Quelques idées pour améliorer l'application iPhone des CFF [fr]

[en] Some ideas to improve the iPhone application for CFF/SBB.

Et hop, un article dans la catégorie “consulting gratuit parce que j’en ai envie” — on verra ce que les CFF ont mis en place comme canaux remontants pour ce genre de chose. Et en passant, ça m’intéresse de savoir ce que vous pensez de vos idées!

Donc, je suis une grande fan de l’application iPhone des CFF. Je l’utilise pour consulter les horaires et pour acheter presque tous mes billets de train. Cependant, il y a un certain nombre de grosses maladresses dans la conception de cette application (je parle stratégie/fonctionnalités ici, et non pas réalisation).

Prenons le plus évident: j’ai un abonnement demi-tarif. Chaque fois que je montre mon billet au contrôleur, je dois également sortir mon porte-monnaie et mon abonnement demi-tarif, en plus de l’iPhone. Au fond, quand j’y pense, c’est presque moins pratique qu’avoir un billet en papier qui serait aussi dans le porte-monnaie! Tous les billets électroniques ont mon nom dessus. Ils sont achetés via un compte créé sur le site CFF. Ne pourrait-on donc pas imaginer la chose suivante:

– j’enregistre mon abonnement demi-tarif auprès de l’application (ou mieux, l’application le fait toute seule car elle sait déjà qui je suis, et ce sont les CFF eux-mêmes (!) qui m’ont vendu le demi-tarif)
– lorsque je présente mon billet au contrôleur, le demi-tarif est “inclus” dans le billet (probablement une fonctionnalité de son lecteur — je ne sais pas exactement quel retour le lecteur fait au contrôleur)

On pourrait aussi imaginer, du coup, que lorsque je cherche à acheter un billet, l’application me propose directement le demi-tarif (ça, c’est implémentable même sans enregistrement du demi-tarif, en passant: une simple préférence “je voyage normalement en deuxième classe demi-tarif” ferait déjà l’affaire).

Alors, je suis sûre qu’il y a un tas de raisons (sécurité, protection des données) qui rendent difficiles “iPhonisation” du demi-tarif. Il faut voir la photo, par exemple. Mais le billet électronique pourrait très bien intégrer la photo de la personne en plus du nom — du coup, serait-il vraiment nécessaire d’exiger alors une pièce d’identité? Il suffit de sécuriser suffisamment le système d’achat et de génération de billets électroniques pour que le système de contrôle puisse avoir la certitude que chacun est unique.

Très probablement qu’on trouverait des solutions à ces problèmes si l’objectif devenait “le voyageur avec un billet iPhone n’a rien d’autre à sortir que son iPhone lorsqu’il est contrôlé”.

Dans le même ordre d’idée: j’ai un abonnement Mobilis zones 11 et 12. Cela veut dire que suivant où je vais, je peux prendre des billets de prolongement de parcours (zones supplémentaires) ou des billets de train partant d’une gare autre que Lausanne.

Exemple: si je vais à Vevey et que mon train s’arrête à Lutry (encore en zone 12), je peux prendre un billet de train depuis Lutry.

Cela demande toutefois une certain gymnastique: si je vais à Genève et que mon train ne s’arrête pas à Renens, par exemple, je n’ai pas le droit de prendre un billet à partir de Renens.

Je m’étais d’ailleurs plainte de cette règle très peu intuitive pour le voyageur auprès de @RailService, qui m’avait expliqué que c’était plus pratique pour eux. Soit. Mais, attendez — on essaie d’être orienté clientèle ou non? Je ne compte pas le nombre de fois où j’ai vu des voyageurs se faire (gentiment, parce qu’ils doivent avoir l’habitude) remettre à l’ordre par le contrôleur parce qu’ils avaient un billet “partiel” pour leur course, un abonnement pour le reste, et que le train ne s’arrêtait pas à la bonne gare intermédiaire. (Moi aussi, d’ailleurs, c’est comme ça que j’ai appris le fonctionnement du système!)

Franchement, “plus pratique pour l’entreprise et complètement contre-intuitif pour le client” n’est pas une bonne stratégie pour vos produits. Mais passons.

