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?

CloudMagic is available as an application for Android and iPhone, as well in your web browser via their website, a handy Google Chrome extension and a Firefox add-on. Basically, if you are looking for a way to make searching for stuff easier, there is a one hundred percent chance that CloudMagic offers a way for you to use their service. We all want to make our lives a little easier, and CloudMagic could be just the solution you need.

What Does CloudMagic Do?

CloudMagic allows you to import your Gmail, Google Apps and Twitter account so they can all be searched from one place quickly and easily. With CloudMagic, you can type in a search query, and it will scan all three of the accounts for that term.

Therefore, if you typed in the name “John”, for example, it would find any instances of John appearing in your Google Apps, any emails with the name John and tweets. This makes it much easier to find something that could be on any of the accounts.

Setting Up Cloud Magic

Of course, if you are going to be using the Chrome, Firefox, iOS or Android version of the app, you will need to download and install them. If you are using the browser-based version, you can simply point your browser to cloudmagic.com.

Setting up Cloud Magic is a breeze. Whether using one of their mobile apps or doing it from your browser, the first step is creating a new account. Creating an account only requires an email address and a password. It literally takes about two seconds.

Once you have created an account the next step is to link your account with your Google and Twitter accounts. To do this, you will need to click on “Settings” on the mobile app and “Services” on the browser-based app. From there you will need to click “Add New Service” and log in with whichever service you would like to add.

If you log in with your Google and Twitter accounts on your phone, these accounts will be there when you log in on the computer, and vice versa. This makes it easy to use your mobile app while on the phone and your computer when you are at home.

Using Cloud Magic

Using CloudMagic is a snap. Once you have your accounts synced, simply click the search bar and enter what you are looking for. It will quickly scan all of your accounts to find items matching the term you entered. The search is blazing fast; it is quite impressive.

You can narrow your search to only specific things. If you only wanted to find calendar events that match your query, you can simply click the “Events” button. This way, if you wanted to find a doctor’s appointment without seeing tweets and emails about it, you could do so.

Of course, simply showing you the results would be useless. That is why you can click any result to be quickly directed to the proper application, either from your phone or from your computer.

Conclusion

This is a great application for quickly finding what you need from select services. I hope that they incorporate other services such as Facebook and other email clients (but let us be honest, almost everyone uses Gmail). As it stands, it is a great solution for organizing your Google and Twitter account, and I definitely recommend checking it out on your platform of choice.

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iTunes Link
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In the spirit of the festive season, Google’s Group Product Manager Vincent Paquet wrote:

“As the holiday season approaches, we’re happy to announce that we’ve extended free domestic calls within the US and Canada for 2012. This is our way of helping you connect with friends and family across the country.”

With Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype not so long ago, Google is surely trying to hold on to its VoIP userbase before Microsoft begins to further integrate Skype into existing and new products.

Callers from outside the US are still able to dial North American numbers for a low rate of 1 cent per minute, and Google’s full list of international calling rates can be found here.

Source: Official Gmail Blog

In addition to being able to add them to your circles, you will also see their latest status update on the right side of the email. It’s cool way of making email feel more social again. It seems like email has become such an in and out kind of thing nowadays. Adding something like this gives it a more personal feel.

They are also adding Google+ into their contacts application. Any users in your Google Contacts who make changes to their Google+ account will be reflected in Contacts.

The last feature change is that any pictures you send or receive in Gmail can be quickly shared in Google+. Instead of having only the option to download the pictures, you will be able to click on the share link and have it sent to your plus profile.

Google expects these features to roll out over the next couple of days.

Source: MacWorld

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

Google says this optional verification procedure is designed to “protect your account even it’s stolen or cracked.” To get started, follow the instructions here, or sign into your Google account > Settings page, and under Security, click “Using 2-Step verification”. It is best to start the process on a computer you use on a regular basis so that you can also authenticate that computer as part of the process. The verification will be remembered on your computer for 30 days. You will also need a landline or mobile phone to receive a text message or phone call for the verification code.

If you’re a Android, BlackBerry, or iPhone user, you can also download a Google Authenticator app which saves you the trouble of doing the authentication process by computer and SMS message. For extra measure, Google also advises that you print backup verification codes in case your phone is lost or stolen.

Source: Mashable

The new Gmail app is designed for touchscreens, and gives an easy overview of your mailboxes and new e-mails. Swipe to the right to reveal your mailboxes, and swipe upwards to refresh and see new e-mails. The infamous notifications work well now, and if you enable them, you will hear a sound upon receipt of new e-mail, and the app icon will present the number of unread e-mails in your inbox. A bit lacking, with no popups, but still works well.

