Recent events have highlighted the importance of local backups. Google makes getting data back onto your computer pretty easy but you can also use these same methods if you’re looking to ditch Google because of concerns about their privacy policy.

Google Takeout

You may have heard of Google Takeout, which we’ve covered in the directory. Google Takeout is supposed to package all your Google data into a single file for download, but it isn’t quite there yet. It is improving, though – Google recently added Google Docs support.

With just a few clicks, you can download photos from your Picasa Web Albums account, documents and files from Google Docs, contacts from Gmail and various bits of information from Google+. Google does all the work of getting your data together and packaging it into a single ZIP file for you — you can even close the window and have Google email you when the file is ready to download.

In a perfect world, this would be the end of the process. But we still have to manually back up our Gmail emails, calendar events and other information.

Gmail

Gmail emails are the hardest thing to download properly. Google’s other services let you download a file directly from the associated website, but Gmail requires an email application that supports IMAP. We’ll use Mozilla Thunderbird here. Gmail Backup, which we’ve covered in the past, is another option.

First, you’ll have to head into your Gmail settings, click over to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab and ensure that IMAP is enabled. You’ll also want to disable folder size limits – otherwise, Thunderbird won’t see all your Gmail messages.

After that, you can launch Thunderbird and add your Gmail account. Thunderbird automatically detects and provides the appropriate settings for Gmail, so you don’t have to enter them manually.

IMAP isn’t meant for doing full backups, so Thunderbird won’t automatically download all email messages and their attachments by default. We can use Thunderbird’s Configuration Editor window to tweak some internal settings and transform Thunderbird into a proper IMAP backup application.

First, set the preference “mail.server.default.mime_parts_on_demand” to False to have Thunderbird download all email attachments. If you can’t locate this preference using the Filter box, you can create it by right-clicking in the window and creating a new boolean preference.

Second, create a boolean preference named “mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new” and set it to true. Thunderbird won’t download messages from outside your inbox unless you click each label individually until you set this preference.

Third, set “mail.imap.use_status_for_biff” to false. This causes Thunderbird to always check each label for new messages.

Lastly, ensure “mail.server.default.autosync_offline_stores” is set to true, or Thunderbird might delay downloading of emails until you go offline.

That’s quite a few settings, but after configuring all four you can click Get Mail and Thunderbird will automatically download and store all your email and attachments. If you have a lot of email messages, this may take some time.

Thunderbird automatically updates your local backup each time you open it. If you want to switch to another email provider, you can even add another IMAP account to Thunderbird and drag and drop your Gmail emails onto that account.

Chat Logs

Your Google Talk chat logs are stored along with your email in your Gmail account, but you won’t see them in Thunderbird yet. Not to worry, you can back up your chat logs along with your email in Thunderbird.

Just go back into Gmail’s settings, click over to the Labels tab and enable the Show in IMAP check box for the Chats label.

Google Calendar

Calendars are easy to download from Google Calendar. Just click the arrow next to My Calendars in the Google Calender sidebar and click the Export Calendars link on the page that appears.

You can’t download calendars that have been shared with you using this link. Instead, download a shared calendar by clicking the arrow next to the calendar’s name, selecting Calendar Settings and clicking the iCal button.

Other Services

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Google offer easy ways of pulling your data back down to Earth from the cloud – not like Facebook, which requires tricks. If you want to download data from another Google service not covered here, check out Google’s Data Liberation Front page. It provides guides for nearly every type of data associated with your Google account (although its Gmail guide is incomplete).

Let us know in the comments what your experiences have been with backing up your Google data.  How easy or difficult was it?  Did you use a different method to the ones outlined here?

We’ve explained before how to set up filters in your email and that’s a good start towards efficiently handling your inbox. What filters should each and every person have in their arsenal so that their inbox is as orderly as mine?

I’m here to help you get started in setting up your first five filters, or help you add on to your current collection. These five should handle daily-to-weekly activities of the everyday internet guy or gal and get that inbox looking as clean as a whistle. Paired with our extensive list of Gmail tools and tips, you’ll be a guru of the inbox.

Let’s start by logging in to your Gmail account and clicking on Create filter.

You’ll then see the following appear:

If you’re using Gmail’s new design, you’ll go about things by clicking the downwards arrow in the search field to show the following:

Now we’re ready to go ahead and crank out some filters.

