Tag Archives: email

How to Organize Emails in Gmail Using Labels

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Ever wondered why Gmail doesn’t allow you to move your emails into custom folders? It might look irksome to many at first but trust me, it just makes you lead a clutter-free email life. Organizing emails in Gmail using Labels, an exclusive feature from Google Mail makes organizing and categorizing emails pretty easy, fun and useful as well.

What makes Labels in Gmail attractive is that your one email can belong to ideally any number of Labels. An email sent to me for moderation of some useful suggestion comment on this space, can be labelled under Webscopia, Useful Tips and also as Have to Respond. Then I can easily find that single email under all thrice of these labels giving categorizing a whole new look and feel along with flexibility.

Organizing and Categorizing emails with Labels:

To create a label in Gmail go to Settings from the top Gmail navigation bar. Click on Labels and create new label.

Create labels in Gmail

Labels in Gmail

You can nest the new label under the other, pre-existing labels or simply leave the check box unchecked. You can open any label from the left (or right) panel on your Gmail display. Click on more to show all of them.

For applying Label to any message in Gmail, check the emails in the email list, click on label button (or press l), and click on the desired label. For faster access start typing the name of desired label’s name until it becomes highlighted. You can also create the label directly from there by typing the name and pressing enter.

Create label in Gmail

To use labels as folders, and removing messages from inbox and organize them in the labels, use the Move To button just beside the Labels and the emails will permanently moved from your Inbox to the destined Label.

Note: Moving the emails from any label to inbox doesn’t remove the current label tag, but just moves it to the inbox letting you organize the messages as you want.

You can also assign a combination of labels to one email message in Gmail. Just select or open the message and keep on clicking the desired labels. You can organize and categorize messages in hierarchical way as well.

To organize emails using labels as filters like the custom folders, go to settings on the Gmail, click on Filters, and click on the Create a new filter. Fill in all the details and click on Next Step. Make sure that Skip the Inbox is checked. Check Apply the label and select any existing label or create new label. Now, new messages will only appear in their specific labels bypassing the Inbox, leaving it clean, organized and uncluttered. You’ll see the label with new messages highlighted in the left panel.

With all these amazing and flexible features of letting you organize and categorize your emails in Gmail, Labels are a sure shot for every email user. Have your other email accounts popped in to your gmail, assign them a label and get emails of all your email IDs right on a single display of Gmail. Have fun playing with the power of Labels!

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How To Permanently Close Down Your Hotmail Account

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I have been using Hotmail since I was introduced to the Internet. But then came up the great competitors, such as Gmail, Yahoo and much more. And in between all this hustle of choosing an email client for yourself, even you might have three or four email accounts already. As for me, it is very difficult to remember all the user names and passwords, and choosing one password for all of them is a danger too.

So if you are one of those people who had a Hotmail account, and are now more addicted to Gmail, then you should be thinking about close down your hotmail account, before it gets hacked and your personal information leaks out.

So here is a small tutorial for you:

How to delete your hotmail account permanently.

When you are signed in to your hotmail, you can see a tab of ‘options’ on the top-right. Click that tab, and choose ‘more options’ from the drop down menu.

On the next page, under the ‘managing your account’, click ‘Account Details’

It will lead you to a sign in page again, just for the security purpose, and will ask you for your password. Put in your password and then you will be directed to another page, where down the page, in ‘Other Options’, you can see an option of  ’Close Your Account’. Click that,

and you will be directed to another page of Confirmation and a list of warning as to what would happen if  you proceed. Just put in your password on this page again for the confirmation, and voila, your hotmail account is gone.

Note: The delete process takes a few days to get processed and there is a period of above 200 days in between which if you login, the account will be activated again, so refrain from that.

