Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 May 11

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May 11

Free email forwarding with no strings attached?

Is there a free service that will give you an email address and forward email to another address, with no strings attached? I signed up for Bigfoot's free account, but when I opted out of receiving email from them and their partners, they suspended the account. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 01:50, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Why not just sign up for any free service. Then when you see emails like those that you've mentioned, just set up a filter to send them to the trash? They still think their advertising is getting through, you have a free address, and everyone is happy? That said, I haven't paid a dime for any of my Gmail addresses (of which I have three) and they never send me anything. Dismas|^(talk) 02:06, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Maybe, but their "partners" are anyone they sell the address to. There might be a dozen new ones each day. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:21, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Google doesn't sell Gmail address lists to anyone. -- BenRG (talk) 05:18, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Will Google gmail forward them to my regular ISP email address? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 17:13, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Well, I don't want webmail, but it looks like I can configure Thunderbird to work with gMail. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 18:12, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

mailnull.com, spamgourmet.com, The Ultimate Disposable Email Provider List —Tamfang (talk) 08:19, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

These don't do what I want. I want a permanent email address that I can use for many years, and anything sent to it will be forwarded to whatever my current ISP email address is. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 18:04, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

I got me a gmail address and configured Thunderbird to work with it. (The last time I looked at gmail, I think it was webmail only.) Thanks. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 18:54, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Note that gmail scans the content of your email and uses it for marketing purposes, e.g. to decide what ads to show you including when you surf the web. I'd expect it also uses the content to build up a marketing profile of the person who sent the email. 70.36.142.114 (talk) 19:28, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Then I need to read up on it more. It said that email was 100% encrypted... Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 20:27, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

The email is encrypted in transit (https) when you view it with a web browser and also opportunistically encrypted over SMTP with other servers that support transport layer security (i.e. some servers, but not all). But it's stored on Google's servers as plaintext, and more relevantly, they examine the content for advertising purposes since that is their revenue model. Gmail#Privacy has some more info. Generally speaking, your whole mission seems a little bit doomed since any other "free" service is likely to operate in about the same way. 70.36.142.114 (talk) 22:02, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I could pay bigfoot $10/quarter and avoid it. Google seems to have me anyway. I can go directly to a website and look at something, then later ads for it come up in google. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 22:49, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

I believe you can prevent Google from using your email contents to serve non email ads like search ones but you'd need to check how. Note that Google can be set up to forward emails as they arrive via the webinterface although you will need to confirm the destination once. This means emails should still be forwarded even if your client is working for whatever reason. Nil Einne (talk) 02:20, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

BTW I believe outlook.com and the other MS services support automatic forwarding and I think they finally added IMAP support and MS makes a big deal about not scanning your emails to serve ads. They will still scan your emails for malware, spam etc though AFAIK. They also scan or did scan Live Drives for porn but I don't think they do that for emails. They may also allow someone at MS to view your emails if they supposedly think a court order will be granted if the emails were under a different company. And I think they still require occasional logins or they will deactivate your email. Nil Einne (talk) 02:38, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

fastmail.fm is $10/year (basic account) and as such things go, their privacy policy is a thing of beauty.[1] 70.36.142.114 (talk) 02:35, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

I don't think that will work for me. Let me explain. I use a mail client (don't like webmail, in general). I have an email address with my ISP, but I'm not going to have that forever. My college gives alumni permanent email addresses that simply forwards email to another email address for you. These days you have to give out your email address in many places. It is a pain to change. If I want to have an email address on file that will be valid as long as I need it, I give out my college alumnus one. The problem is that it is 27 characters long. I asked the college if I could keep it (since it is used in dozens or maybe hundreds of places) but also get a shorter one, but they declined to do that. So in addition to the long permanent address, I'd like to have a shorter permanent one that will just forward to my ISP email address. Right now I'm leaning toward the free gmail one, and let them collect data. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 05:03, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

I'm not trying to pitch fastmail but they do have an imap service, you can configure it to forward email to other accounts etc. Now that I understand what you want though, I seriously think you shouldn't use gmail or your college address as a permanent one--you should instead register your own domain and make an address on it and use that. Domain registrars often have forwarding or mail hosting services that you can use with your domain, for a small fee or maybe even for free (if you register the domain with them). My residential ISP hosts email at subscriber domains at no extra charge, though of course that means you are already paying monthly for internet service. 70.36.142.114 (talk) 05:23, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