Donc, qu’est-ce que ce serait pratique si je pouvais signifier à mon application iPhone CFF que je possède un abonnement Mobilis pour les zones 11 et 12, et s’il pouvait en tenir compte dans les billets qu’il me proposerait? Si je veux aller à St-Prex, l’application me proposerait automatiquement les bonnes zones pour un billet de prolongement de parcours (et non pas, comme elle le fait maintenant, cinq zones dont deux qui me sont inutiles car je les ai déjà payées via mon abonnement).

Si je veux acheter uniquement les bonnes zones, c’est très difficile via l’iPhone, car l’application ne permet pas de sélectionner des zones spécifiques (on peut comprendre, vu le nombre de communautés tarifaires, mais quand même). C’est donc une des rares situations où je me retrouve à acheter mon billet à l’automate.

Maintenant, avec l’extension du réseau Mobilis, je suis confrontée à cette difficulté de plus en plus souvent: je suis dans le train pour Gland (eh oui, l’impulsion pour écrire cet article!) pour lequel j’ai acheté un prolongement de sept zones pour compléter mon abonnement Mobilis, alors que l’application m’en proposait au moins une ou deux de plus. Je pouvais uniquement spécifier que je voulais un billet à partir de Renens, et dans ce cas là, le système tient à me faire acheter la zone 12 également (dans laquelle se situe Renens). J’avais donc le choix entre payer plus (trop!) cher avec l’iPhone, ou payer le prix juste via l’automate.

Je trouve un peu ironique — en y pensant maintenant — que l’application iPhone soit plus maladroite à gérer les situations des voyageurs avec demi-tarif et abonnements préexistants (et donc des gens qui voyagent régulièrement en transports publics) que les gens qui n’ont aucun abonnement (et qui donc voyagent moins, et qui donc… n’ont peut-être pas pris la peine d’installer l’application CFF et de créer un compte lié à leur carte de crédit pour pouvoir acheter des billets en ligne…).

(Tiens, trois jeunes faux sourds dans mon train. Je viens de prévenir @RailService, y a-t-il mieux à faire? Edit 08.03.2011: Alors, dixit @RailService, appeler la Police Ferrovière CFF au 0800 117 117, sans oublier de préciser le train — et hop, numéro enregistré pour la prochaine fois.)

Dernier grief concernant l’application iPhone (que j’adore quand même, je le précise à nouveau): elle est fondamentalement stupide en ce qui concerne les transports publics locaux (en tous cas lausannois). L’application semble un peu idiotement considérer qu’on est incapables de marcher entre deux arrêts de bus s’ils ne portent pas le même nom. Ou en tous cas, sa base de données en la matière n’est pas à jour.

Exemple: pour me rendre à la gare, je prends le 4 jusqu’à Bel-Air, puis je marche une minute (bon, deux) pour prendre le M2 au Flon. Je pourrais aussi changer à St-Roch et prendre le 3 ou le 21, si la correspondance est bonne. Ou bien je peux marcher une minute jusqu’au LEB — de nouveau, si le timing est bon. Je peux aussi marcher jusqu’aux Bergières pour prendre le 21, qui descend directement à la gare. Pour finir, je pourrais aussi prendre le 4 jusqu’à St-François et marcher depuis là (mais ça arrive rarement que je le fasse, j’avoue, le M2 est assez fréquent pour que ça ne vaille pas vraiment la peine).

Si je demande à l’application iPhone CFF un itinéraire depuis mon arrêt de bus, il ne me propose pas la solution la plus rapide pour la gare (le M2) — mais uniquement celle avec changement à St-Roch. Les bus étant un peu moins précis que les trains niveau horaire, j’avoue généralement ne pas vouloir courir le risque de rester coincée à St-Roch parce que mon bus avait une minute de retard.

Ce qui est étonnant avec cette apparente stupidité de l’application, c’est qu’elle est tout à fait capable de me proposer d’aller prendre le train à Renens plutôt que Lausanne (ce qui peut être plein de bon sens vu où j’habite). Par contre, elle me fait passer par le centre-ville, au lieu de marcher 5-10 minutes pour prendre le 7 directement.

J’ai le même problème quand je vais faire du bateau. Mon bateau est au Port de Vidy, accessible via le 6 et le 1 (Maladière ou Figuiers), le 2 (Maladière-Lac), etc. Pour trouver le meilleur parcours, je dois regarder manuellement toutes les possibilités et les comparer “offline”.

