Frequently Asked Questions - Email and Chat Questions

What is Pidgin?

Pidgin is a chat client that lets you log into multiple accounts at one time. The software is free,free of adware and advertising. This can be downloaded at www.pidgin.im.

Once it is downloaded and installed you can add any accounts you might have including Yahoo, MSN, Mac, AOL, and Google Talk, among others.

Here are the instructions on how to add a Google Apps account for google talk in Pidgin.

1. Select "Add/Edit" from the Accounts menu, then press the "Add" button.

2. Fill in fields on the basic tab.

• Protocol: XMPP
• Screen name: johndoe
• Server: example.com
• Resource: Home
• Password: ********
• Local alias: John

3. Fill in fields on the advanced tab.

• [x] Force old (port 5223) SSL
• [ ] Allow plaintext over unencrypted streams
• Connect port: 5223
• Connect server: talk.google.com
• Proxy type: Use Global Proxy Settings

4. Press "Save". Don't "Register", because your username should already be assigned.

Need help or more questions?: Send a ticket or give us a call.

READ RECEIPTS on Webmail?

By far the easiest and most reliable way to know if your recipient has read a message is to ask them in the message to send you a brief reply.
Gmail's web interface does not support automatic read receipts or message disposition notifications (MDNs). In fact, there are no webmail systems that support these receipts.

Why are Read Receipts something you can do with Outlook but not Gmail?

Some mail clients allow you to set a special header that requests an automatic receipt notification from the receiving mail client. While you can't do this in Gmail's web interface, you can use a desktop mail client that supports this feature (such as Mozilla Thunderbird or MS Outlook) to send your mail via Gmail's SMTP servers. However, we no longer support those desktop clients here at Region IX as the benefits of the online environment of Gmail outweigh the logistics and support needed to use these desktop clients. And as noted below, different clients deal with receipts in different ways as there is no standard for these or they ignore them, making the receipt system invalid.

There are also variety of web-based services that can be used with any email address to send tracked mails. You should think very carefully before using such services, because they often use shady techniques to track emails. For example, they frequently use techniques otherwise employed only by spammers. Your recipients may consider such techniques to be an attempt to violate their privacy.

I did find some of these options. However, at this time, I can not suggest one that could be used as they use techniques that might be questionable and/or flag your messages to other mail servers as spam or hacking mail. When a sender is flagged in this way, often times, the entire domain is flagged so all the senders to that server from our mail system would be potentially blocked.

What's the problem with read receipts?

There are essentially two problems with read receipts in general:

They are unreliable: For a read receipt to work, the receiving client must support it and be configured to use it. Many clients (including most webmail services) will simply ignore any read receipt request. For this reason, not receiving a read receipt doesn't mean that the mail was not read. In addition, some systems may reply to read receipts without the user having truly opened the message. So receiving a read receipt doesn't necessarily mean the mail was read. In other words, read receipts tell you almost nothing. Even the sneakier techniques used by mail tracking services are far-less than perfectly reliable.

They may be considered a violation of privacy: Your recipient may not want you to know exactly when they opened your email. For this reason, most modern email clients won't send a read receipts without the explicit confirmation of the recipient.