There are many ways to share a piece of information without it appearing in your chat logs and emails. Whether you want to make the message self-destruct, use a password vault or send an encrypted file, we’ve got you covered.

Split The Secret Into Pieces

Sending a username, password and website address together is dangerous because the information has context. If you send each piece of information over a different communication method — say instant messaging, email and text message — you’ll be a lot safer. This doesn’t hide the sensitive information entirely, but it scatters the information around and removes the context, making its use unclear.

You can use the same method even if you only have a single secret to share. For example, you could split a password into three parts and send each via a different communication method.

Exercise some caution when doing this. Send an email to a Gmail account, an instant message over Google Talk and a text message to a Google Voice number and that’s one stop shopping for data thieves.

Send A One-Time Message

Websites like Privnote and One Time Secret allow you to send a message that can only be read once. Just access the website, enter your sensitive information and you’ll get a link you can send to your friend or colleague. After they click the link and access the information, it’ll be immediately deleted from the website. Anyone examining your old emails or chat logs won’t be able to click the link and access the information.

Another alternative is DestructingMessage, which creates messages that self-destruct on a timer. When the other person opens the page, a countdown starts and the message will implode and vanish from their screen when the timer reaches zero.

If you’re worried about trusting the websites themselves, you can use this in combination with the secret-splitting method. Send the username over email and send the password as a self-destructing message — the website will have no idea what that password is for.

We’ve covered Privnote, One Time Secret and DestructingMessage in the directory.

Share With A Password Manager

Password managers like LastPass contain built-in password-sharing features. Share a password with another LastPass user and it’ll appear in their LastPass vault. The same method works for secure notes, so you can use LastPass to share any bit of text in an encrypted form.

Beware the “Password Will Remain a Secret” feature here if you’re using LastPass. LastPass tries to hide the password from the other user, but anyone with a little technical knowledge can get around that and view the password when LastPass autofills it on a webpage.

LastPass isn’t the only password manager that can share passwords; PassPack and others can too.

Send Encrypted Files

Encrypted files are the classic, old-school way to send secrets. Write a simple text file with the information, then encrypt it with a password that only your friend or colleague knows. You’ll want to decide on this password ahead of time, ideally in a face-to-face situation.

The recipient can use a decryption program to decrypt your file and access the sensitive information. As a bonus, this method allows you to send sensitive files as email attachments. It won’t matter that the email attachments sit around because no one can read them without decrypting them.

We’ve covered quite a few ways to send encrypted files in the past.

Go Off the Record

Gmail and many desktop chat clients automatically log every message you send, but they also have an off-the-record mode. All logging is disabled in off-the-record mode, so you can send messages and omit them from your chat logs.

If you’re chatting from Gmail or Google+, you can select the “Go Off the Record” option in the Actions menu and both Gmail accounts will stop logging until you go back on the record. Be careful – if your contact is using a desktop chat client, their chat client may continue to log messages on their computer.

Desktop chat applications also have off-the-record plug-ins. For example, the OTR plug-in for Pidgin provides encryption and deniability for sensitive conversations, but it can also disable logging when you and your contact go off-the-record. (this option isn’t enabled by default, though).

How do you send sensitive information online? Do you have a better method? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit: Shutterstock, Shutterstock

In the past, I’ve used email a whole lot in my batch jobs and other automated scripts, just like I’ve described in past articles here on using tools like Sendmail or Blat to issue emails straight from the command line, or from within a command line script.

These are great for those times when you have a script that’s monitoring the health of a computer or the status of a specific process, but what if you want to automate sending emails from within Office products like Word or Excel?

There are a lot of reasons why you might want to do so. Maybe you have staff that update documents or spreadsheets on a weekly basis, and you’d like to receive an email notification of when those updates take place, and even a report of the data from within those sheets. There are a few techniques you can use to program automated emails from within Excel, but my favorite remains CDO.

Sending Emails From Within Excel

You’re probably thinking that scripting outgoing email into an Excel VBA script is going to be painfully complicated. Well, that’s not the case at all.