En somme:

– j’aimerais pouvoir dire à l’application que je n’ai pas peur de marcher une dizaine de minutes
– j’aimerais que l’application puisse, à partir d’une adresse, ou pour une adresse donnée, choisir l’arrêt de bus qui donnera la meilleure correspondance, tenant compte du temps de marche
– on peut aussi imagine que je puisse avoir des options: minimiser le temps de marche, minimiser les correspondances, chemin le plus rapide porte-à-porte, etc.
– l’application pourrait être nettement plus agile dans ses correspondances (clair, Bel-Air et Flon ce n’est pas le même nom, mais c’est à une minute de marche!)

Voilà, je crois que j’ai fait le tour. Pour ces messieurs-dames des CFF (et éventuellement des TL) qui passeraient par ici, je fais une petite liste-résumé:

– intégrer d’une façon ou une autre mes abonnements existants à l’application, afin que
(a) je ne doive pas sortir iPhone et demi-tarif et abonnement Mobilis pour le contrôleur (oui, parfois c’est les trois!)
(b) l’application me propose des billets qui tiennent compte de mes abonnements existants (particulièrement pour les billets de prolongement de parcours des zones tarifaires)
– améliorer l’intelligence de l’application pour les parcours avec transports publics locaux, en particulier
(a) les correspondances entre arrêts proches portant des noms différents
(b) les alternatives de parcours à partir/à destination d’une adresse donnée, avec des arrêts de départ/arrivée différents

Merci 🙂

LeWeb'10: Tell Us Which Bloggers or Podcasters to Invite [en]

Pay attention: this stage is not about pitching yourself, it will come later (September) — this is the time to tell us who else we should not miss.

As you probably know, I’m managing blogger accreditations for LeWeb in Paris for the third time. We’ve decided to change the system slightly this year to ensure a more balanced representation of countries and linguistic groups. We’ve also decided to do away with the big deadline to request an accreditation, and will be evaluating applications on a case-by-case basis.

Basically, here’s what we’re going to do:

First, reach out to motivated and influential bloggers and podcasters in all countries and linguistic communities. We need your help for that — to identify them, and maybe also to contact them. This is what this post is about.

Second, in September, we will allow individual bloggers/podcasters to apply for an accreditation.

We have thought quite a bit about what we expect from official bloggers, as a conference, and what kind of population we want to reach and invite. Our criteria this year will be stricter. To make it clear: if you work for an industry agency or big company, your company should be paying for your ticket — unless you are primarily known as a high-profile blogger, independently of your work. But more on that in good time (September).

So, back to our plan for July: the problem with the system that we used over the last two years is that it was perfectly possible for us to end up with no blogger from country XYZ covering the conference — or no coverage in certain languages. We want to make sure that LeWeb’10 echoes beyond political and linguistic barriers.

We have a pretty good idea who the main players are in anglophone and francophone circles. However, you probably know your country or linguistic group’s bloggers or podcasters better than we do.

Here’s who we’re looking for. Official bloggers and podcasters should:

  • have a passion for content and reporting
  • commit to attending and covering the conference (it’s in English!)
  • have significant reach and influence inside their community.

Although the accreditation allows to attend the conference for free, we cannot cover expenses.

Got a few people in mind? Great! Please use this form to recommend three bloggers/podcasters from your linguistic group or country.

Thanks a lot for your help! Please tell your friends speaking other languages or from other countries to send in their recommendations too.

New Tumblr iPhone App [en]

[fr] Si vous êtes un utilisateur de Tumblr muni d'un iPhone, il vous faut absolument l'application iPhone pour Tumblr.

I missed the Tumblr application for iPhone when it came out, because I had downloaded an earlier version named Tumblrette — and didn’t spot the name change. I was quite disappointed by Tumblrette, to be honest — but I absolutely love the new Tumblr app.

There is an iPhone-specific dashboard view, you can easily like and reblog posts, follow new Tumblelogs you discover, or create new original posts. Here’s a view of the dashboard (easy insertion of iPhone screenshots by using the WordPress iPhone app to create a draft containing the images — my iPhone is starting to feel almost like a computer):

When you click on the top right arrow in a given post on your dashboard, it changes to this:

To like, just tap “like”, and if you want to reblog, you get a chance to edit (like in the web interface) before posting:

The one thing I’m not wild about, because it really breaks the flow of what you’re doing with the app, is that once you’ve reblogged a post, you end up at the top of the “web-view” dashboard.