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Don’t Bite! They Are Phishing

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What is Phishing

Phishing is the act of acquiring information such as usernames, banking details and other information  by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. It is surprising that a lot of people have fallen victim to phishing scams over the past few years. Fraudsters are getting sophisticated day by day and are coming up with unique ways of duping people. Earlier, they would simply create a fake email which would look like it came from a bank, an auction site, social media site or any other source. The email would ask for the user to confirm their username and password and unsuspecting users would fall for it and give up their details. Some were sophisticated enough to create a replica of the banking website where customers would enter their details only to find out later that fraudsters got all their info. The latest scam is phone phishing, which is basically a new way of social engineering. Phone phishing is when fraudsters call computer users and convince them to give their details. Phone Phishing is currently on the rise and companies have asked their employees to be vigilant and not to give their details to anyone.

Fortunately there is a way to avoid phishing and if there is more training and awareness amongst users, then phishing will go down. The following is a guide on how you can save yourself from being a victim of phishing and what steps you should take to prevent it.

 

Email Scams

I am sure a lot of you have probably received emails from your bank , ISP, Credit card company, financial institution , auction site, gambling site or any other trusted company claiming they lost your record and asking you to click on a link to re-verify your identity. The link usually leads to a good copy of a website and asks the users to enter all their personally identifiable information.   If you have received an email like that then you have just been targeted by a phishing fraudster.

 

How to Protect Yourself

You can avoid this from happening to you by taking the following steps:

  1. If you ever get an email asking you to submit your personal financial information , the first thing you need to do is trash it or you can simply forward the email to the FTC. No one will ever ask you to submit your details on a site or an email. There is no doubt that it is a scam. An important thing to remember is that Phishers don’t send out personalized mail as they are sending them out to millions in the hope that they can trap someone.
  2. If you ever get an email asking you to fill out a form which asks for personal financial information you know that it’s yet another attempt by the phisher to get to you. Important financial information should only be shared over a secure line or website.
  3. No matter what happens no one will ever call you asking you to divulge personal financial information over the phone. If you ever receive a call like that hang up or tell them that you don’t want to give any information.
  4. If you want to make sure that you have not been scammed by a phisher, you can keep checking all your online records to make sure that there is no unusual activity in your bank account, credit and bank accounts.  It really helps over the long run though we don’t advise you to check your statement every 10 minutes as it would be a classic case of paranoia.
  5. Whenever you are checking your financial information online please make sure that the website is secure. It’s easy to tell if you are on a secure website as the browser will show a https:// instead  of a http://.
  6. Make sure that you have the latest web browser which has an anti-phishing plugin to let you know if the website you are on is authentic or not. Try to make sure you have all the patches and updates available to prevent phishing from taking place.
  7. If you ever suspect that you have been targeted by a phisher,  log on to the website by typing the address instead of going via the link. Alternatively you can call up the company and ask them if they have sent out that email.
  8. Make sure you have an anti-virus, anti-spyware and a firewall on at all times. This is a great way of protecting yourself from phishers who can send you emails which have spyware which can spy on you.

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Postbox Express Email Program

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Postbox Express  is available free of cost and does not have any annoying adware asking the user to buy the free version. One can’t tell the difference between the paid version and the lightweight version as the biggest similarity is that it has a conversation view. It makes it easier to view all the emails in a sequence without a headache. Another good thing about Postbox Express email client is that it will check all links in an email to make sure that it is not part of a scam and will check it against a database of blacklisted sites to make sure the email is authentic.

The downside is that Postbox Express lacks a lot of features in Postbox. There is no ability to search from a database of downloads in the Express version nor does it have a number of the preview modes present in the paid version as well as the ability to create to-do notes. Other major missing components are the addition of foreign language packs.

Gmail users will love the threading style of reading emails on Postbox Express. Typically email clients do not have threading style of reading emails. This is a great feature for all those people who want to read threading style emails.

The controls are user friendly and allow for ease of use. It is quite easy to import settings from other email clients and use them in Postbox Express. If there are other email clients on the system it will find them and prompt the user to import the settings. It also works by syncing itself with the chosen email client and importing all the recent email.

Postbox Express also comes with a proper search feature. It does not bog down the system and also stores previous searches. It also has the capability to store previous searches and will make suggestions during the search.

Postbox Express users can also share content easily from within the inbox with the help of the post button. This will make it easy for the user to share content on Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed. This is a unique feature which allows the user to share an interesting forwarded message or to simply share a URL with the rest of the world.

