Tag Archives: email

Re-activating gmail on Blackberry after setting up 2-step verification for Google

After reading this viral post, ‘How Apple and Amazon’s security flaws led to my epic hacking’ I decided to set up 2-step verification for my Google Account for good. If you are reading this, chances are you already know what 2-step verification for Google is and if you don’t, read this.

If you have integrated your gmail on Blackberry, after having set up that 2-step verification your mails will stop working on your phone. Here’s what you need to do to fix it

Option 1: While you are on https://accounts.google.com/SmsAuthConfig, click on Blackberry link (on right) in the Mobile application section

On clicking Blackberry, you’ll see this

I couldn’t get to use this method as the authenticator link didn’t open on my phone, so in search of an alternate I discovered another way out(option 2)

Option 2: Open https://accounts.google.com/IssuedAuthSubTokens and generate password from here (You can use any name you want, say my BB)

After clicking generate password, you’ll see the application password. In another tab open the website for your blackberry internet service provider (https://airtel.blackberry.com in my case). While editing the email id, it will ask for gmail password. Once you validate that, it will again present you a screen to validate your gmail password.

Now instead of inputting your gmail password again here, you need to input the application password that was generated doing the step mentioned above (copy paste the generated password and click ok). This should work just fine

The Best of Web: 23/6/2012

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Looking for something interesting to read? I read the following links(and visited websites) today and liked, you might want to read them/check them out

The Future of Social Networking: Web Entrepreneurs, Vision 2.0
Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup – Class 18 Notes Essay (Founder as Victim, Founder as God)
Rapportive (Email Pluggin)
Codeacademy (Learn Coding)

The Curious Case of Customer Service and Missing Personal Touch

Tax Refund Phishing Alert and 5 Tips to avoid being Phished

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Just a quick warning to folks reading this that there’s a Phishing email doing that looks like it’s from the Indian Tax Department is doing rounds. The email text reads

tax_phishing

Averse that some of us have become to reading the complete text I clicked the link that took me to

tax_phishing1

and it was only when I saw the card number and card verification number that it occurred to me something’s not right here. On close examination things started to fall out of place. This page is a cleverly devised one and can make a lot of people fall for it unless they are alert enough. The right side pane have links to actual sites and the look is a complete rip off from an official site. While this might be a clever attempt it isn’t perfect and here’s why(keep this things in mind for similar situations)

1) Asking for Card Number and/or Pin: If anyone needs to transfer money to you, all they need is your name, your bank account number and branch. There isn’t any need for a credit/debit card number and pin

2) Non Clickable Icons/Links: On trying to find where various links on the sites are pointing out I realized that left pane is just an image and not an html section with actual links, the same holds true for the footer which looked genuine but is just an image

3) Generic Name: On a closer look you’ll realize that all the text from email to the web page is not being addressed to you or anyone in particular. It’s just a generic text like ‘Dear Applicant’ and a silly ‘Dear Income Tax Department of India customer’ for email

4) URL: The site URL could be a great pointer in Phishing cases and the URL here (http://indiataxrefdep.com/folder/) reveals that something isn’t right here. When was the last time you accessed a government site which had ‘folder’ in it’s url? Also, aren’t government sites on the ‘.gov.in’ domains?

5) Email Sender: It’s really important to check the sender email id of such emails(which I didn’t check in the first place to be honest). On second thoughts a quick look at the email id would have cleared all doubts, the sender email was ‘fihktr@yahoo.com’. Yes, an Income Tax Department email coming from a yahoo mail id.

These five tips should be helpful in figuring out if an email is a Phishing attempt or not. Feel free to add more points to the list.

I had written a similar post to avoid being Phished on Facebook, you can read it here

Designing Notification Emails: What you can learn from Friendfeed and others

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Email notifications for various actions(like new friend request, new follower) play an important role in getting a user back to the site and making them perform an action (accept/deny or follow back). Also, given the huge size of various social networks and thinking of these emails as a customer touch point it’s helpful to have a nicely designed notification email template. I’ve written a couple of posts on the same earlier too.

In this post I’ll try to compare the notification email by various popular platforms for the basic action of getting a new friend,follower, subscriber etc and see whose doing what and what could they do to make things better.

1) Twitter:

Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: Visit profile; Direct Action: Block

This template is mostly good enough to decide if a user wants to follow back another user of not but by having a direct follow button would have helped.