The logical place to end up would be back in the “iPhone-view” dashboard, so that you can continue skimming through the posts you were reading before you reblogged:

But in all, it’s really great. If you’re a Tumblr and iPhone user, get Tumblr for your iPhone now!

In Love With Evernote [en]

[fr] Evernote est un must si vous avez un iPhone. Cette application vous permet de prendre des notes dans toutes les formes (audio, texte, et image avec un bout de reconnaissance de caractères), les taguer, et les synchroniser via le serveur d'Evernote avec votre accès web ou l'application qui tourne sur votre ordinateur. Il y a également un plugin Firefox. Même si vous n'avez pas d'iPhone, je vous encourage vivement à voir en quoi Evernote peut vous être utile.

Pour ma part, voici quelques utilisations que j'en fais:

  • photos de cartes de visite, d'horaires de bus/train, d'heures d'ouverture de commerces
  • liste-photos de choses prêtées
  • notes de recherche ramassées sur le web
  • idées à creuser quand je serai en ligne
  • choses à écrire/bloguer
  • choses à acheter
  • livres lus et films vus
  • photos des choses que j'ai laissées au chalet, pour savoir si j'y ai déjà un pyjama ou non
  • ... et je cherche encore!

Et vous?

When I told you about my favourite iPhone apps, I wasn’t sure yet whether I’d like Evernote or not, as I had only just installed it.

I now know.

Evernote is your ubiquitous backup brain. It’s a place to store all the stuff you want to remember, be it snapshots (with text recognition to some extent), text, or audio notes. You can add notes and access them from the web, the desktop app (Mac <strong>and</strong> Windows, please), or your iPhone or Windows mobile phone.

If you have an iPhone and aren’t using Evernote yet, do not waste one second. Download the free Evernote iPhone app immediately, and sign up for an account. Even if you don’t have an iPhone (or a phone running Windows mobile), I really recommend you sign up, install the desktop app, and take a close look to see how it can be useful to you.

You should also install the Firefox extension or the bookmarklet if you’re using another browser.

Now that you’re done, here are some screenshots and ideas to get started using Evernote with your iPhone. First, here’s what it looks like:

Evernote

The little “Tips” tab near the bottom has a bunch of good ideas in it that made me go “oooh” and “aaaah” as I read through them. Amongst other things, I learnt to take screenshots on my iPhone:

Evernote 1

You can easily record any kind of note from your iPhone. Take a snapshot, or record some thoughts in audio format. The notes sync with the server, which will in turn sync with your desktop app — so you have everything everywhere.

Evernote 2

As you can see, notes are tagged. You can prevent the iPhone from syncing over 3G if you’re worried about bandwidth limits. I’m personally so way under mine that I turned it on.

Evernote 6

Here’s a list of what I’ve been putting in Evernote so far:

  • business cards (a bit disappointing with the MacBook iSight, haven’t tried with the iPhone camera so far — but I was a bit let down by my high hopes for textual recognition in photographs; expect it to work “a little”)
  • bus and train timetables (Lausanne and elsewhere)
  • opening hours
  • photos of things left at the chalet
  • photos of things lent to people (books, DVDs)
  • ideas for blog posts (with or without photo)
  • things I need to look up or think about
  • books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen
  • things I want to buy
  • “quotes” from books I’m reading

Other ideas:

  • recipes
  • research material
  • & (limited here only by creativity and current needs)

Bus timetable, to come back home from town without missing my last bus at night:

Evernote 4

Contents of my drawer at the chalet to help me remember that I already have a woolly pullover, a cap, a pair of pyjamas and toothpaste up there next time I go:

Evernote 5

Now, even if you tag your stuff, the pile of notes is going to build up, and you might want a little more organisation. You store notes in notebooks. Here are some of those I’ve created (with the desktop app):

Evernote 3

Notebooks can be public. For example, “Things Read and Seen” is online for everybody to see.

As notes may be a little slow to load on the iPhone (and connectivity might abandon you) you can mark some notes as favorites — they will be available offline.

With the Firefox extension, you can put snippets of web pages into notes (just highlight and click on Evernote), as well as whole pages. You can import bookmarks and notes from delicious or Google Notebook.

I’m curious. What are the other great uses of Evernote I haven’t discovered yet? The comments are yours.