A really cool feature is the part where you enter your own email address (whether it is part of our own domain or if it’s a web based email) and it will find the IMAP server automatically. This is a helpful feature and will save time for those who are technologically challenged.

Users can also utilize the Topics feature to separate their various email clients from each other.  If the user has more than one email account he/she can separate them by labeling them according to topic.  The addition of the tabbed viewing feature makes it easy to view emails in tabs.

Postbox Express is the light version of the solid email client Postbox. It is basically a stripped version of Postbox but without compromising on the quality. Postbox Express is supported on both the Windows (XP, Vista and 7) and Mac Platforms. Postbox Express is the must have Free Email Client.

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Windows Live Email

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Windows Live Mail is one of the best email clients for all those people who are unable to afford Outlook 2010. Windows Live Mail is the successor to Outlook Express which was discontinued in 2005.  It is a nifty email client for all those people who don’t have Microsoft Office installed on their systems.

The layout of Windows Live Mail is similar to Outlook 2010 but then that’s where the similarity ends. Windows Live Mail is basically a free version of Outlook 2010 minus a few features. Windows Live Mail  offers the user a number of options and the ability to customize everything. The user interface is similar to that of Outlook as it allows you to view your emails and calendar in a similar manner.

The interface is really good as it is more vibrant than Outlook Express. It is easy to change the layout and the colors of the client. This makes it a very flexible client as you can make changes to suit your own needs.

It is quite easy to set up email accounts through Windows Live Mail. Setting up a POP or IMAP account is simple as ABC. It also has support for adding Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo accounts so you can download them to your client. There is no need to create separate accounts for each as all the emails will be gathered at one place.

The Junk email settings are a massive improvement in Windows Live Mail. The Spam filter is on by default and scans each email so that spam won’t get through. The spam filter is less than perfect as it can throw perfectly legitimate emails in the spam folder from time to time. This means that the user should check his spam filter from time to time to make sure.

It is easy to send photo attachments through Windows Live Mail. Windows Live Mail has a nifty feature which transfers the original size of the picture at a web location hosted by Microsoft and sends the thumbnail version to the recipient. In this way the inboxes of users are not clogged by with unnecessary stuff. Users can also edit the images and choose the size of the thumbnail before it is sent out.

Searching for emails has improved tremendously. Users can easily search for emails in mere seconds instead of waiting forever. Windows Live Mail is also a handy RSS reader. You can easily subscribe to RSS feeds and view them in Windows Live Mail.

An amazing thing about Windows Live Mail is that it syncs with your Windows Live ID account. It also has a picture viewer within the emails and syncs with SkyDrive. SkyDrive  provides 10 GB of space which is enough for users for half a life time.

Windows Live Mail does the job well as it is a truly solid email client. It is available for free and does a great job of managing email. If you find this article helpful, you can always subscribe to our RSS Feed or follow us on Twitter & Facebook for more.

 

 

Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1

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Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1 is one of the best free email clients available in the market. This version of Thunderbird gets props for getting a lot of things right this time around and erasing the memories of version 3.0.  Version 3.0 was not exactly the best software as it was plagued with bugs.

The Pros

The best thing about Thunderbird 3.1 is that it is relatively fast and is able to index messages from large inboxes really fast. It does not take long for Thunderbird 3.1 to index a large number of messages. The search capability of Thunderbird 3.1 is really good and is really responsive. It is easy to search for messages based on the sender, date and many more.  It can easily give Google a run for its money as the files are searched much faster.

Quick Filter will allow a user to filter files by their tags, if they have attachments or not, contact name and if they are read or unread. Unfortunately the Quick Filter tool is not customizable so the user will have to make do with the preset filters.

It is relatively easy to save attachments with the help of the saved files manager. The Saved Files Manager will organize and sort out all attachments downloaded from emails to your computer easily.  It has a great feature which will only the user to select multiple messages and check a preview of each message. Unfortunately the preview is limited to 2 lines and that might not be good enough to find out what it is.

The best thing about Thunderbird 3.1 is that it has an all new Account Setup Wizard. The good thing about it is that it includes hundreds of ISP settings so that the user does not have to manually enter them. This means that the user simply has to enter his name, email address and password and Thunderbird does the rest.