CDO is a messaging component used in Windows for a few generations of the OS. It used to be called CDONTS, and then with the advent of Windows 2000 and XP, it was replaced with “CDO for Windows 2000″. This component is already included in your VBA installation within Word or Excel and it’s ready for use.

Using the component makes sending emails from within Windows products with VBA extremely easy. In this example, I’m going to use the CDO component in Excel to send out an email that will deliver the results from a specific Excel cell.

The first step is to go to the “Developer” menu tab, click on “Insert” in the Controls box, and then select a command button. Draw it into the sheet and then create a new macro for it.

When Excel opens up the VBA editor, you’re going to need to add the reference to the CDO library. You can access this in the Tools menu, and then scroll down the list until you find “Microsoft CDO for Windows 2000 Library“. Select the checkbox and click OK.

Now you’re ready to use CDO to issue emails from inside Excel. To do this, you first need ot create the mail objects and set up all of the fields that will be required for sending the email. Keep in mind that while many of the fields are optional, the From and To fields are required.

Dim CDO_Mail As Object
Dim CDO_Config As Object
Dim SMTP_Config As Variant
Dim strSubject as String
Dim strFrom as String
Dim strTo as String
Dim strCc as String
Dim strBcc as String
Dim strBody As String
 
strSubject = "Results from Excel Spreadsheet"
strFrom = "ryxxxxxx@xxxxxcast.net"
strTo = "rdxxxxxx@gmail.com"
strCc = ""
strBcc = ""
strBody = "The total results for this quarter are: " & Str(Sheet1.Cells(2, 1))

The cool thing about this is that you an build up any string you want to customize a full email message and assign it to the strBody variable. Piece together components of the message by using the “&” string to insert data from any of the Excel sheets right into the email message, just like I’ve shown above.

The next section of code is where you will configure CDO to use any external SMTP server that you want to use. In this case I don’t need to use SSL because my SMTP server doesn’t require it. CDO is capable of SSL, but that’s outside the scope of this article. If you need to use SSL, I highly recommend Paul Sadowski’s awesome writeup on using CDO.

Set CDO_Mail = CreateObject("CDO.Message")
On Error GoTo Error_Handling
 
Set CDO_Config = CreateObject("CDO.Configuration")
CDO_Config.Load -1
 
Set SMTP_Config = CDO_Config.Fields
 
With SMTP_Config
    .Item("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendusing") = 2
    .Item("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserver") = "smtp.metrocast.net"
    .Item("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserverport") = 25
    .Update
End With
 
With CDO_Mail
    Set .Configuration = CDO_Config
End With

Now that you’ve configured the connection to the SMTP server for sending the email, all you have to do is fill in the appropriate fields for the CDO_Mail object, and issue the Send command. This is how you do that.

CDO_Mail.Subject = strSubject
CDO_Mail.From = strFrom
CDO_Mail.To = strTo
CDO_Mail.TextBody = strBody
CDO_Mail.CC = strCc
CDO_Mail.BCC = strBcc
CDO_Mail.Send
 
Error_Handling:
If Err.Description <> "" Then MsgBox Err.Description

So there you have it. There won’t be any pop-up boxes or security alert messages, which can happen when you resort to using the Outlook mail object. CDO simply puts together the email and utilizes your SMTP server connection details to fire off the message. It’s probably the easiest way I know to incorporate email into Word or Excel VBA scripts.

Here’s what the message looked like that I received in my inbox.

No hassle – just the data straight from within the Excel sheet delivered right to my email account. If you’re creative with how you put together the body string variable with all sorts of data from your Excel sheet, you can just imagine the cool automated email reports that you could put together. And if you don’t want to use a command button, just have the script run on the sheet or application close event.

Can you think up any cool uses for CDO in your own Excel, Access, or Word projects? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below.

Shutterstock

Well, that’s exactly what I’m going to introduce to you today, if you’ve never heard of it before. Blat is not new, but it’s important. There are numerous applications and utilities that will automatically send email notifications out for you.

