My Yahoo e-mail inboxes, probably like many other people’s inboxes, get filled up by junk mail rather quickly. After being away for a week or so, my inbox had thousands of messages. These have to be checked and deleted at a maximum number of 20 at a time. Is there a way to delete the inbox mail all by one click?

-Eugene Chang

Look closer, Mr. C. I fear you have missed a preferences tool that can be used to expand page views from the 20 displayed by default to 200. Open your Yahoo inbox and look for the word Options atop the messages display. Click it and find the General Preferences choice. There you will find a box to increase the display from the default 20 to 50 or 100 or 200.

Nobody knows many work hours have been frittered away by millions of e-mail customers dealing with Yahoo messages 20 at a time before calling up the next 20, and so on.

The fix eludes too many users drawn to the popular Yahoo e-mail service because of its 1 gigabyte of free storage and powerful tools for signatures, adding photos and searching archived messages.

I am an artist, trying to enter some shows (for the first time) and all my art was photographed by someone with a Mac, and I cannot read the CD they gave me, nor “read” the attachments they send me (even though the images are jpegs).

On top of this, the submission rules are that any jpegs submitted to this art show state that “all jpegs submitted must be Mac readable.” I just had another photographer digitally shoot all my art for another CD, but he is PC-based!

Is there some software I need to buy? I am using Windows XP.

-Beau Enriquez, Skokie, Ill.

Relax, B.E., you’re home free with those redone images by the new photographer.

For years now, Mac operating systems such as OS 9 and OS X were written to accept Windows-format CDs as though they were formatted in Apple’s own Mac format. Here’s the deal: Macs can read either Mac formats or Windows formats, but PCs running Windows cannot read Mac formats.

I know that Windows jpegs are Mac-readable, so there shouldn’t be a problem there with either the CD or picture formats. There was a time when this wasn’t so, but it was a long time ago.

The show sponsors probably included that business about Mac-readable jpegs because a lot of superb work was done a few years back that didn’t always work with Macs because of technical details dealing with stuff such as compression, metadata and color (256 vs. millions of colors).

Got a question on personal technology? Send a note to Jim Coates at [email protected].