goowy is actually meant to be playful and easy to remember.  But its more than that.  It's a play on words - the term GUI which is pronounced the same way, refers to a Graphical User Interface.  We felt that one of the key areas where our application would make a difference is with the vibrant, interactive interface.  And so goowy was born.  There are people that feel funny about giving out something@goowy.com as their email address, but we imagine that when Hotmail and Yahoo first launched, there were similar reservations about their naming decisions.  As we grow to be a household name, this will cease to be an issue.

The (re) in goowy(re) stands for "rich experience".  We believe in providing a truly interactive medium for managing our members' digital lifestyle.

A mini is a small specialized (mini) application that provides easy access to frequently used functions or provides some visual information. Examples of minis within goowy are news (rss) viewers, desktop notes, quotes, bookmarks, search windows, etc.

Unfortunately, some of our users have reported problems installing Flash.  In most cases, the users reporting this issue have been using Internet Explorer on Windows machines.  Here are some steps to take to make sure that Flash 8 is properly installed:

1. After vising the Macromedia site, make sure to close your browser and open it again before returning to goowy.
2. If step 1 doesn't solve the issue, a more complex solution is necessary.  You will need to visit the Macromedia site to learn more about how to uninstall Flash: http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_14157
3. Once Flash is uninstalled, make sure to close your browser and/or reboot if the uninstaller suggested that you need to do this.
4. Install Flash 8 again by visiting: http://www.macromedia.com/go/flashplayer.  After installation is complete, make sure to once again close your browser.
5. Return to goowy: http://www.goowy.com.  If you are still experiencing issues, please send a detailed description of the steps you've taken, and the exact page that you are seeing to support@goowy.com so that we can further troubleshoot this issue with you.

We encourage everyone to upgrade to Flash 8 if you currently have Flash 7 installed. This will give you a lot of benefit within goowy, including access to our IM and File Storage components and a much cleaner overall look and feel. However, if you have Flash 7 installed and are unable or unwilling to upgrade to Flash 8, we have a Flash 7 implementation available to you. To access it, please visit http://classic.goowy.com

Our member's privacy and security is at the heart of everything we do.  To that end, we ensure that sensitive information such as passwords are always encrypted within our system.  Since we do not maintain a clear-text version of your password, we can't possibly send it to you.  However, we are able to send you a new, randomly generated password to your alternate email address. If you registered without entering an alternate email address, the only recourse that you have is to go through our "reset password" process.  This process requires that you know your user ID, your birthdate and the answer to your secret question.  Without this information, you will not be able to reset your password.

Unfortunately, the mail protocol (SMTP) has many problems associated with it. One of the issues is that anyone can impersonate anyone else - basically, there is no way to know that the email being sent to you is actually coming from the person listed in the "From" line. The problem of sending these false emails is commonly referred to as "Phishing", where the purpose of the email is to extract information from you. Rest assured that we will never send you an email asking you to open a document or fill out an online application. Further, we will never ask you for your password as we have no need for it. If you receive an email of this nature that appears to be from goowy.com, please delete the email without taking any action on it.

We do not provide access to our mail system through any external applications (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc.).  If you would like to either view your messages or send new ones, you must login to your goowy account through the web interface.  In the future, we will be bringing the power of our interface to your desktop, allowing you to access your goowy mail without a browser and even in offline modes.

Each of our members is given 2GB worth of email storage.  Is that enough?  It's equivalent to 2000MB.  That should hopefully be enough for the most active of our members.

We currently allow attachments of up to 10MB of size.  To be more specific, our mail servers do not allow more than a total of 11MB to be sent per email.  This includes the email, all of the attachments and the meta data which is necessary for mail servers to communicate to each other.  Further, we allow a single attachment of up to 10MB per email, or up to 5 individual attachments, which total 10MB or less.

Although usable at 800x600, we have optimize goowy(re) for resolutions that are 1024x768 or greater.  We highly recommend using at least 1024x768 resolution with goowy(re) when possible, as the experience is significantly better.

To change your resolution under Windows 95/98/NT/2000/Me:

1. From the Start menu, select Settings, and then choose Control Panel. The Control Panel window will appear.
2. Open the Display icon. The Display Properties window will appear.
3. Select the Settings tab.
4. Ensure the Desktop Area is set to 1024 by 768 pixels.
5. Choose the OK button.

To change your resolution on a Mac:

1. From the Apple menu, select Control Panels. You will either have the option Monitors & Sound or Monitors
1. Open the Monitor icon.
2. From the list of available resolutions, select the resolution you wish to use. Your screen resolution will change instantly.
3. Close the window.

Unfortunately, it seems that the entire font set is not installed for certain Linux ditrubutions. This is specifically true with Ubuntu, where the Microsoft True Type Core Fonts are not installed by default. To install the fonts, use the Synaptic Package Manager. Choose the Settings Menu and then choose Repositories. Click on Add and select the Multiverse Repositories. It may take some time to load the new repositories. "msttfcorefonts" will now be in the list of available items. Mark it for Installation and choose Apply. Once you have finished this step, open your browser again, login into goowy(re) and you should see all of the fonts as they are expected to be displayed.

To disable your popup blocker in Internet Explorer:

Open Internet Explorer. Select Tools>Pop-up Blockers>Pop-up Blocker Settings

Enter *.goowy.com into the Addresses of Web Site to Allow. Select Add and Close.