You can get RSS news updates automatically emailed. You can have websites send you email notifications, like the 10 notification sites that Saikat covered. You can even set up services like Google Analytics to send you automatic reports every now and then.

But what if you want to set up batch jobs or Windows scripts on your own computer where you can send out emails straight from the command line? Well, Blat is a Win32 utility that you can use to send emails via SMTP straight from the command line.

Setting Up Blat Command Line Emails

Blat is a free utility that’s been available ever since Windows 95, and it has continued to evolve through the years. It is now available as a SourceForge offering.

While Unix users have utilities like sendmail to issue command line emails, Windows users have turned to Blat since Windows 95 to do the same. Many computer users don’t realize how easy it can be to send emails via the command line in Windows, only because they’ve never tried blat. So, for those of you that have never seen it, I would like to introduce you to this brilliantly simple, yet powerful command line utility.

After you download and extract the Blat files, you’ll find blat.dll, blat.lib and blat.exe. Make sure to place them all in one folder, and you can launch the .exe file from there.

The first step is to issue the “install” command which will tell blat what SMTP server and account to use.

In this case, the command I issued was “blat -install <smtp server> <email user id>”

This works for my SMTP account (no password required), but if yours requires authentication, you can include “-u <username> -pw <password>”, but keep in mind that blat still doesn’t support SSL without some third party tool, so it won’t work at this time with Gmail SMTP.  Once you’ve got the id/pw and smtp server to use installed, you can issue the blat command at any time from the command line.

In my example, I have  a file stored in the blat directory called help.txt that contains all of the blat command parameters. I want to email this text file as the email body using blat. I can do this in one command by typing “blat help.txt -to <email address to send to> -subject TestFile”

That’s it!

This command opens up the test file, embeds it as the email body, uses the subject line that you’ve defined (don’t use any spaces though), and then sends the email to the recipient you defined. Here’s what the email looked like when I received it.

While being able to open up a command prompt and issue a quick email like this is pretty cool, it’s even cooler to use that ability from within an even more powerful Windows Script.

Issue The Blat Command From Within A Windows Script File

My goal in this example is fairly simple. I have a Windows Script that pings a list of websites that I have listed in a text .ini file.

Currently, when the script encounters a problem pinging any of the sites, it’ll issue an alert window that looks like this.

Instead, I’m going to improve my script by issue an email whenever a website isn’t pingable, rather than depending on a pop-up window. To do this, I’m just going to add the following section to my existing Windows Script.

'If any ping failed, send an email

If Ping = false then
        '* Send out email
	wscript.echo "Sending " & strFailedList
        Shell.run "c:\temp\blat\blat.exe -body " & strFailedList & " -to rdxxxxx@gmail.com -subject TestFile"
 
End If

If you’ve never used scripting in WSF before, you have to issue the command “Set Shell = wscript.createObject(“wscript.shell”)” to set it up. Then you can use Shell.run as show above to launch the blat.exe command.

A few hard lessons learned about blat limitations. The command above only works if the string variable ‘strFailedList’ has no spaces in it. To accomplish this I use a dash between each failed IP ping, so my final email looks like this.

If you want a better formatted email, you could always output any messages that you want to email out into an output file, and then replace the “-body” parameter with the name of the file instead (like the example I showed in the first half of this article).

As you can see, the blat tool lets you integrate email sending into your Windows Scripts, and opens up the possibility of all sorts of useful email notifications for when things go wrong with your PC.

If you’ve never tried it before, give the Blat tool a test and let us know what you think. Did you come up with any creative uses for it in your Windows scripts? Share your ideas and insight in the comments section below.

Image Credit: ShutterStock

One such class of anonymous services is about the use of emails. Anonymous emails allow you to send emails without revealing your ID or detectable fingerprints like your IP. A layman cannot begin to take the anonymous digital route that easily; he has to depend on hosted services like disposable email IDs to anonymous remailing tools to remain a John Doe (or Jane Doe).

Sending an email without letting the recipient know can be used for a variety of non-malicious causes which make them really useful. Here are five for your consideration.