The Cons

However all these improvements come at a price as Thunderbird 3.1 requires a whopping 1 GB of RAM. All the performance enhancements come at the price that the user will have to compromise on RAM. This is not such a good idea as version 2.0 required around 64 MB while the test version did not consume more than 250 MB RAM. The indexing feature is to blame for that as it needs a lot of horsepower to come up with the quick results. However a user with a good powered machine will be able to benefit from this.

It is also annoying that the search result options are only limited to 10 per search. There is no option to allow the user to fix the number of results. It is a pain to simply click on the “more” button to find out more results. This is annoying if you have a lot of results to filter through.The user menus are not so user friendly as they require a lot of digging to find various options. There is no ability to sync with web mail providers such as Yahoo or Gmail. However users can access their accounts with the help of an add-on.

Conclusion

Despite some of the flaws and huge user requirements, we would highly recommend Thunderbird 3.1 as it is one of the best Free Email Clients in the market. If you find this article helpful, you can always subscribe to our RSS Feed or follow us on Twitter & Facebook for more

 

The Future of Email

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The Early Days

Electronic Mail or Email has come a long way from its humble beginning at MIT Labs in the early 1960s. The first RFC (Request for Comments) for an email standard was proposed as early as 1973 (RFC 561) and the world’s first SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) RFC 821 was put together in 1982.

RFC 821 was very important because it allowed SMTP (Server) to SMTP (Server) communication for email, which was on the store-and-forward basis, where the client (user) need not be online at all times for the email message to be communicated across.

Towards the late end of 1980s and very early 1990s, email was being served via various communication networks like BITnet, CompuServe, FidoNet, NSFNet, et. al.

The 1990s

In the early 1990s, email was limited and used predominantly by the academia and research institutes and large businesses. It was not the mainstream communication media. The facsimile ruled at the time.

The evolution of email into mainstream was very much dependent on the web browser that you and I take for granted. It wasn’t until 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first WWW browser on, ironically, a NeXT computer, and until 1993 when Marc Andreessen released the Mosiac browser – which was multi-platform- that it came into its own.

This led to a exponential growth of the Internet in the proverbial sense and everyone wanted to get on the bandwagon.

Email for the Masses

Towards the mid 90s three very important events happened:

  1. The eventual collapse of CompuServe as the email/communication medium. Why pay so much when so much more was available on a non-proprietary network where everyone could join in.
  2. AOL – America Online! Everyone remembers the 3.5” floppy disk mailed to your address to freely signup and get on the AOL so you can be on the Internet.
  3. Hotmail was introduced.

Each of the above three factors led to an explosion in communication. Free email was unheard of before. CompuServe was fast becoming history, and you had your neighborhood ISP or AOL to get you online, and with AOL, came the famous “You’ve Got Mail” (AOL Mail).

TCP/IP was clearly winning. Any disparate network running any other protocol other than TCP/IP would either collapse, or adopt TCP/IP to survive. Most opted for the former and withered away into oblivion.

Email Client Software and Email Server Software (or MTA – Mail Transfer Agent) software were being developed at lightning speed. The big boys Novell, Microsoft, IBM, Sun, SCO Unix (remember them), Lotus Software, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), etc.


Early examples of email includes cc:Mail, Lantastic, WordPerfect Office, Microsoft Mail, Banyan VINES and Lotus Notes.

As more and more users adopted email for their daily communication, business cards started to see the “@” symbol.

The Millennium Change

In early 2000, email went mobile. With the release of BlackBerry,  for the first time business users could now send/receive email on the go. As the mobile market literally exploded by 2005/2006 towards the end of the decade, the distinction between a handheld device and a home PC was shortening – not as in power but as in the ability to do the same task while on the go. Email was still on top of the list.

With the release of the iPhone, Android mobile platforms, and tablet PCs, email was now virtually available on every device and where ever the Internet could be accessed – Wifi, Mobile or Wired line.

The most surprising thing was that despite the advances of Web 2.0 and more powerful graphics and multimedia capability of the Internet, the basic premise of email had still not changed.

