Useful Tips & Tricks
For your Crystal Oak Email Account
Okay, just admit it. Several of you have quit using your Crystal Oak
email account. You already have another account (or three) that you
monitor, and you fell out of the habit of using this one. Or you're having
trouble configuring Outlook or Outlook Express (or some other mail
program) to properly retrieve and send mail from your Crystal Oak account.
Perhaps you've been traveling a few times, and decided you'd rather stick with an
email address at Hotmail, Yahoo! or Excite that you can pick up using a web
browser. Maybe you don't have a single computer that you always use for
your email, or maybe you just want to check your mail at work and find it easier
to use your work email address for everything.
Well, I have a solution for you! Remember the genesis of Crystal Oak? I was motivated to buy a domain name and start learning about web authoring because my email address got bounced too many times in a short span. But I too have multiple email accounts that I manage. And sometimes I need to get mail while I'm on the road. Holly's need for an email account accessible from a web browser that won't attract lots of junk mail has made me do some further research. There are two useful tricks that will make your Crystal Oak account more valuable than ever.
The first useful trick is mail forwarding. Maybe you have a work account or an ISP email account that you routinely use. And you prefer it to be your main (or only) email account. Send me a note and ask me to forward your Crystal Oak email account to that account. It works like this: Suppose I decide to receive all my mail at hgsjunkbin@hotmail.com (not a real account -- so don't mail anything there!) I want this to be the only account I have to check for mail. I can forward my Crystal Oak account so that all mail sent to it will automatically be delivered to my hotmail account. I can still give out my Crystal Oak account to friends and family. They can email me at my Crystal Oak account. Now suppose I get a new job and I decide to get all my mail at the new work account. I can just point my Crystal Oak account to the new account! I have one account that becomes a personal "remailer". My personal email account can stay the same for years -- but I don't have to mess with multiple accounts!
Mail forwarding is a form of aliasing. There is another form of aliasing that can also be useful. Suppose I want an informal or humorous email name to give one group (i.e. my buddies), but I'd like a more formal name to give to another group (e.g. business contacts). I can create two (or more) accounts. The first might be named grumpy@crystaloak.com, while the second would be my.name@crystaloak.com. One account can then be forwarded to the other. A third or fourth account can also be added if needed (e.g. dale, dneibaur, dale.neibaur, hgrebunski, etc.). But all can feed into one account for simplicity.
The second useful trick I learned is accessing a Crystal Oak email account from a web browser. To do this the account can't be forwarded. If you forward your mail (using useful trick #1 above) then you'll have to use the tools that go with your target mailbox. Of course, if the target mailbox is another Crystal Oak account (aliasing multiple names to one mailbox on Crystal Oak) then you can use the browser interface to get your mail from the collector mailbox. Click on the "WebMail" link that has been added to the button list on the left side of our Crystal Oak pages. See it over there? It's between "Contributors" and "About Crystal Oak". Using this link you can read your email, compose replies, write new notes and keep an address book online. It's at least as useful as Hotmail or Excite, and there are no advertisements! You won't get constant reminders to buy more disk space, either.
When you click on the WebMail link you'll be asked for your name and password. Your name is the name of your email account without the "@crystaloak.com" part of the address. For example, if I wanted to check the email for the webmaster@crystaloak.com account, then I would type "webmaster" into the "name" field. The password is the same password you enter to retrieve email from this account in Outlook or some other email program. Please note: Passwords ARE case sensitive! If you've forgotten your password or if you would like to change your password then send me a note (webmaster@crystaloak.com) or call me. I'll get you fixed right up. That's what I'm here for!
After you log in you'll be taken to a setup screen. Unless you want to read your mail in some other language, you can leave all the defaults as they are. Click the "continue" button on the first page. Scroll to the very bottom of the "User Preferences" page (the next page) and hit the "Save" button. You'll then be taken to a page with a very simple, intuitive interface to send and retrieve your emails. You can go back and play with different setup parameters at any time by clicking the "Pref" button at the top of this email access page. And by the way, the "Pref" area will allow you to set up your own automatic mail forwarding, as well as send an automatic reply to an incoming email. So if you're going to be gone for a while you can have the mailer automatically send a response to any incoming emails until you get back to check on things.
That's it! You can now access your Crystal Oak email account any time you can get on the web!
If you have other friends or extended family who'd like an account, or if you would find it useful to have more than one account, please let me know. We can have up to 999,999 accounts for no additional charge! As you can imagine, we have lots of room still left to grow.
These tools exist for you. I hope you'll find them useful and fun!