If you’re using an iPad, you can browse your e-mails and read them simultaneously in split view, which you can see in the screenshot.

The Gmail app automatically syncs your Google contacts, but you can also use contacts from your device’s address book. It’s easy to attach photos, add and remove contacts and do anything else you’d expect from an e-mail app.

Other than that, the app offers all the usual Gmail features we’re all used to, such as priority inbox, threaded conversations, easy organization and so on. One feature that’s sorely missing is the ability to sign into multiple accounts, which is already possible with the mobile web interface. For users who use this frequently, the app may prove insufficient for now. But according to Google, they will be iterating rapidly and providing new features, some of which will be based on user feedback.

What do you think of the new app? Share some opinions in the comments.

Source: Official Gmail Blog

The change will happen automatically for everyone, but if you can’t wait or just want to see what it’s all about, you can choose to switch by clicking the “Switch to the new look” link on the right side of your Gmail screen (if you use the Gmail tasks feature on the right side of your screen, you will have to close it to see the link).

One of the most prominent changes is to the themes. Gmail has got a brand new set of themes, and the one you’ve been using is most likely gone, so be prepared for a real change when you switch to the new look. Google has chosen a clean, straight-lined look which resembles Google+, and the old toolbars have been changed into icon-based ones.

Among the new features you’ll also find an improved conversation view complete with profile pictures, a new, customizable search box, more control over the content you see (like labels, chat, etc.) and adjustability to monitors of different sizes.

Watch this short video for a recap of the changes to Gmail:

For now, you can go back to the old look if you don’t like it, but it won’t stay available for long.  Let us know what you think of it in the comments below.  A big improvement or a horrible mess?

Source: Gmail Blog

GMail Drive is a tool for Windows (XP through 7) that allows you to access your Google Mail storage space. Once installed, GMail Drive will appear as a device on your Computer, much like an external drive. In this article, I will show you the simple setup and explain how GMail Drive works.

How Do I Know How Much Space I Have Left On Google Mail?

Log into your Google Mail account and check the bottom left corner of your inbox. I have been using Google Mail for just over 7 years, there are more than 60,000 emails in my archive, many of which contain attachments, and yet I’m only using 38% of its full capacity.

If you’ve been sending and receiving a lot more mail and realize that you don’t have enough space to make good use of it, why not set up an additional account to use with GMail Drive?

How Can I Use GMail Drive?

You can download it from MajorGeeks. Unpack the ZIP archive, run the setup file, and then go to > Start > Computer to see all connected drives. GMail Drive should be listed under > Other. When you double-click it, you will be asked to log into GMail Drive using your Google account information.

Once you’re logged in, you can drag and drop files to your new network drive and use it to back up documents. You will subsequently be able to access these documents from any computer with an Internet connection, either by logging into your Google Mail account via the web interface or by installing GMail Drive on the respective computer.

How Does GMail Drive Work?

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension for Windows. It creates a virtual filesystem for your Google Mail account to give you direct access to your account through Windows Explorer.

When you drag and drop files to your GMail Drive, the tool creates an email with the respective file as an attachment. So GMail Drive is not very convenient if you download your Google Mail through POP. You can still set Google Mail to store all your mail online, but a copy of the file will be downloaded to your computer.

In any case, I would recommend to set up a filter to automatically remove all emails created by GMail Drive from your inbox and archive them or sort them into a specific folder. To create a filter, open one of the emails, then go to > More > Filter messages like these and enter > GMAILFS: into the subject field of your filter. Then proceed to define what GMail should do with these emails.

What Else Do I Need To Know?

GMail Drive has a few limitations that you should be aware of:

• File names should be less than 65 characters long.
• The file size limit corresponds to the maximum size of attachments for mails sent with Google Mail. Presently, this is 25MB.
• Since files are stored as email attachments in your personal email account, you cannot share these files directly with your friends, unless you grant them access to the respective account.

Given these limitations, GMail Drive may not quite be what you’re looking for. In that case, have a look at these alternatives:

• Top 10 Largest File Sharing Websites On The Net Right Now
• 4 Best Sites To Get 10GB Free Online Backup & Storage
• 3 Simple Ways To Send Big Files Over The Internet
• 6 Online Instant File Sharing Sites You’ve Never Heard Of
• Minus: Extremely Simple File Sharing With 10GB of Free Online Storage

So what do you think of GMail Drive? Is it useful or past its prime?