Gmail
Gmail Now allows you to read your mails securely over SSL
Do you use a shared Internet connection to access your mail? if yes you must be worried about your privacy because anyone can read your mail, but now Gmail team has added a new feature to Gmail that is now you can enable SSL encryption, yeah it was available earlier but it only used to be encrypted until you log in so that your password is safe but after being successfully logged-in it would become un-encrypted until and unless you put HTTPS manually to the URL (https://mail.google.com), now you can set Gmail to always use SSL encryption and don’t have to type HTTPS every time you open Gmail, but there is a disadvantage of SSL encryption that your Gmail inbox will load slower than usual because of the encryption as your browser has to decrypt the data hence slowing down the process but many people can live with it if their accounts are secure
To enable encryption just goto Gmail settings by clicking the link at top right corner of the screen, this feature is in the process of being rolled out so you wont see it just yet but don’t worry you will soon be able to use this feature
More here
Add New Features like Mouse Gestures To your Gmail Account using Google Labs
Yesterday when I was going through my Gmail account settings and I saw a new tab there named “labs” which represents Google Labs, a cool new feature which allows people to try experimental features added to gmail, I remember reading about it on other blogs few days ago but I didn’t really tried it, anyway I opened that tab and saw 13 new feature that I could enable including “custom keyboard shortcuts- which allows you to change the current keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, “Mouse Gesture”- this allows you to do tasks by just moving your mouse (works great!) , “random signature” allow you to add multiple signatures and then shows them randomly with your outgoing mail and a stupid snake game! If these Features get good feedback they are permanently added to Gmail and if not they are buried, you can suggest feature using this link. Google Labs feature has been enabled on all Gmail accounts but Google apps user will have to wait before they can start using Google Lab
To enable Google Labs you need to follow these steps:
1.Open your Gmail inbox and click settings on the top left corner
2. in the settings page click on the Labs tab
3. now you will be shown all the experimental features you can add to your Gmail account, enable the features you like by click the enable radio button
See your previous Gmail Sessions and sign out of them remotely
Few days ago the Gmail team added a new feature to Gmail I.e now you can see your last activity on your Gmail account, this come as a very useful features for people who use public computers to check their email as if they forget to sign out then anyone can access their mail account which may have personal information or important files
To see how this feature works scroll down your Gmail inbox, at the bottom you will find your last account activity along with the IP address, when you click the details link you will get a pop up window with last five session details which contains the IP address from where Gmail was accessed and the time of access, you can sign out of all other sessions from your computer by clicking the “sign out all other sessions” button, using this feature you can also track if someone has got your account password and reading your emails without your knowledge, you can check that by seeing the IP address from the account is accessed and if you find any suspicious activity you can change your password
For more details Check out the official Gmail blog post
Changes to GMail Contacts Manager
One thing I like about Google is that they keep on adding new features and improving the current features frequently, the latest being the changes to the contact manager, earlier when you used to send email to someone he would be added to the contacts list so that when next time you want to send an email to the same person you type first few letters of his email address and a bunch of suggestions show up in auto complete list (which is a good feature) but now the problem is that if you send a lot of emails to different people then they all get added to the contact list and the auto complete list grows huge with time making it less efficient.
The Gmail team in a bid to fix this have modified the contacts manager and sorted the contact in to three categories that are as follows:
- “My Contacts”-these are the contacts you have manually added or contacted a lot in the past
- “Most Contacted”-the people you have contacted the most, if number of times you have emailed a certain person increases he is automatically added to My Contact (at least five time)
- “Suggested Contacts”- all the people you have emailed are added automatically in this category
To access the contact manager click on the contacts link under Gmail folders and above labels box on the left sidebar:
as you click on the contact button you can now see the Gmail contact manager which looks like this:
Gmail Contacts Manager
More on the official Gmail Blog
Backup Your Important Files In your Gmail Account Easily With GmailFS
Gmail has a lot of space to offer but for many that much space is useless but now I will show you a way to use that space for something useful that is backing up your files in your whopping 6.7 GB Gmail Account.
The other day I was thinking of backing up some of my files to a DVD but then I came across GmailFS over at file hippo and I thought that maybe I should try it and to my delight it worked like a charm! basically it places an icon in my computer so you can easily drag and drop or copy your file in that, once you copy your files in that folder it automatically uploads them to your gmail account for you, you can even make sub directories in that GmailFS folder so you can organize your files
whenever you upload a file you will receive a email in your Gmail account with your file as an attachment but now there is a problem those emails are stored in your inbox and if you are like me you wont like extra mails lying around in your inbox that’s when Gmail’s labelling features come in handy, here’s how to apply labels to your files and stop them from showing up in the inbox:
1. once you have backup your file go to your Gmail inbox
2.select the email which has your file, the subject will have “GmailFS” in it
3. now click on more actions drop down menu (next to delete button) and select new label
4. enter “files” in the dialog box that appears
5. now you need to create a filter so that these emails are archived and are not seen to you as soon as they arrive, to do that goto settings, click on “filters” tab and now click on create a new filter link
now Gmail will ask you to enter some data regarding your new filter
put “GMAILFS” in the Subject text box and click next step button
now here check “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” , “Apply the label:” and from the drop down menu next to it select “files” label and “Also apply filter to xx conversations below”
when you are done with it click create filter button
now the files no longer will show up in your inbox but if you want to view those files just click on files label in Gmail inbox and it will show all your files
That’s it you are done start backing up your files!
there is also a Firefox extension for the same purpose, you can get it here