Forums

Forums are an ever-growing part of the internet. With chat rooms practically dead outside of our social networking circles, this is where we go to communicate on the web. A huge bulk of these forums are running either vBulletin or phpBB. The following filters are built around their default email templates:

• Subject: “Action Requires to Active Membership for”
• Subject: “Reply to thread”
• Subject: “You are subscribed to the forum”
• Subject: “New Private Message at”
• Has the words: “Your password has been securely stored in our database and cannot be retrieved.”
• Subject: “Topic reply notification”

As our first example, let me offer a little tutoring. You can set these filters up completely individually or lumped together. For example, we can compound all of the Subject criteria as:

• Subject: “Action Requires to Active Membership for” OR “Reply to thread” OR “You are subscribed to the forum” OR “New Private Message at” OR “Topic reply notification”

You still have to remember to create a separate filter for the Has the words criteria, also. Be advised that there is a character limit in the criteria fields. I am not 100% sure of that exact hard limit, bit there may be a scenario where you have to break a lump filter into two filters. It all depends on how you’d like to do it.
Now is a good time to let you know how all the Google’s search operands work in the filter creation process.

Once you’ve decided this, you want to click Next Step.  Check the box beside Apply the label and set up a new label name if you must:

I’d also recommend checking the box beside “Also apply filter to conversations below.” That will go ahead and automatically organize emails you’ve received in the past so that everything is neat and orderly. Once finished, your Filters tab in Settings should look something like:

Now that you’ve been effectively broken in to the process, let’s continue on!

Newsletters

Not all newsletters are bad. Some of them are quite good and worth keeping. Reddit and other social sites have boomed recently with the suggestion of creating a filter to automatically send emails with certain words directly to your trash. There are too many reasons why this is a bad idea. One extremely simple filter should make labeling every one of your newsletter subscriptions painless:

• Has the words: unsubscribe

Purchases

Keeping track of your online shopping is incredibly important. The following filters have proven effective for me in labeling all of my buys:

• Has the words: receipt
• Subject: invoice
• Subject: order

Account Information

Labeling your logins for each website that you sign up for could be the difference between searching for five minutes and five seconds. A single filter will help you achieve greatness:

• Has the words: username AND password

Financial

It’s important to see those credit card and bank statements and warnings. Here’s something to get you started:

• From: paypal.com OR capitalone.com OR chase.com OR americanexpress.com OR discover.com OR bankofamerica.com OR citi.com OR citibank.com OR mastercard.com OR visa.com OR hsbc.com OR tdbank.com OR jpmorgan.com OR wellsfargo.com

Of course it’s a little difficult for me to squeeze every single bank and creditor into this list, so this is one that can be improved upon. You can go ahead and add yours in there if you must. It’s also highly recommended that you check the box beside Never send it to Spam, too. If not, definitely Star it. The only instance I can see in which excluding these messages from spam may become troublesome is in the case of phishing. Gmail is very good at alerting users about phishing attempts, however.

These five filters should put you on the right track to really seeing a visual change in the way your email fleshes out. The possibilities are quite endless but you must remember to make very accurate and precise filters. You don’t want a filter so broad that important emails can slip between the cracks and become wrongly categorized. If you need any help or have any other suggestions, feel free to contribute in the comments!

We use Thunderbird a lot here at MUO. Saikat covered how to use it to send mass emails, and Tina and I have covered cool Thunderbird add-ons and extensions. After doing a little bit of digging online and rummaging through the Thunderbird settings pages, I’ve determined the things that can really bog down this email client. It appears that Thunderbird can actually run quite fast, even when you have loads of email in your remote accounts like I do, so long as you configure things on Thunderbird to handle that gigantic load.

Optimizing Thunderbird Settings

I use Thunderbird for four email accounts that have grown to enormous proportions. To make matters worse, I pretty much leave the emails on the servers. These are bad habits, I know. Email messages, like real mail, should be dealt with only once.  However, I would bet that there are lots of you out there in the same boat as me, and need Thunderbird to be capable of handling those giant email accounts.

So, here’s the status of my own Thunderbird setup. I’ve got 4 Gmail accounts that I connect to on a regular basis, and Thunderbird is set up to download new messages from them every 10 minutes.

This may sound like a lot, especially considering that those accounts have thousands of messages stored on the server, but Thunderbird is actually very good at this. What it isn’t very good at is managing the huge folders that accumulate on the local side of the equation – the folders on your PC.

Automatic Compacting Of Folders to Make Thunderbird Faster

The first way to improve performance is by automatically compacting folders.

For these next few settings, we’ll be playing in Tools -> Options.  To turn on auto-compact and set the size, you’ll need to click on the Advanced tab, and then click on the Network & Disk Space tab under that.

As you can see, I have Thunderbird set up to only compact folders if it will save me over 20MB of space. This is actually a good thing – I could even set it lower to enable more frequent compacting. This will keep your folder sizes down and performance high. The only problem is that this automatic compacting, especially when you have multiple accounts set up, can interfere with your normal use of the client, especially when the client first loads.

