How to Import your Macintosh Apple Mail Contacts into Earthlink’s Webmail So You Can Use Earthlink’s SpamBlocker On Its “HIGH” Setting.

1. Get familiar with SpamBlocker and your Earthlink account at webmail.earthlink.net. (I don’t address background knowledge here.) If you want to use Earthlink’s SpamBlocker on its “HIGH” setting, you have to export your email addresses from your current mail program and import them into Earthlink’s Webmail program. If you don’t know the import trick you will be frustrated for hours (because Earthlink uses shoddy programming that looks for specific words in the file you upload. And, Earthlink uses shoddy customer service reps that don’t know this and have great difficulty understanding this and most other problems that would actually prompt you to call in. And they have a bad habit of hanging up on you when transferring you, after you've spent an hour on the phone waiting for someone who might know an answer).

2. Open your email program and export the contacts. If you can, use a format that exports directly to commas (such as .CSV, but I’ve seen some exported comma delimited files that just have a .DAT suffix.) If you can’t export to comma-delimited directly, export your contacts however you can and open the exported file in Excel, which will probably read it in just about any exported format. For example, in Apple’s Mail program, you have to download and use a secondary program called Address Book Exporter, which saves to Text (and other formats). Doesn’t really matter which export format you use, Excel will open one of them.

In Excel, clip out all the unnecessary fields. I just kept two, and relabeled them: “Last Name” and “E-mail Address”. Those two labels (spelled just as indicated) are important. They should be at the top of their two respective columns. Be precise. If you specify “email address” instead of “E-mail Address” it won’t work. If you specify “Name” instead of “Last Name” you’ll have a blank column under name. (This is where Earthlink’s “I don’t care about you if you don’t use exactly the same program as most of our customers” attitude really shows.) Then save this as a comma delimited file, with the appended suffix. Either .CSV or .DAT appear to work.

Check your work: You can open this new file in a text program now. The first couple of lines should look like this:

Last Name,E-mail Address
Smith,smith@smithy.com
Jones,jones@yahoo.com

…with all your contacts listed as the two shown here.

Now import this file into the Address Book portion of Earthlink’s webmail, using the “Import Address Book” link.

I plan to bill Earthlink for the 4.5 hours of time it took me to figure this out ON MY OWN without any help from them.

Macintosh Safari (or other web browser) users: eBay blocks your viewing of entire item categories.

Problem: Your web browser is possibly telling eBay that you live in Germany!

From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences.
From the View menu, choose International.
If the Language tab is not already selected, click it.
Click the Edit button.
Deselect Deutsch, and click OK.
Quit Safari.
Reopen Safari.

Sudden or New Microsoft Word Problems on Macintosh OSX, after it's been working well for some time.

One possible problem: MS Word's preference files corrupt on a semi-regular basis.

Force Word to make new ones. Users:Name:Library:Preferences: Microsoft and then stuff (or save elsewhere) these 6 files. Then delete the originals, reopen MS Word which forces new ones to be made. You can always go back to your stuffed versions if something goes horribly wrong:

• Microsoft Component Preferences
• Microsoft Office Settings
• Microsoft Word
• Office Font Cache
• Word Font Substitutes
• Word Settings