Hide your real email ID and fight spam

Few are aware that email addresses are deliberately harvested. Email harvesting is an “accepted” practice in the sense that there are online and software tools that can pluck publicly available email addressed from webpages, mailing lists, and discussion boards. But on the other side, email harvesting is used by spammers and used for bulk emailing. In many parts of the world, it has been deemed illegal, though your inbox will tell you otherwise.

To keep your inbox spam free (after questionable web signups), you can use services like Notsharingmy.info. A previous post takes a close look at how you can – Hide Your Real Email Address When You Do Web Signups With NotSharingMy.Info

Tell the bitter truth

Anonymous emails can be great for feedback – usually of the negative kind. It could range from something harmless but needed like telling a friend that he stinks, to telling your boss something he does not want to hear. Protecting your identity behind the anonymity of an untraceable email could be wise if the recipient has a history of taking bad news badly.

We took a look at 5 Websites For Self Improvement With Some Anonymous Feedback From Friends. AnonEmail is a simple text based anonymous email service. There are also other email based services like Send-Email and Voxopolis that allow you to send anonymous and secure messages.

For instance, Voxopolis is a tool for secure anonymous interactive messaging. Using its QuickVox service, you can send an anonymous email in 60 seconds flat. The free account also lets you attach images and videos to spice up your feedback, question, or survey. Voxopolis looks appealing because it carried a trusted certificate from TRUSTe. The slight annoyance is that to read an anonymous message, you have to register for an (free) account. But on the other hand, that helps to monitor and follow-up on the conversation with the nameless sender. 

Be a whistleblower

Whistleblowers can escape persecution and harassment by using anonymous email services. It is the equivalent of a phone tip. Of course, to be taken seriously you should also supply credible proof to go with your complaint. With proof, an anonymous email can be a powerful vehicle of change. You can prevent a crime before it happens, report corruption, complain against bad civic services, tip off the media, foil child abuse …the reasons could go on.

Express your love

Saying “I love you” perhaps ranks among the more difficult things to express. You can break through the tongue-tied status quo by using an anonymous message service like Had To Say.  Hadtosay.com is a very simple web app (not exactly an email service though) that lets you print out cards with a message ID and a PIN. The card can be printed out and delivered secretly. The message ID on the card allows the person to log into the site and view the special message you have left there. The recipient can choose to leave an answer below your message. (Directory mention)

Play a prank

Though the idea of using fake emails to play pranks seems a bit outdated to me, it could still raise a few laughs if the victim if naïve enough. I guess the rate at which people click emails from Nigeria and Bill Gates, suggests that there’s still a few out there who still can be led up a blind alley…but strictly for laughs. Give it a trial run before April with Anonymailer. You can use the anonymous email service to “impersonate” anyone you choose.

The only loophole I could see was the ad line that gets inserted in the email body. Just about halves the fun. I couldn’t find another similar service; if you do, do put it in the comments.

Check out the apps tagged as anonymous in our directory.

Anonymity has its uses. But it could be double-sided if used wrongly. Misuse of anonymous email services could lead to legal consequences. Research says that anonymous emails can also be tracked. But there are some benign uses of anonymous messages. What would be some of yours? Let us know the value you place on being anonymous.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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!

So I’ve gathered up a list of ten popular free email providers that you might want to take for a spin if Gmail or Yahoo are not your thing.

Hotmail

Hotmail is Microsoft’s email service, and I have to say this is one of the best services on this list (if not the very best). We’ve recently held a poll asking if you guys would be willing to switch to Hotmail, and most of you picked the answer that went “I will never ever consider switching to Hotmail. Ever“. Well, if you’re one of those people, I guess I won’t be able to sway your opinion.

But if you go to that poll page and scroll down, you will see comments by a user who goes by the name of Galileo Vieira, a member of Microsoft’s Hotmail team. Galileo presents some fairly persuasive arguments as to why you should give Hotmail a chance. Their new UI is quite spiffy, and Microsoft are generally putting some energy into the service.

Is Hotmail a better free email provider than Gmail (or even Yahoo, for that matter)? I would say definitely not, not by a long shot. But I would say that for most users, Hotmail is probably the best service on this list.