To fix this, click on the Config Editor, and in the “Filter” field, type in “mail.purge.ask“.

Set this value equal to true. Now, Thunderbird will still automatically compact folders, but if you’re in the middle of trying to read or respond to new email messages, it won’t interfere with your efforts. This was the biggest annoyance for me, and this one setting made a world of difference.

Three Other General Settings

To further increase performance, in the windows that I showed you above, you might also consider making the following changes as well.

• Unclick the “Enable Global Search and Indexer” checkbox. The bottom line is that unless you often search your emails using keywords, you can disable this feature.
• In the main Thunderbird window, click on View ->Layout and disable “Message Pane“. Thunderbird can get bogged down on previewing messages that have lots of graphics and HTML links.

• Also, in the Network & Disk Space settings window where I discussed compacting folders, you might consider increasing the size of your cache space. This increases page-load speed for when you view the same email messages in the future.

Settings For Each Account

The following settings can be found under the Tools -> Account settings. Each email account you’ve set up has a section with various menu items. Why did I end up with such huge folders that needed compacting? Because up until recently Thunderbird didn’t delete files that you deleted.

Strange, I know. But now, under “Server Settings“, you can have Thunderbird empty the trash when you close the client.

Under “Copies & Folder“, enable the archiving of your messages. This won’t directly improve performance, but it’ll let you delete messages off your server without worrying about those messages getting lost.

Choose to save to Archives under each account folder, and then click Archive Options to choose how you’d like to sort those archived messages.

Now, you can click on the “Disk Space” menu item and set up Thunderbird to delete all messages that are older than a year (365 days).

If you’re brave, you could delete messages sooner, but in my case I figure that if I haven’t dealt with the message after a year, I never will. You’ve also enabled local archiving, so you’ve got your local copies safe and sound.

The final setting that can help your Thunderbird performance is only fetching message headers, rather than the entire message itself.

This one change alone can reduce your initial Thunderbird start-up time tremendously.

So, did any or all of these tweaks make an impact for you? Sometimes it can be tempting to dump an application when it starts bogging down like Thunderbird can, but when you start digging you’ll quickly realize that it’s simply a configuration issue.

Let us know how tweaking your Thunderbird settings as described above helped you improve its performance. Do you have any other tips? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Image Credit : Shutterstock

At MakeUseOf we have written a lot of articles about different ways to use Google Mail and how to make the most of it. But which features and techniques do people who receive hundreds of emails a week really use? How do we keep track of dozens of tasks and yet remain on top of the daily mail flood? While I cannot speak for my colleagues, I can certainly speak for myself. I use Google Mail to handle emails and most of my tasks and with this article I would like to share my ‘magic tricks’ with you.

Filtering Incoming Mail

For me, a key step to deal with the floods, was to set up filters for incoming mail. If you receive more than three or four emails a day and if you repeatedly receive specific emails, for example notifications, newsletters, or reminders, I would strongly recommend you set up filters.

I have set up over 20 filters, which sort mail under 15 key labels (similar to folders), for example to take care of comment notifications, emails related to MakeUseOf Answers, including new and published questions, or emails related to Sound Sunday.

I receive a lot of mail that I don’t really have to read, at least not in my inbox, for example new questions submitted to MakeUseOf Answers. I still like to have a copy in my inbox though, for example to forward a question to a colleague or to respond to it via email. However, since I don’t have to read these emails, I have set up a filter to sort and mark them as read.

So whenever I see a bold number pop up next to one of my labels, I know there is mail I actually have to read. Depending on what the label is, I read it immediately (e.g. Inbox) or I set aside a chunk of time to read all emails of that category collectively (e.g. comment notifications).

If you would like to learn more about setting up filters in Google Mail, I recommend the article 3 Great Examples of Using Gmail Filters for Productivity. It contains some great tips for setting up email to-do lists, manage reminders, or filter google calendar events.

Prioritizing

So you have set up filters for emails you receive regularly, but your inbox still tends to be full of less important stuff? Google Mail has a solution for that and it’s called Priority Inbox. It is easy to set up under > Settings > Inbox. Per default, it will show the following labels on top of your inbox: Important and Unread mail, Starred mail, and Everything Else in your inbox. You can customize it to include another important label or change or remove one of the aforementioned.

For a thorough introduction to Priority Inbox, see the article Gmail’s Priority Inbox Solves The Bacn Problem.

