I’ve got one silly question that not even the SBC Yahoo support staff for my e-mail account knows. How come when I send e-mail to myself to test my account it does not come back to my mailbox?
– Mike Biko
A: Your test messages are not floating in cyberspace, Mr. B., but rather they’ve almost certainly been exiled to your junk mail folder.
A common scam among junk e-mail boiler rooms is to use a person’s own e-mail address as the return address on their sales pitches and other schemes.
Accordingly, many junk mail filters sniff out this self-addressed stuff and automatically sweep it off into a junk mail folder.
Open the e-mail trash folder and you’ll find those test messages.
Q. Whenever a website requires an e-mail address my Windows XP computer’s Auto Complete gives several options: One is my old e-mail address and another one is an e-mail typo. I’ve searched the registry and files and have come up with some references that I’ve eliminated, but it persists.
How can I locate these erroneous quick fills? I know you can help.
-Richard Tolzman
A. Guess what, Mr. T.? Your confidence in me knowing the answer here is misplaced. Because Windows writes the information you want to change in a highly encrypted form, I cannot help you fix bad listings in this list of user names and passwords.
Windows collects this information as users log on to various websites and provide user names and passwords.
Think for a moment and you will appreciate that the data is encrypted, because otherwise your sensitive sign-on information could be stolen by any mope with access to your computer. All is not lost, however. I can show you how to delete everything in the current list.
This will let you go back and fill stuff in correctly the second time around.
Look for the Tools choice at the top of the Microsoft Internet Explorer display and then select Internet Options in the drop-down menu. In the box with tabbed menus this summons, open the tab called Content and you will find an Auto Complete button. Click on it and you will be given the option of clearing all user names and/or all passwords. Also available are boxes to switch off remembering the names of Web pages visited in the past and to stop offering information to fill in forms.
The information for filling in forms is added by creating an entry for yourself in the Windows address book, which is part of the Outlook Express e-mail software in Windows.
With any luck, you will find it relatively easy to clear out all of your current information and then start over again to fix the bad information now on your machine.