2) Slideshare

Format: HTML; Display Pic: Not Included; Call to Action: Visit profile; Direct Action: None

This template is plain and simple but it doesn’t have a display pic for new follower and it doesn’t have a direct button for an action. Also, it has two links which point to the same page, which isn’t the best thing .

3) LinkedIn

Format: HTML; Display Pic: Not Included; Call to Action: View Invitation; Direct Action: Accept Invitation.

While Linkedin has a direct action button they don’t have any detail about the user in question. Here again a picture or some more description will be helpful.

4) FriendFeed:

Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: None; Direct Action: Subscribe back

Friendfeed has by far the best designed email notification template in which they have the display pic, last few updates and just one link to get direct action(subscribe back) from the user

5) Facebook:

Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: Visit request ; Direct Action: Accept Request.

Facebook has changed it’s notification from the older one (active till 14th september 09). While they have definitely gone the Friendfeed way, the name of direct action button is Login which doesn’t kinda look right.

Format: Text; Display Pic: Not Included; Call to Action: View Request; Direct Action: None

6) Orkut:

Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: Visit profile and Visit friends page; Direct Action: None

Orkut too like slideshare has two links to the user’s profile and a third link which reads ‘visit friends page’ but it takes you to a separate ‘add friends’ page ala facebook. Also there is no direct call to action here too.

While there could be reasons for not having a direct action button for Facebook and Orkut(because they need to group friends into categories for example) some sites like Slideshare and Twitter can easily pick this.{Tip 1}

Having two links to the same profile page is definitely not wise and needs to be taken care off {Tip 2}. Other tips like having some profile info and a display picture can help {Tip 3} in a direct call to action(button etc) {Tip 4} if there is.

As you might have noticed eventually every notification email has moved to HTML format as it has more options like better looks and including a direct action call. {Tip 5}

What do you think about these email notifications?

5 Tips for Writing Better Emails

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Yesterday evening while trying to explain some best practices for writing emails to my younger brother I tried to make my point clear by showing him some examples and asking him to identify the differences. Given the amount of badly designed/structured emails doing rounds it wasn’t hard to find an example of badly designed email from my inbox.

Here are two emails that I picked up for him, both are regarding bloggers meet.

bad_email

and

good_email

Instead of pin-pointing the differences I asked him spot them and it didn’t take him a second to say

“The second email is addressed to you while the first one is SPAM”

Though I wasn’t expecting him to flag the first one as spam but I guess that’s how it would appear to anyone who doesn’t know the context beforehand.

Trying to figure out what was really bad about the first email isn’t rocket science. It’s essentially two very simple things

bad email marked

1) ‘To’ Field: I try to find some clues like who all was the mail addressed to etc, from the ‘To’ field (some people put their entire list in to field btw). As you can see here the email’s ‘from and to’ fields are same. Thankfully email clients don’t work like packet sniffers else this mail would have reach spam folder directly, no questions asked.
Perhaps like we used to think during our college day the sender thought it’s mandatory to have an address in ‘To’ field and therefor it’s their name in the ‘To’ field while the addresses email id’s are shoved in the ‘BCC’ field.

2) ‘Greeting’: It’s basic courtesy (common sense?) to greet someone by their name (unless you are not sure about their name) when sending email and it’s even more important when you are sending mail to a blogger on behalf of a client. The last thing the recipient should think is if it’s a bulk email or worse spam.

Given the fact that recepients of such emails wouldn’t be numerous I don’t think it would have bee a tough job.

5 Tips for Writing Better Emails:

1) Don’t send bulk emails. And if you have to then don’t make it apparent that it’s a bulk email by addressing it like ‘Hi Bloggers’ or ‘Hi Guys’ .

2) Write personal emails:

Emails starting with just ‘Hi’, start on a fishy ground(unless you know the recipient)

bulk email Though the ‘To’ field here has your name unlike in example 1 above since it starts with just ‘Hi’, you can’t assume that this email is just being sent to you.

3) Avoid generic statements:

‘Your blog makes for very interesting reading’. That’s the kind of lines spammers use these days. Avoid them and insted writing something that seems more genuine and believable.

4) Be relevant/targeted:

Now that’s seriously lame. Thankfully they didn’t add neighbours and relatives to the list.

5) Have an opt-out link: If for whatever reason you plan to send emails to people regularly without asking them before hand at least have a link for them to opt-out from your emailing list.