Keeping Track

You can keep track of different emails by automatically or manually labeling them. If you have to manually mark dozens of emails every day, however, labeling can be quite tiresome because it takes several mouse clicks and some coordination. What works a lot better for me is starring emails.

One of my major editorial tasks is keeping track of comments. This includes any comments across MakeUseOf that need to be addressed, notable comments in general, best comments from staff, best comments for the Best Answer of the Week contest (MakeUseOf Answers), and winning comments of that contest. I usually have between 50 to 100 comments marked at any given time and I use five different labels to differ between them. I can access all marked mail via the Starred label, which allows me to quickly deal with all of them, and that label tends to be very colorful.

For deadlines or emails I want to follow up on, I convert emails into tasks, as described in this great article: 4 Simple Steps To Achieving & Maintaining Inbox Zero In Gmail

All The Small Things

I have set up a range of small settings, that make dealing with emails easier for me. It goes without saying, that I use the threaded conversation view. Most other small settings are provided through Google Labs features and below is a list of my favorites.

• Auto-advance…
  to automatically show the next conversation after processing the previous email.
• Default ‘Reply to all’…
  because most of my outgoing mail is intended for more than one recipient.
• Inbox preview…
  because I can’t wait to see what’s waiting for me while GMail loads.
• Move Icon Column…
  as I find it easier to scan them when they are on the left hand side.
• Send & Archive…
  to save a click and get that inbox empty faster.

Conclusion

If you are still waiting for a magic trick, I’m afraid I have to disappoint you. There is no magic involved in keeping on top of things! It generally just takes a few simple strategies and a lot of discipline.

If you were seriously hoping for a neat trick, try this 1 Awesome Gmail tip You Don’t Know about.

And many more great tips can be found here:

• How To Turn Your Gmail Inbox Into A Reading To-Do List
• How To Search Emails In Gmail Efficiently
• 4 Ways To Set Gmail As Your Default Email In Your Browser
• 7 Tips to Make Gmail The Best Free Email Service For Productive People
• 3 Things Pro Gmail Users Have Set Up In Their Accounts

How many emails do you receive per day and how do you deal with them? Do you have any GMail tips and tricks I didn’t cover? Or is there a reason why you are using a different email client?

In its latest version of Mail, Apple streamlined the user interface of the application so that emails can be previewed, sorted, and searched more effectively. I have already written about one new feature in Mail, but there are several others that you may have overlooked. Let’s see what time-saving features the new Mail has to offer.

Column Views

The most significant streamlining that Apple did to the user interface of Mail is to incorporate column views. The left column is for  mailboxes and folders; the center section contains your Inbox of email messages; and the third column consists of selected message(s). In the column view, you can now streamline and group messages into “conversations,” with senders you have replied back to.

Also, with the new bookmarks bar feature (which I will talk about next) in Mail, you may find less need for the first column. So you can simply hide it, especially if you’re running Mail on a small laptop Mac.

Notice also that the Inbox includes a preview, consisting of the first two lines of each message.

Favorites Bar

One of the best and, I think, most useful new features in Mail is the favorites bar that sits right below the toolbar. The favorites bar includes a few default Mail folders, such as Inbox, Drafts, Sent, and Notes.

With these folders at the top, you may not need the first column as much in Mail. Also, what you may not realize at first – because it was not obvious to me for several weeks after using the new Mail – is that you can drag other mailboxes, folders, and accounts (in the form of an alias) to the favorites bar. This feature essentially works like the Bookmarks Bar in Safari.

Search Features

Apple has also improved the search capabilities of Mail. Now when you search for a name or other subject, the search results get broken down by “People“, “Subjects” and “Mailboxes“.

When you select a search result, you can further narrow the type of email you are looking for, for example, “From“, “To” or “Entire Message“.  I think Apple understood that for many users, searching for a name or subject is often faster than using mailboxes and folders.

You can also refine your search by using what is called “Tokens“. For example, if you want to find all the emails you received from Amazon.com in the month of August, you can simply type, “Amazon August 2011“. There doesn’t seem to be a definitive list of tokens that can be used for searches, but a few that worked for me include: “last week”, “last month” and “last year”.

One more time saving feature is that you can actually save searches. After conducting a search, you can click the Save button on the right side of Mail, and from there a Smart Mailbox rule will be initiated for you. You can add and change the rules, and save the mailbox, which automatically updates itself based on the rules you set. Smart Mailboxes, which I have written about before, and in my MUO Guide to Mac Automation, are huge time savers when it comes to managing e-mails.

Flagging & Sorting

For Mail power users, Apple has also made it easier to sort messages in the Inbox – by Attachments, by Date, by Flags, Subject, and so forth. This type of sorting is also useful when you want to sort and delete messages in bulk.

