seems to make my system such a mess...I've gotten all my updates....run my scans and all that.....my firewall took a poop about a month ago...so I uninstalled it...it decided that it wasn't going to let me access the internet at all anymore. Symantec's tech support (both the online tutes and the email support were all yada yada yada...no help at all...so I just uninstalled it....

Things are probably an awful mess.....I keep finding weird files that open with the wrong programs....*sigh

Koasati had it right on the help boards.....windowblonde...I'd laugh but I'm afraid it might come out a little too hysterically to be credible as humor

dangit

footsie....it's important that you get 'protected' one way or another.

If one proggy seems to fail you, try another.

If unprotected you are guaranteed to invite 'dramas' of which file associations is just the thin edge of the wedge.

Eventually...a system reformat can be the only 'cure'....and remaining offline the only way to be 'reasonably' safe...

I know this next statement belongs in the 'say something funny' thread too.....

believe it or not

having spent most of my time in lala land taking pictures and writing...and essentially not understanding most of any of the 'techtalk' I read....

I have no idea how to format a hard drive

arthritis prevents me from doing the required pushups...could I have a mere 'stand in the corner' instead??

Anybody out there that could recommend a step by step layman's terms guide to walk me through what obviously is going to be an excrutiatingly traumatic experience?

In other words....Jafo...is there a friendly person or place that might be able to hold my hand through the process...???

what happened to Rachael?

Since I saw this thread mentioned in the locked thread so I thought I'd pontificate since I can thus postpone some work for a bit.

RE: Incredimail spyware?

Search results at the old Spywareinfo.com forums: http://www.spywareinfo.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=21985&hl=incredimail indicate that the folks there don't appear to consider Incredimail as "spyware" although the privacy policy and EULA wouldn't give them warm fuzzies. (The helpers at Spywareinfo spend a lot of time helping people get rid of spyware on their PC's so it's a place where the info is usually sound on the topic of spyware.)

In the security forums I frequent generally the most objections I've seen against Incredimail are related to aesthetics and potential security issues resulting from the use of HTML email rather than plain old plain text. Then there are those of course who object to adware of any kind (this in reference to the free version) no matter how innocuous. There's occasionally some argy bargy about it "phoning home" but that can be blocked via firewall rules if people are concerned and people I know who checked it out didn't find anything particularly nasty in that wooodshed.

FWIW I haven't seen any documented reports of Incredimail being a classic spyware product. And Ad-aware and SSD don't include it in their DB, which I wouldn't assume is necessarily a "flaw." Incredimail's been around for some time and is quite well known. If it was particularly noxious it would have been targeted some time ago and railed at by the antispyware advocates (the serious ones, I mean, not the ones who instill a universal fear of cookies). As for Pest Patrol's listing it as spyware based on a "tracking cookie" I've seen suggestions that this may be related to the use of targeted advertisements in the freeware version. But nothing otherwise nefarious in the same league with noted spyware apps.

As for Spy Sweeper's seeming detection of it as "spyware" by inclusion in the list Jafo posted, I note that "spyware blaster" is also on that list and the only "spyware blaster" of which I'm aware is most definitely NOT spyware or adware quite the opposite: it's an app for prevention of driveby spyware installations through one's browser. The inclusion of "spyware blaster" in SpySweeper's list is extremely curious. To me that list looks more like keywords one might use in a search rather than an actual list of specific SS database items. I wonder if that is the case and this list is more a bit of marketing appealing to a concerned potential user rather than a straight listing of DB entries. Remember, this is a commercial product and they do want to get downloads and sales. Perhaps they may also hit on a "tracking cookie" for Incredimail one can't tell from that list alone. But spyware blaster is not spyware or adware or anything that should be at all targeted by Spy Sweeper and yet it would appear to be on that list as well.

I also know some "paranoid" types who are concerned about privacy/security issues and they actually use Incredimail (the purchased version) because they think it's "purty." Go figure.

[Message Edited]

OOOOoooo...I like when Deb pontificates

I'll stick to outlook express and hotmail all the same thanks...