Thanks to Stowe for pointing out Evernote to me way back when, even though I didn’t “get it” at the time. Thanks to Julien for recently telling me how much he liked it on his iPhone and how he was using it.

English Only: Barrier to Adoption [en]

Foreword: this turned into a rather longer post than I had expected. The importance of language and localization online is one of my pet topics (I’ve just decided that it would be what I’d talk about at BlogCamp, rather than teenagers and stuff), so I do tend to get carried away a little.

I was surprised last night to realise that this wasn’t necessarily obvious — so I think it’s probably worth a blog post.

The fact a service is in English only is a showstopper for many non-native speakers, hence a barrier to wider adoption in Europe.

But doesn’t everybody speak English, more or less? Isn’t it the lingua franca of today that everybody speaks? It isn’t. At least not in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and I’m certain there are many other places in Europe where the situation is similar.

Come and spend a little time in Lausanne, for example, and try communicating in English with the man on the street. Even if many people have done a couple of years of English at school, most have never had any use for it after that and have promptly forgotten it. German is a way more important “foreign language” around here, as it is the linguistic majority in Switzerland, and most administrative centers of big companies (and the government) are in the German-speaking part of the country (which doesn’t mean that everybody speaks German, either).

The people who are reasonably comfortable with English around here will most often be those who have taken up higher academic studies, particularly in scientific subjects (“soft” and “hard” science alike).

And if I’m the person who comes to your mind when you think “Swiss”, think again — my father is British, I was born in England, went to an English medium school and spoke English at home until I was 8, conversed regularly with English-speaking grandparents during my growing years, and never stopped reading in English: all that gave me enough of a headstart that even though my English had become very rusty at the end of my teens, I dove into the English-speaking internet with a passion, and spent an anglophone year in India. So, no. I’m not your average Lausanne-living French-speaker. I’m a strange bilingual beast.

Imagine somebody whose native language is not English, even though they may theoretically know enough English to get around if you parachuted them into London. (Let’s forget about the man on the street who barely understands you when you ask where the station is.) I like to think of my (step-)sister as a good test-case (not that I want to insist on the “step-“, but it explains why she isn’t bilingual). She took up the “modern languages” path at school, which means she did German, English, and Italian during her teenage years, and ended up being quite proficient in all three (she’s pretty good with languages). She went to university after that and used some English during her studies. But since then, she honestly hasn’t had much use for the language. She’ll read my blog in English, can converse reasonably comfortably, but will tend to watch the TV series I lend her in the dubbed French version.

I’m telling you this to help paint a picture of somebody which you might (legitimately) classify as “speaks English”, but for whom it represents an extra effort. And again, I’d like to insist, my sister would be very representative of most people around here who “speak English but don’t use it regularly at work”. That is already not representative of the general population, who “did a bit of English at school but forgot it all” and can barely communicate with the lost English-speaking tourist. Oh, and forget about the teenagers: they start English at school when they’re 13, and by the time they’re 15-16 they might (if they are lucky) have enough knowledge of it to converse on everyday topics (again: learning German starts a few years before that, and is more important in the business world). This is the state of “speaking English” around here.

A service or tool which is not available in French faces a barrier to adoption in the Suisse Romande on two levels:

  • first of all, there are people who simply don’t know enough English to understand what’s written on the sign-up page;
  • second, there are people who would understand most of what’s on the sign-up page, but for whom it represents and extra effort.

Let’s concentrate on the second batch. An *extra effort”?! Lazy people! Think of it. All this talk about making applications more usable, about optimizing the sign-up process to make it so painless that people can do it with their eyes closed? Well, throw a page in a foreign language at most normal people and they’ll perceive it as an extra difficulty. And it may very well be the one that just makes them navigate away from the page and never come back. Same goes for using the service or application once they have signed up: it makes everything more complicated, and people anticipate that.

Let’s look at some examples.

The first example isn’t exactly about a web service or application, but it shows how important language is for the adoption of new ideas (this isn’t anything groundbreaking if you look at human history, but sometimes the web seems to forget that the world hasn’t changed that much…). Thanks for bearing with me while I ramble on.

In February 2001, I briefly mentioned the WaSP Browser Push and realised that the French-speaking web was really “behind” on design and web standards ressources. I also realised that although there was interest for web standards, many French-speaking people couldn’t read the original English material. This encouraged me to blog in French about it, translate Zeldman’s article, launching the translation site pompage.net in the process. Pompage.net, and the associated mailing-list, followed a year or so later by OpenWeb, eventually became a hub for the budding francophone web standards community, which is still very active to this day.

