Importing Contacts to SmarterMail

Yes, you can import data into SmarterMail from other email software!

Here's how you import a list of contacts:

1. Log in using the credentials provided.



2. Click the Contacts icon



3. From the Actions menu choose Import/Export, then Import



4. You'll see this "File to Upload" box:



5. Click "Browse" and locate your contacts file, which ought to be in CSV format



6. Click "Next"



7. You'll be prompted to match up the fields in your file to the fields in SmarterMail – you might want to select "ignore" for some of them as I've done here – then click "Next" again:



8. You might be prompted to clarify or "skip" one or two of the items in your list – otherwise, that's it, you've finished and the contacts will be imported in no time.

BNI 60 Seconds - New Law on Cookies

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I help people to have the best possible shop window on the street where the world does its shopping – the internet.

"My company is called inframes and we have been making websites for eleven years, and the vast majority of those sites have used - in one way or another - cookies, little hidden text files that a website uses to store information on your computer or mobile device.

"This week I just wanted to mention a change to the law on the use of cookies by websites which will affect a lot of companies. From May 26th, as a result of a change to the European Telecommunication Directive, websites will be legally obliged to ask for a user’s consent if they want to store a cookie on that user’s device.
The government expects all companies to have at the very least what they call “a realistic plan to achieve compliance”. You can find out more by visiting the Information Commissioner’s Office website at ico.gov.uk or just give me a call and I can tell you whether your site is going to be affected.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am part of a growing new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

First Steps in Setting Up Your Own Website Forum

Forums and bulletin boards have been around since the very early days of the internet and there a lot of different ways to create or manage your own.

Free and Open Source

You could use a free service like invisionfree.com where it's all hosted for you.

If you want to host it yourself, consider open source software, like phpbb.com (probably the most popular of all the open source forums – see reading-forum.co.uk).

Also look at simplemachines.org and phpnuke.org and jforum.net and on and on – there are literally dozens of them. So really it's a case of deciding you want from the forum and which product suits you best.

Commercial Software Packages

Start by looking at vBulletin. That's about $195. The Digital Point forum that I use sometimes is run with vBulletin. Or something like ASP Playground which is about $300.

I have used UBB Threads for one of my clients, which is very good and costs $139, but isn't hugely customisable, visually-speaking.

Obviously, if you're not a developer yourself, the cost of setting up one of these sites will combine the cost of the software (from zero upwards), plus the amount of time it takes to install, plus a degree of customisation, plus a degree of integration with the rest of your website.