As with other things finding bad examples is quite easy but finding good examples isn’t. Here’s an example of what could be called a better designed/structured email sent for the first time (to some email list I suppose)

nice_email

second half

nice_email2 You might want to checkout this awesome email checklist by Seth Godin and writing more effective emails by Chris Brogan for more on better/effective emails.

Got some tips to share about writing better emails?

Slideshare Listens and Acts: Makes changes to notification email

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Among many notifications mails like Facebook comments and Twitter followers that I got today one was from Slideshare informing of a new follwer. I was about to delete it almost as soon as it opened/loaded but then something caught my eye. Something had changed. Here’s what the email looked like on 10th August when I took this screenshot.

I had written about the use of both terms(follower and contact) in this email and how it isn’t the best thing to be done here. In two days since I wrote that blog post, things have changed and I assume that post of mine might have been one of the reasons behind the change in email template which now looks like this

The usage of term follow/follower/following is consistent now in all the three instances. Also, the profile url is now hidden under ‘here’, unlike being posted in open which is a good thing as it saves space and looks neat.

All in all good change, thumbs up Slideshare !!

Slideshare were you really listening ? 🙂

update: Slideshare acknowledged listening to the post I wrote

Personal email in a print ad – personal touch or lack of professional attitude?

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I started out replying to this question on LinkedIn

In every print ad it is common to give some contacts for a consumer – be it a website address, infoline number or general email (info@company (product).com). What about email address with name and surname of a brand manager? Does it look unprofessional, or on contrary – gives a sense of credibility and personal touch

but thought of posting my answer in form of a blog post.

So here’s the deal:

While most people who read this or commented on this question might feel/say that they are more likely to respond to a firstname.lastname@company.com than to info@company.com, I don’t think it holds true for me. On the contrary I feel it’s better to have generic email ids for following reasons

1) It gives you a sense of knowing what you are getting into:
While a “firstname.lastname@company.com” might be more personal, it definitely doesn’t tell you about the role/designation the guy holds or if you are asking the right question to the right guy.

2) Easy to remember:
While firstname.lastname@company.com might look and sound good, what people don’t realize is that it’s difficult to remember these email ids. For ex: If every company whose products you use started giving people’s names as ids for things like support would you be able to remember even a few of them ? No, on the other hand think if each one of those companies had an email id like help@company.com or support@company.com. Isn’t this a lot easier to remember and share ?

3) Ease of management:
While giving personal email id’s is not a big deal but it might not be a practical deal, especially for big brands. I for sure know that I won’t be able to handle if I start getting hunderds of emails per day. The way these email accounts are maintained(mostly) is that the emails to them gets forwarded to everyone whose part of the support team or alternatively is assigned to a member from support team. Supporting that sort of thing would be difficult unless you make a fake account and give it out rather than giving email id of a real user.

These are a few points that I could think of in support of using a generic email id.

What do you think about this and why you think that way ?

Changes in Twitter’s notification emails

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A Twitter Phishing Attempt ? This was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this email in my inbox

Not used to seeing a new twitter follower mail like this ever I was a bit alarmed, to find out more I checked what URL were the hyperlinks pointing to and as it turned out the hyperlinks were all pointing to twitter.com. Then it occured to me that maybe twitter has changed the format of it’s notifcation mails, which as it turns out is the case. Here’s what the older follower notification mail looked like.

The new format of notification definitely looks better and adds value by sharing more information about the “new follower” like their profile picture, number of updates, follower and following count. Also, a small extention to this change could be to also share the one line user bio, that’ll further assist users to know more about their new follower and in turn be helpful in deciding if they should follow them back or not.

Let’s see what the change could mean

1) Reduction in number of clicks/visits to the site: Needless to say, a lot of views which twitter was getting due to new follower notification will go down as the details in many cases would be sufficient for the person being followed to not follow back(not popular, newbie, bot etc)

2) Increase in usage of block feature: Since identifying bot/spam users will become easy and the notification now also has a block button, the usage of block feature will rise and might lead to more cases of spam account deletions.

3) Better Tracking: Since the new notification mails have hyperlinks with analytics tracking code, their usage metrics will be recorded and can be improved

These are some of the possible implications of this change, there would be some more interesting patterns that’ll emerge with time for ex: peope might start to decide if someone is worth following back by just seeing their following/follower ratio(which isn’t always right) or people with beautiful/interesting pics will get more follow backs.

What do you think about these changes ? Do you think the service should notify its users about such changes ?

PS: Did you notice the order of user stats in the mail with their follower count on top ?

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