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Open source software (UNIX and its plugins, other software) and web applications (Servers, forum applications, email applications, programming languages, etc.) have attracted the people all around the world. And they are gradually becoming the dominant in many areas. This is due to many important characters common to these open source software. I will describe some of them in this post.

The most significant attribute of any open source software or web application is the complete availability of the source code. This enables the developers to customize or improve these software and applications according to their requirements. Most of these are available for free download and usage. And they have a huge user and developer community around the world. Many of them contribute to the improvements of the software or web application. If anyone gets stuck with open source software or a web application, he/she can get help from the user and developer community. This is very important and economical compared to the high priced software and their vendors.

Open source software and web applications are always more reliable compared to others. When there are any bugs (errors) anyone can report to the main developer or company and they will fix it in the next release version.

As most of them are freely available and reliable, more than 50% of the computer users around the world use at least small open source software or a web application. But when it comes to web applications, open source web applications are dominating. For an example, if you take web hosting, Apache Tomcat server is dominating as a reliable and less complex server. And most of these tomcat servers run on UNIX based systems which are also open source. Due to this most of the web hosting services charge less for web hosting plans hosted in UNIX servers compared to Windows servers.

In my personal view, I think that the open source software will make the world happier and a safer place to live in the coming future. They will definitely win the competition with high priced software and web applications and more and more people will embrace the open source software and web applications saying BYE to the highly priced ones.

Most of us suffer from unwanted emails (spam emails). They fill our inbox very quickly. Some spam emails are blocked by the email service. But sometimes we receive emails from the websites or people that we know and use, in an unwanted time and sequences. I have experienced this frequently. I’m pretty sure that you have also experienced this or still experiencing it. Therefore I thought to write this article on how to avoid this by following some basic precautions.

Actually, if you are receiving unwanted emails, the responsible person for these unwanted emails is you. I say this because you are the one who provides your email addresses to various people and websites. Therefore you better start practicing the following guidelines on your email addresses if you are not doing it now.

The first thing you must do is deciding the people and websites that you are going to provide your primary email address. Give an importance to each person or website. If you don’t bother receiving emails from them it is ok to provide your primary email address. If you want to give your email address only once and don’t wish to receive emails from that person or website again, my advice is to create a secondary email address from a free email service like Gmail or Yahoo and provide it. Many websites ask to enter a valid email address even for a single download or for some data. Then some of them sell these email addresses to various kinds of email marketing services and individuals to market products and services. If you provide your primary email address, you will be receiving various kinds of unwanted emails. If you provide your office email address, the situation will definitely become worse. Therefore always keep a secondary email at least to provide for these kinds of websites and people.

Never provide your real details like address and phone number when registering for a secondary email account. Sometimes, the marketing companies can extract your personal data. Then they will contact you using those data. And never open or reply to emails that you are not quite sure about. Because some emails carry viruses. There are email blocking settings provided by your email service. But they differ from service to service. You must find out about those settings and configure your mail account to minimize the amount of emails that you receive.

Companies are selling domain names for very cheap prices. Therefore some people buy them without any purpose just for fun and keep them. This will block the chance for a person who really wants to reserve a domain name with a desired name. Sometimes they get disappointed as they can’t reserve a domain name according to their wish. Therefore I thought to give some guidelines on how to select a domain name according to someone’s desire.

First thing you must understand that the domain name that you are going to select (buy) should indicate the content of the website that you are going to build and what you provide from that website. For an example if you are going to buy a domain name to design a website for your biscuit manufacturing business (let’s say your business name is ABC Biscuits), first you should find whether you can reserve a domain name like abcbiscuits.com. If it is not available, the domain name reserving service will suggest you some weird domain names like bestabcbiscuits.com, abcbiscuits123.com,topabcbiscuits.com, etc. But those domain names don’t give a clear idea about your business name. Then the best thing you should do is to check whether a domain name available like abc-biscuits.com,a-b-c-biscuits.com. Even if it has a “-“ in the middle it clearly shows your business name. I also did the same thing to reserve this domain name www.best-internet-guide.com as bestinternetguide.com was already reserved. Using “-“ will increase the readability of your domain name.

Some people think that short named domains attract more users. But according to my point of view it doesn’t make a big difference. If your website is famous and customers or visitors are satisfied, then they don’t care about how long is your domain name. They will find ways to remember it easily. The most important thing is that your website must run smoothly and continuously increase the visitors per day. I’m not going to discuss how to increase the traffic for the website here as it is out of the topic. I will discuss it in a future post.

Another important thing is that you must consider about how to host your domain when you choose a domain name reservation service. The less trouble way is that you find a good hosting service. Most of the hosting services provide a free domain if you buy a hosting package. As you have to host your domain someday, I think this is the best way to do. You must not go for a cheap service always. Because sometimes it will give you unexpected troubles as their service is not good. Normally the companies charge higher rates, maintain their infrastructure with a high quality. I hope that you got something from this. More relevant topics to come in the future.

Email is not a new thing for the modern age people. But many people do not get the maximum usage of it as they are not aware about professional email writing according to my point of view. Some people lose their jobs, some lose their potential customers, some lose their opportunities and some lose their hopes due to non-professional emails they write. Therefore I thought that it will be better if I can provide few tips on how to write professional emails. I can’t promise you that I will let you know how to write professional emails 100% accurately. But I’m very confident that these tips will help you to improve your skills and ultimately you will benefit from it. Following are the tips that I have followed to write my professional emails.

ONE: You MUST, MUST, MUST create a mail signature. Mail signature is something which you put after your email body which indicates your identity. It is far more better than only writing your name. you can create your email signature like this.

Thank You (You can also use “Thanks & Regards” or simply “Regards” or “Cheers”)
John Cena{Your first name and last name}
Engineer{Your position in the company that you work or your own business}
Office: 123 456 789 Mobile:654 321 987{Your contact details (Phone numbers)}
www.yourcompany.com{Your company or your business web address if there is any}

Make sure that you put your country code for the telephone number(s) if your are sending the email to a foreigner.

TWO: Use a language style which is simple yet professional. This is very important if you are sending the email to a foreign person or a group of people whose mother language is not English (To a person like me).

THREE: Do the addressing in a polite and a professional manner. Ex. You can address the person as “Dear Sir” or if you know that person “Dear {Name of the person}” or else you can use “Hello” also with the name or Sir.

FOUR: Make sure that you put the subject in a way that it briefs the content of the email. The receiver of your email might be a very busy person. Normally those kind of people ignore some emails by looking at the subject line. You must make sure that this won’t happen to your email. Imagine what will happen if you send a critical email to your boss without a proper subject line and he ignores it.

These are the main things that you should consider when writing a professional email. You don’t need to consider about these tips if you are writing personal emails. Then the consequences might be vice-versa. Hope you got my point. Wish you can write better professional emails after reading this.