I'll look into it. I think Google and my college will be around at least as long as I am. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 05:36, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Gmail is the new hotmail, and hotmail is about to be gone. I think you're better off without having your email unavoidably go through someone else's server, even your college's. It defeats part of the purpose of encrypted transport, for one thing. 70.36.142.114 (talk) 06:40, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

I'd never heard of fastmail until I saw it here. I think Google is more likely to be around for the rest of my life. I'm looking for a solution that I can use and have it work for the rest of my life. More and more places are using your email address for the user name. Then when you change your primary email address, you have a lot of changes to make, and have to keep track of which sites use which email address. And then if you forget your password, and it has the old email address, you have more difficulties. I've had six primary email addresses in 20 years (not counting the forwarding one from the school). Changing is a pain. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 20:35, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

I understand what you mean about address changes being a pain. That's why I suggested using your own domain. That lets you move from one email provider to another while keeping your address the same. 70.36.142.114 (talk) 07:22, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Adobe Flash Player Settings

My homepage is msn.com and currently I use Mozilla browser. When I click on certain links leading to articles I want to see I get this small pop-up/window. It says:

Adobe Flash Player Settings Local Storage. www.nbcchicago.com is requesting permission to store information on your computer. Requested up to 10 KB. Currently used: 4 KB. There are two buttons: ALLOW and DENY but the deny button also has a sign of red brick (I believe this is how they are called) which is a sign of traffic not entering like at the start of one way/wrong way street. And when I try to click on it anyway I can see it is frozen. I consider it is an intrusion of my privacy. How can I get rid of it? --AboutFace 22 (talk) 22:52, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

That sign is probably a stop sign and it signifies "click this to prevent or stop [whatever]". Local storage is an obnoxious cookie-like mechanism in recent browsers and you can empty it out and shut off permissions through the Firefox Preference menu. Go to the "advanced" panel and click the "network" tab, then clear out "Offline web content and user data". 70.36.142.114 (talk) 02:42, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Go here, move the slider to the bottom, check "Never Bother Again" and uncheck allowing third party storage.

Then here and check Always Deny. Then explore the other six sections on the upper left side on your own. Pretty self-explanatory.

Install NoScript and only let individual sites run scripts when you want them to. Great for reducing ad clutter, nosy robots and pure maliciousness. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:20, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Many thanks for all your advice. Will try it later tonight since I am at work now. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 20:05, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

How to get the origin link from Blogger?

In this page there are 4 clips from YouTube but when I try to get the origin in YouTube I can not. I tried to find it by "copy video URL" or the same at the corrent time, but it didn't work. I would like to get an advice about, bcz it's important for me. Thank you. 5.28.163.166 (talk) 23:44, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

I don't see any youtube links on that page. 70.36.142.114 (talk) 05:32, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Do you not see some clips? I mean about them. I need the origin of this clips in youtube5.28.163.166 (talk) 09:24, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Just hovering over them with the mouse (Javascript off), I see a lot of code, including a youtube.com URL and a googlevideos.com one. The rest is Greek to me, and when I click it, I get an "Are you sure?" message. I'm not sure, so I don't click OK. If you see videos, do you see titles? Have you tried Googling the titles? InedibleHulk (talk) 23:35, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

There are not titles in the clips. That's the problem too. 5.28.159.102 (talk) 13:25, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

It would appear that the clips are not actually on youtube, just that youtube is being used to play the video content.Phoenixia1177 (talk) 14:58, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

This is not an area I know much about, just my observations from looking at the source in Chrome. It would appear, according to [2] and [3], that you can use youtube to play clips not uploaded to their servers. This is what appears to be going on here. The actual video should be, I think, at the flvurl part under flashvars, but that doesn't seem to go anywhere for me - there's also something using rtsp, but I'm not so sure I understand that. At any rate, best guess: the videos are not on/at youtube; where they actually are, and how the links are encoded, is a little beyond me (I know little of web page design stuff). Sorry I couldn't be of more help. :-) Phoenixia1177 (talk) 09:57, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

The video file is an FLV formatted file downloaded (streamed) from r13---sn-aiglln7d.googlevideo.com over HTTP. Its id is d8e4d146e22e2413. But you can't directly link to it (so the full URL for it is useless outside that page) because the server checks the HTTP referer header. I'm not going to paste the one I see, because it's got unique-to-me session info. If you want to see yours, view the page in Firefox with Firebug (software) open to the NET tab, and you'll see the browser start a large download to that URL. Firebug also has the option to generate the necessary cURL command to allow the file to be archived offline. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 16:28, 16 May 2014 (UTC)