For those of you who like to flag messages, Apple included multiple colored flags, which are similar to the multi-colored labels in the Finder. Just right- or control-click on a message to select and add a flag to it. As you will see, you can also filter messages by flags. You can change the label for flags, by looking under the Reminders > Flagged section in the first column of Mail. Flags that you have applied to messages will appear in that section. Double-click on a flag’s label to change it.

Archive Messages

If you have a batch of emails that you would like to archive, the new version of Mail makes it easier to do so. Simply select designated messages, and choose Message> Archive in the menu bar.

Archiving messages is a great way to de-clutter and manage messages in your mailbox.

As you tinker around and use Mail more you will discover a few other small changes that might make the task of reading and managing emails a little less troublesome.

Tell us what you like and dislike about Mail in Mac OS X Lion, and what features you find the most useful.

Today we’ll be looking at a top KDE choice that has plenty to offer for those of you who crave some power and control over their applications.

About KMail

KMail is the default email client of the KDE desktop environment, which is available on a number of platforms, although primarily known for being on Linux. KMail ties into the KDE PIM suite, or KDE Personal Information Management suite, which is a collection of different programs, including KMail, personal organizers, and more.

The entire suite helps tie together the different functions of each program so that it becomes easier to use each one. Contacts can therefore be shared between Kmail and Korganizer, a calendar app. In the same way, events mentioned in an email can easily be added to your calendar on Korganizer with a single click. As KDE aims to be both elegant and powerful, you’ll have to expect a lot of different features and customization options for the KMail program.

Installation

If you’re running KDE, KMail should already be installed by default. If you’re running another desktop environment but wish to use KMail, you’ll need to install your distribution’s package for either KMail (if it’s packaged separately and therefore exists under that name), or kdepim. You’ll also need to accept the installation of the dependencies needed for the package.

Getting Started

Unlike GNOME‘s Evolution email client, you’ll find KMail in the Internet category of your menu instead of the Office category. Once you launch KMail, you’ll be greeted by the Tip of the Day followed by the Account Wizard. If that did not open, you can add your email account under Tools –> Account Wizard. Here you can enter in your information as is necessary. The instructions should not any different from say Outlook, as it’s all the same basic information (IMAP/POP3, SMTP, etc.).

Unique Features

KMail has an interesting feature know as identities. Identities lets you choose under what name, email address, and other information you would like to send an email with. This is helpful when sending emails for both personal and professional purposes. If you have multiple email accounts you will need to use identities so that you can send out from each email account. You can find it as well as any other KMail settings under Settings –> Configure KMail.

Speaking of the Configure KMail window, if you explore a bit you’ll find that there are a lot of options to configure. Not only can each account and identity be tweaked to perfectly suit the configuration that you want, but nearly every aspect of KMail can be changed as well. This can range from anything such as changing settings for the composer (including modifying templates), to the overall appearance of KMail, to a multitude of security features, some of which I’ve never even heard of. While competitors such as Thunderbird are perceived as highly configurable, KMail can wipe the floor with Thunderbird hands down in that category. There are enough features packed in here that virtually all Thunderbird add-ons would be redundant. If you can think of it, you can probably tweak it with KMail.

KMail makes excellent use of threaded conversation views, and offers all sorts of different ways to view the threads, as well as their ordering. If you want you can also turn off threaded conversations completely. Here, you can have your cake and eat it too.

This wonderful email client also makes great use of tabs. Instead of automatically opening new tabs whenever something is opened, tabs are used more as workspaces. Therefore, only you can make more tabs, and you can choose which folder or message to view in each tab. This is great if you wish to have a tab open for personal, professional, and other accounts all at the same time.

Finally, KMail is proactive right out of the box by taking an anti-spam and anti-virus approach. Under the Tools menu you’ll find a wizard for each one to help configure the settings required to get those two components in working order. This is a great feature that isn’t included in most other Linux email clients that I know of.

Conclusion

KMail is a fantastic email client that does everything you need it to do. It is well designed and packed with built-in features. It even offers automatic support for GPG keys, so you can sign and encrypt your email securely and easily. Simply put, this is one heck of a powerhouse that can treat you like a God when configured right. If you’re a KDE user but haven’t tried out KMail, I highly suggest you do so before going back to your old client or website.

You may also find that although Kmail works fine in previous releases of KDE, the program has received plenty under the hood changes to run better and tie in better with Akonadi, the personal information framework that allows all the sharing of information between certain programs to take place.

What do you use as your email client (Gmail’s website included)? Do you feel like there’s something better out there? Let us know in the comments!