How to retrieve Web faves

Q. I have a friend who has lost everything in her Favorites. Is there any chance she can recover them?

A. If she hasn’t actually deleted anything, she’s got a good chance. Do a search in Start/ Search/ Files or Folders for a folder named Favorites. She may find several, including the “lost” ones. It’s a good precaution to export them to a file every now and then using File/ Import and Export in Internet Explorer.

Q. I do a newsletter and I like to include content from the Web and Excel files, but it’s tricky dealing with all of the table formatting. Is there some way to vaporize all of that and get just the text?

A. You can avoid the formatting problems by highlighting only text from a Web page, then pasting into a plain-text editor such as Windows Notepad (Start/ All Programs/ Accessories/ Notepad) or possibly WordPad, in the same location, if you need line breaks.

Since you’re familiar with Excel, the Microsoft spreadsheet program, you can use it to get plain text out of Web tables fairly easily. You can copy the tables into a blank Excel sheet, or use File/ Open within Excel and use the URL of the Web page as the location of the file. Delete junk you don’t want and use File/ Save As to save as plain text, by setting Files of Type to Formatted Text (Space Delimited). Check the results first, because you’ll literally get what you see — some text might be truncated if it doesn’t fit entirely into a spreadsheet cell.

Q. For six months, somebody has been sending out spam using the return address of my Web site, americancasinoguide.com.

I keep getting all the bounced e-mails sent back to me. The Web site they’re promoting is constantly shifting names, but the messages all seem to be from some lonely girl with faulty English looking for love.

How can I stop this?

A. It sounds like you’re being victimized by the “Russian Bride Scam,” perpetrated by Russian gangs pretending to be pretty girls needing to get married. If you fall for it, you get milked for “travel money.”

You could report it to one of the Web sites keeping track of the scammers, like www.russian-scam.org/report.htm.

These sites basically serve to alert people who might become victims.

You can also use the e-mail header, if that’s included in the bounced mail, to track down the source of the e-mail and complain to the people who provided e-mail service.

You can follow the instructions at spam.abuse.net.

XTim Henderson is database editor for the Miami Herald’s computer-assisted reporting team. Send questions to thendersonmiamiherald.com.