Mail.com

If you feel that your email domain name is the most important part of the address, you should definitely check out Mail.com. Its default domain name (@mail.com) is cool enough, and is even one letter shorter than you-know-who. But if you’re looking for something more specific, Mail.com offers an enormous list of alternative domains for you to pick from, such as “Engineer.com”, “Muslim.com”, and even “Secretary.net”.

It also boasts unlimited email storage, drag-and-drop labels, and more.

GMX Mail

GMX claims to be “the free e-mail you’ve been waiting for”, and boasts 13 million users. That may seem like a drop in the bucket compared to how many users the other vendors have, but it’s still a sizable amount. Some of the perks GMX provides include unlimited email storage, as well as attachments of up to 50MB each.

The service is based in Germany, and they also have an Android app that seems slated mainly at German-speaking users.

Hushmail

Hushmail is a bit more of an esoteric service. Their main claim to fame is that fact they provide “private, secure” free email accounts. Why the quote marks, you ask? Because Hushmail (quite famously) betrayed user trust in 2007 by providing email correspondence to federal agencies, complying to a Canadian court order. You can read a complete analysis of the incident in Wired’s Threat Level column of the time.

In brief, what you should know is that Hushmail’s mechanisms are not completely secure, although they are still significantly more secure than those offered by other free email providers. Conversely, their free option only includes a paltry 25MB of storage – a far cry from the unlimited space offered by some of the other vendors on the list. If privacy is a key concern for you, check out Hushmail, but don’t blindly trust them. Configure your own settings, and don’t give them your encryption key at any stage of the process.

Zoho Mail

Zoho makes a complete suite of online productivity tools, including a spreadsheet, a Wiki service, and more. Zoho Mail is their free email offering, and it looks quite spiffy. If you already use Zoho, that means you have a Zoho Mail account. One of its distinctive feature is that it is 100% ad free – not a single banner in sight.

Gawab.com

Gawab offers email tracking (a way to see if users received your email), 10GB of storage, and other goodies. But above all, it offers built-in support for foreign character encodings, such as Arabic UTF-16. If you write a lot of email in Arabic and are not happy with your current email provider, check out Gawab.

Final Thought

Did I miss an important free email provider? Are you using an unknown provider that is absolutely awesome, and are dying to tell the world about it? Share it all in the comments!

Image Credit: ShutterStock

If you are ever faced with a situation where you feel your communications might be monitored, a somewhat simpler and easier approach would be to encrypt files to email them to the person you’re communicating with. If they know the password, then they’ll be able to decrypt and open those files.

5 Ways to Encrypt Files Before Emailing Them

Encrypting files isn’t new. Tina covered this briefly in 2008, and we’ve also covered other apps that encrypt folders and drives like Mark’s review of TrueCrypt or my review of AxCrypt.

The field of cryptography extends back into ancient Greece, where the Spartans used ciphers to communicate hidden messages. Cryptography today consists of a dizzying array of algorithms that software applications can use to encrypt password-protected files in a way that is nearly impossible to decipher. I say nearly – because there is always an exception to the rule.

Use Encrypt Files To Quickly Protect Files

All of the solutions I’m going to offer in this article are applications that both you and the recipient install on your computers. On your end, the software will encrypt files or messages using a password you supply, and the recipient can use the software to decrypt that information.

Encrypt Files is an example of one of the easiest applications you can use to accomplish that task.

All you have to do is select the files that you want to encrypt, and click on “Encrypt” in the left panel. You’ll be prompted for the password you want to use to encrypt those files.

Afterwards, a new copy of that file will appear that is encrypted. You can tell the software to use one of 13 cryptography algorithms, and you can tell it to either leave, delete or shred the original files.

Drag, Drop & Encrypt With dsCrypt

The fastest solution I’ve ever seen to quickly encrypt files is a small freeware app called dsCrypt.  When you run the dsCrypt executable, a small window will appear on your screen. All you have to do is drag files into the gray box. The program will prompt you for the password you want to use.