What has evolved is how email is being used. From status updates to mini-blog entries, for CRM and Sales, etc, email is now being used for a whole lot of other purposes than the original one-on-one communication.

Instant Messaging (or IM) has on the flip side evolved to an extent that it sometimes mimics email (depending on where IM is being used). However, the email still remains. We all have our respective email addresses (I say with a plural, because it seems, the more the merrier).

Ever Evolving Email

The future of email however, has become a difficult thing to predict or extrapolate based on the current scenario.

Given a 20 year working history of mainstream email, it has not changed much. Aesthetics aside, it still remains the same.  Email still consists of the From, the To, the Subject and the Body (Content). The basic email structure is still very much there as it was 20 or so years ago.

What can be said with a lot of certainty, is that the email has become mobile. No longer is it attached to a server and a client in some physical location. Today, you just  access email, and never really give a thought as to where it is physically, in which city or data-center. We are oblivious to such information.

Besides being mobile, email usage has also evolved. It is now used more so for ‘forwarding & sharing’ of documents, schedules, sales leads, website inquiries, form submissions done on the web, customer support requests, daily news snippets and feeds, group communication, etc.

When GMail was announced on 1st April 2004, everyone anticipated the next killer email application. It wasn’t. It was just more space, without the use of folders and some added advertising. Take a look at Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail from the early days to and compare it to present and you will notice that nothing much has changed other than the GUI and the storage, etc.

Email Killer?

Facebook recently launched their own email and they had to specifically cite, that it was not a GMail killer, but just an extension of Facebook’s communication medium. So much for hype. You can call it embedded email or converged email. Big deal? Evidently it is.


So is anyone working on the next-generation email? That’s a tough one to answer. You have companies like Xobni (Inbox spelled backwards), that essentially, for lack of a better term, just data mines your Outlook, and presents some interesting information. Certainly not an email killer.

Google Wave? Quite possibly the next generation email, for sure. Its a viable candidate.

However, it did meet an unfortunate death, because of the lack of interest by users (who found it too cumbersome and complicated).

Google however believes in reincarnation. It is not actively promoting it or developing it ….yet!

The Wave is still alive and kept on a pedestal nearby. I can bet you a dollar, that Google in the next 1-2 years will revive the Google Wave project, maybe in bits and pieces or full blown, but it will definitely revive it.

The double-edged sword called email: On one hand we want simplicity, on the other hand, we want the next generation of email because we are sick and tired of the present one.

The Future of Email

All bets today are pointing at a converged email system, one that takes the traditional email and converges it with other forms of messaging (be it SMS, Instant Messaging or messaging from various Social Networks).

Facebook Messages is attempting to do just that – convergence! Allocation of more eye-balls to their domain rather than your favorite email application, directly translates to more revenue for Facebook. So evidently, it is a big deal, we are just numb to it all right now, as the roll-out worldwide for Facebook Messages is very slowly happening.

Google and Microsoft (the two other competing giants) and possible Yahoo! are not sitting still either. They too see this eminent threat of moving eyeballs away from their domains onto Facebook’s domain as a direct revenue threat and are working on ways to implement convergence on their respective properties.

In the 21st century – its all about revenue and valuations. The more time one spends on a certain domain property, the more valuable it becomes. Facebook with its nearly 600 million user base is already the top site on the web for traffic and time spent. Now move email into Facebook’s domain, and it becomes merrier.

Google and Microsoft have the edge, because they have the browser, however, with monopolistic practice lawsuits only a snap-of-the-fingers away, don’t expect Chrome or IE to natively support email that would converge all the social sites and email services into one.

Social Browsers may just be the key to merging the social networks, email and Instant Messaging all into one.

The truth is in 2005 email was no different than it is now. Five year prior to that in 2000 it was still no different. The GUI may have changed, but the basic premise remains the same. Five years from now – I believe the basic premise will still remain the same, however, the email client will meet some form of a merger with the social platforms and instant messaging platforms.

There might be an email killer application right around the corner, or perhaps it may never come. Email is still gluing us to each other for communication. How it shapes up in the near future, remains to be seen.

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