(What happened with the Swiss Blog Awards is in my opinion another example of how important language issues are.)

Back to web applications proper. Flickr is an application I love, but I have a hard time getting people to sign up and use it, even when I’ve walked them through the lengthy Yahoo-ID process. WordPress.com, on the other hand, exists in French, and I can now easily persuade my friends and clients to open blogs there. There is a strong French-speaking WordPress community too. A few years ago, when the translation and support were not what they are now, a very nice little blogging tool named DotClear became hugely popular amongst francophone bloggers (and it still is!) in part because it was in French when other major blogging solutions were insufficient in that respect.

Regarding WordPress, I’d like to point out the community-driven translation effort to which everybody can contribute. Such an open way of doing things has its pitfalls (like dreadful, dreadful translations which linger on the home page until somebody comes along to correct them) but overall, I think the benefits outweigh the risks. In almost no time, dozens of localized versions can be made available, maintained by those who know the language best.

Let’s look at teenagers. When MySpace was all that was being talked about in the US, French-speaking teenagers were going wild on skyblog. MySpace is catching up a bit now because it also exists in French. Facebook? In English, nobody here has heard of it. Live Messenger aka MSN? Very much in French, unlike ICQ, which is only used here by anglophile early adopters.

Skype and GMail/GTalk are really taking off here now that they are available in French.

Learning to use a new service, or just trying out the latest toy, can be challenging enough an experience for the average user without adding the extra hurdle of having to struggle with an unfamiliar language. Even though a non-localized service like Flickr may be the home to various linguistic groups, it’s important to keep in mind that their members will tend to be the more “anglophone” of this language group, and are not representative.

The bottom line is that even with a lot of encouragement, most local people around here are not going to use a service which doesn’t talk to them in their language.

9:52 Afterthought credit:

I just realised that this article on why startups condense in America was the little seed planted a few days ago which finally brought me to writing this post. I haven’t read all the article, but this little part of it struck me and has been working in the background ever since:

What sustains a startup in the beginning is the prospect of getting their initial product out. The successful ones therefore make the first version as simple as possible. In the US they usually begin by making something just for the local market.

This works in America, because the local market is 300 million people. It wouldn’t work so well in Sweden. In a small country, a startup has a harder task: they have to sell internationally from the start.

The EU was designed partly to simulate a single, large domestic market. The problem is that the inhabitants still speak many different languages. So a software startup in Sweden is still at a disadvantage relative to one in the US, because they have to deal with internationalization from the beginning. It’s significant that the most famous recent startup in Europe, Skype, worked on a problem that was intrinsically international.

Java and FreeMind on my MacBook [en]

[fr] Maintenant que je suis sur mon MacBook, Freemind ne marche plus. Description du problème. Solutions et suggestions bienvenues.

Ah, well, the Lazyweb was retired, looks like I missed that. We can just go about tagging posts with lazyweb, though.

I used Freemind as a mind-mapping application on my iBook. Unfortunately, it won’t start on my MacBook. I’ve looked in system profiler and it tells me about plugins for two Java versions.

Screenshot of error message.
Screenshot of error message.

Suggestions or solutions very much welcome (or nice free OSX mind-mapping apps too).

Emergency SMTP Server for OS 10.3 [en]

PostfixEnabler is a small utility that allows you to use your OSX machine as an SMTP server to send e-mail when you cannot use your regular SMTP server.

[fr] PostfixEnabler est une petite application qui vous permet d'utiliser votre machine tournant sous comme serveur SMTP, pour envoyer des mails lorsque vous ne pouvez pas utiliser votre serveur SMTP habituel.

My ISP’s SMTP server is acting up these days, which means I can’t always send out mail. (Which, you’ll agree, can be frustrating.) Dave pointed me to a very easy solution to set up a local SMTP server on OSX (10.3 only with this tool, earlier versions require another similar tool). It can also be useful when you’re on the road.

  • Download PostfixEnabler and install it.
  • Launch it and click on “Enable Postfix”.
  • Send your mail.
  • Stop Postfix when you’re done.

Whenever possible, use an “official” SMTP server, as e-mail from private SMTP servers is often treated like SPAM.