To disable your popup blocker in Firefox:

Open Firefox. Select Tools>Options>Content>Allowed Sites.

In the Address of web site enter the following sites and select Allow after each:
www.goowy.com
www1.goowy.com
www2.goowy.com
desktop.goowy.com

Select OK and then OK again.

As you may imagine, FlashBlock causes some issues for goowy users as our site is built primarily with Flash for rendering of the user interface. A simple workaround for this is to ensure that *.goowy.com is added to the FlashBlock white list. If you are running at a resolution of 1024x768 or greater and see scrollbars in the message area, it is likely that FlashBlock is somehow interfering and should be disabled.

Inherently, we support all languages.  This is due to our use of standardized UTF-8 encoding for the processing of both inbound and outbound mail. There are some systems, such as Hotmail, which break this universal standard, and end up displaying funky characters in messages from goowy accounts.  This can be remedied by changing your setting for message encoding in the goowy General Options screen, from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1.  We have also had many requests to translate our application into various languages, and this is something we will do in the future, but for now the interface is only available in English.

Contacts can easily be imported into goowy(contacts).  There are two ways that contacts can be imported - either automatically or manually.  Generally speaking, if the automatic option is available and works, you should use it.  However, as this automatic process involves screen scraping technology, it can easily be broken when a provider changes their web content.  For this reason, the manual approach is a good alternative.

To use the automatic approach, click import and then choose the provider that you would like to import from: Yahoo.com, GMail.com, AOL.com or Hotmail.com.  Once chosen, you will be asked to input your username and password - we do not store this information, but simply use it to log into your account and download your information.  If this automatic approach does not work for you, the manual approach should.

To get started with the manual approach, you first need to have a proper export.  We currently support importing contacts which have been exported into one of the following formats: Outlook CSV, Outlook Express CSV, Yahoo CSV, Thunderbird CSV, and the vCard standard (used by the Mac Address Book).  In addition, if the automatic process of exporting your Hotmail contacts did not work for you, you can use this manual process:

Sign in to your Hotmail account.

Click the 'Contacts' tab.

Click 'Print view.'

Align the cursor with the first letter of the 'Name' column.

Highlight your contacts by holding down the cursor and dragging it down the list.

Hold down the 'Ctrl+C' keys to copy the list.

Open Microsoft Excel (or a similar spreadsheet program that supports comma separated values).

Select the first cell (A1) 

Right click in cell A1 and select 'Paste Special'-->Text and then OK (if using Firefox) or simply hold down the 'Ctrl+V' keys to paste (if using Internet Explorer).

Choose 'Save as' from the 'File' menu, and select the type 'CSV (Comma delimited).' 

The following are the keyboard shortcuts that we support:
You can now compose a new message just by pressing n (wherever the compose message button is visible).

In the Compose message view, you can:
* Save (Ctrl+Shift+S)
* Print (Ctrl+Shift+P)
* Send (Ctrl+Shift+Enter)
* Close (Esc)

When selected on a message, you can:
* Forward (f)
* Reply (r)
* Reply to All (l)
* Print (p or Ctrl+Shift+P)
* Mark as Read (q)
* Mark as Unread (w)

When viewing contacts, you can:
* Save (Ctrl+Shift+S)
* Print (Ctrl+Shift+P)
* Create New Contact (Ctrl+Shift+A)

When changing options, you can save (Ctrl+Shift+S).

We also support other standard keyboard shortcuts including the use of the arrow keys for list navigation and the use of the Delete key in lists.

We disable all accounts which have not been accessed for 120 days and we delete all accounts which have not been accessed for 180 days. To stay active, please access the account a minimum of once every 120 days. After all, do you really want to leave us for four months straight?!  If your account is disabled, and you would like to have it enabled again, please email support@goowy.com and make sure to let us know which goowy id you would like to have re-enabled.

In most cases, a message which you consider to be SPAM, even though addressed from a user@goowy.com is not actually sent from our servers.  If the message is not sent from our servers, there is nothing that we can do to prevent this message from being sent.  Any messages sent from our servers will have the following as one of the headers:
X-Mailer: goowy mail - http://www.goowy.com
Please note that this can be forged as well, but if this is not present, it was not sent from us.  If this is present, please take a look at the received from header, and find the IP address in that header. Once you have identified the IP address, you can conduct an IP lookup to determine which ISP provides this person with Internet access. One such lookup tool you may want to try is: http://www.arin.net/whois/.  You can then attempt to contact that ISP to report any abuse activities occurring within their service.  If you find that California Regional Intranet, Inc. is the registered owner of that IP address, please submit the complaint to us at abuse@goowy.com.

We're constantly working, trying to enhance our member experience with new and innovative functionality presented in an intuitive and fun manner.  Currently, we have a few major pieces of functionality that we're working on including Instant Messaging, Virtual File Storage, Personal Pages and Blogs, Audio and Video Email.  In addition, we're hard at work on bringing out new minis which we believe will enhance our members' ability to truly leverage the power of the Internet.  And of course, we're also constantly refining the overall product based on our member feedback - so please keep it coming!

Please help us grow by sharing your goowy experience with your friends and family.  Click here to find out how to spread the word!

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