The files will transform into encrypted .dsc files. The recipient just has to drop the .dsc files into the gray box, type the correct password, and the files will be decrypted and made usable again. I doubt the encryption is anything stellar, but for simple applications this gets the job done.

Encrypt Files Or Email With MEO Encryption

Another file encryption app that I really like a lot is MEO Encryption. This is free encryption software that not only encrypts and decrypts files, but it also lets you send encrypted email messages as well.

File encryption also includes a feature where you can save files to a self-extracting executable.

The beauty of this is that the person you’re sending it to doesn’t need to install any software, they just need the correct password. The feature that I love about this software is that you can configure it to use any SMTP account and the software will encrypt email messages and send them directly for you.

Only two crypto algorithms are available, a light one (for fast encryption) and a strong one (for slow encryption). Choose according to your needs.

Use LockNote To Send Encrypted Simple Text

One solution to send text messages that are protected from prying eyes is by writing a message in a text file using LockNote, and then saving it in an encrypted format.  The application feels pretty much identical to Windows Notepad, but when you save the file, you’ll be prompted for a password.

When your recipient runs LockNote on their PC, all they have to do is open the file, answer the password request, and they can read your message.

This is probably the simplest encryption application I’ve ever seen. If ease of use is your priority, I’d highly suggest LockNote.

Encrypt Messages Into Images

Years ago, it hit the news that terrorists were using images to send encrypted messages. You can be sure that most covert intelligence agents were using that technology long before terrorists ever discovered it.

If you want to elevate your encryption efforts into the field of image encryption, then you may want to install 4t HIT Mail Privacy Lite.

I have to be honest, this is probably my favorite app, simply because of the coolness factor. Open any image with the software in “Create Mode“, apply a password and a message, and then save it as a .bmp, .hit. or a .zip file.

If you save in bitmap mode, in transit all anyone will see is a picture. When the recipient opens the picture with this app, all they have to do is type the password and the embedded message will appear under “Decrypted text“!

Hopefully, these five encryption solutions offer you plenty of help when you’re looking for a way to encrypt files before emailing them off to folks. Encryption isn’t always foolproof – there’s always someone out there that can break encryption, but at least you can rest assured that you’ve at least tried your best to protect sensitive information as best you could.

Give these apps a try to encrypt files to email, and let us know if they worked out well for you. Which one is your favorite? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Image Credit : Shutterstock

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

Thankfully, that is not a problem anymore thanks to the new Chrome extension ezAutoCorrect for Gmail. With this easy to use extension, all your typing woes will be resolved because all those common errors will automatically be fixed and you won’t have to go back and spell check as much as you used to. Never make the mistake of sending an email with a lower case “i” again!

Installation

To install this in Google Chrome, head over to the app’s page on the Google Chrome Web Store and click the big “Add to Chrome” button.

Using The Extension

To use this, you do not have to do anything you wouldn’t do already, and that is simply send emails. Head to Gmail in your web browser, open a new email window and simply start typing. Try some words that you would commonly mistype. Try typing “dont” with no apostrophe and you will notice that the app will automatically change it to “don’t” as it should be.

I think my personal favorite use is not having to capitalize “i” as I am typing. It allows me to save myself hitting shift and making it capitalized every time I use it.

According to the developer of the app, the program automatically fixes about 700 common typos. I don’t think I personally make 700 different typos, but it is good to know they are out there, and that in the event that I do make the mistakes, the program will fix them for me.

The app also offers the ability to add your own auto corrections. To do this, simply head to the extension’s options by clicking on the settings button in Chrome, then Tools, then Extensions. Scroll down to ezAutoCorrect and click Options. Under the options you can add or remove existing auto corrections and set the application to automatically capitalize the first word after a period.

These are great features that were just added recently, and they really bring the application to the next level.

Conclusion

This is a really cool little extension that does one simple thing, and it does it well. If you are sick of having to go back and fix all the common typos when sending an email this extension will make your life much more pleasant.

Have you tried this extension? Did it make your life easier? Let us know in the comments!

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?