Put all your Emails on a USB Drive for Offline Access

How do you ensure that you always have access to all your emails - even at places where there is no Internet or when you aren’t carrying your own laptop?

One of the popular options is that you use a tool like Microsoft Outlook to download all your emails to the computer beforehand and you can then read them anywhere even in offline mode. Both Gmail and Hotmail offer POP3 access to help you download messages using any email client while there are easy workarounds for Yahoo Mail.

There are some downsides though. First, most email clients aren’t portable (can you carry emails on a USB drive?) and second, if all you want is offline access to your Gmail messages and nothing extra, Outlook is probably too heavy a tool for that purpose.

I have been testing a Windows-only utility called MailStore that seems like an ideal solution for such a problem – the tool is free, there’s a portable version for your USB stick and best of all, it works out of the box with your email account without requiring any configuration.

Step by Step – How to Backup your Emails

The way MailStore works is something like this. You install (or unzip) the software to a folder and then select the email accounts that you want to archive. They can be your Gmail accounts, Microsoft Exchange, your old Outlook PST files, Thunderbird and any other web email service that supports either IMAP or POP3.

The tool will pull your email messages from all these places into a central location. If you have a large mailbox, you may specify criteria to skip emails that are older than ‘n’ days. It skips the Spam and Junk folders by default but you may also manually specify any folders /labels that you wish to include (or exclude) from the backup.

That’s it. There’s a convenient search box allowing you to search all your email accounts from one place. You can copy the MailStore folder to your USB drive, or even your Dropbox folder, and access all the emails from anywhere, anytime. Since this is more of an email backup utility and not a full-blown email client, it cannot be used for replying or sending new emails.

To quickly recap, here are some scenarios where you may find Mail Store useful:

0. You want to backup all your web mails to a safe location.

1. You want to carry your Microsoft Exchange / Outlook emails on a USB drive.

2. You have multiple email accounts and need to search all your mailboxes from one place.

3. You want offline access to all your web-based email accounts.

Download 

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5 Tips to Improve Your Windows 7 System’s Speed

The introduction of Microsoft’s Windows 7 was met with great reception and reviews from critics, especially those who didn’t think much of the previous OS of Windows Vista. Windows 7 has been mentioned to have the stability and security of popular Windows XP, with the visual look of Vista; 7 is what Vista should have been. But with all of the features and new bells and whistles, Windows 7 can slow down some systems. Here are five ways in which you can speed up your system to get work done. 1. Upgrade Your System While Windows 7 can run on systems that meet the minimum specifications, it’s always a better practice to meet or exceed that of the recommended specs. This allows for the system to work programs in the background without taxing your system or slowing down your movies, music, or work. 2. Disable Aero Feature One of the features that carried over from Vista was that of the Aero technology. Basically eye candy, the technology allows for transparent taskbars and windows, as well as some quick shortcuts and features. For systems who only meet the minimum requirements, this only slows down the computer. This may be disabled automatically if the hardware doesn’t meet the requirements, but if not - Right click on the desktop and choose “Personalize” Within the box, click the option of “Window Color” Uncheck “enable transparency”, then choose to open the classic appearance Choose the standard Windows 7 Appearance. 3. Disable Desktop Gadgets Gadgets are another feature that was carried over from Vista, giving users a way to view different items from their desktop. Windows 7 comes with a clock gadget, a weather gadget, and a CPU monitor just to name a few, with more to download from both Microsoft and third party companies. The more gadgets you have on your desktop, the more the system is working to keep them up to date. To disable gadgets: Go to the START menu and select ‘control panel’ Within the Control Panel, find ‘Programs & Features’. Under this is a link to turn off Windows features. Within in Windows features, uncheck the Windows Gadget Platform. 4. Turn Off Unused Windows Features There are some standard features of Windows – like games, Messenger – that be turned off as well, especially if you never use them. As above to disable the gadgets, you can disable these features. Try not to disable features you aren’t familiar with, as you could be turning off something important. 5. Prevent Unwanted Programs from Running at Startup When you turn on your computer, several programs will turn on. Like the operating system, any office programs, gadgets, and others. To speed up your computer, have some of these programs not start when the computer does. Go to the START menu and choose ‘run’. In the textbox, type in ‘msconfig’. This brings up a console in which you can configure parts of Microsoft Windows, such as what programs should start. Select the ‘start up’ tab. Go through the list and uncheck programs that you don’t want to start up, like a cell phone manager program, an office program (like MS Office). Make sure you don’t uncheck the operating system! This are just some ways in which you can speed up your Windows 7 computer, but there are more, such as upgrading parts of your computer or removing programs; it all depends on you and the customization of your Windows 7.

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5 Simple Tips to Fix a Slow Computer

5 Simple Tips to Fix a Slow Computer

Very few things are as annoying as dealing with a slow computer. If launching applications takes ages and you can cook a meal while your computer is booting up, using it becomes a nightmare. Fortunately, there are several simple slow computer fixes that can help you make your PC fast again.

1. Disinfect

When your computer starts slowing down for no apparent reason, the first thing you should do is run anti-virus and anti-malware scans.  Viruses and malware almost always steal system resources and consume your bandwidth, which makes your PC sluggish. There are plenty of good free anti-viruses out there, Microsoft Security Essentials being the lightest one. In addition to that, use Malwarebytes to detect and remove infections that get missed by most anti-virus programs.

2. Configure startup

Do you have to wait ages for your desktop and all your icons to appear? This usually happens when there are too many programs launching on Windows startup and slowing it down. Most likely you don’t need half of them to start every time your computer starts, as you can always launch them manually whenever you need them. To disable unneeded startup items, click on Start – Run – type msconfig and hit Enter. Then go to the Startup tab and disable things like Skype, other IM programs, Acrobat speed launcher, and everything you don’t need. Be careful and look up entries before disabling them, as they may be important system components.

3. Clean your desktop

Is your desktop cluttered with software icons and various files? If yes, then you should move or delete all unnecessary stuff. A cluttered desktop takes up a lot of system resources and slows down your computer. If you want to gain even more performance, don’t use any wallpaper and use a simple background instead. This will free up even more system resources and make your computer start faster.

4. Clean your disks

Daily computer activity creates hundreds of temporary files that take up valuable disk space. You’ll be surprised, but you can accumulate gigabytes of clutter in just one month. Freeing up disk space will speed up your computer and tasks like Windows search, anti-virus scans, and disk defrags. To cleanup your hard drives, you can run the built-in Disk Cleanup tool (Start – Programs – Accessories – Disk Cleanup) or use a third party disk cleaner, like CCleaner

5. Defrag your PC

Defragmentation is one of the most powerful slow computer fixes. That’s because a fragmented hard drive can dramatically slow down file access and software launch time. Windows has its own disk defrag utility, but it’s far from perfect (unless you use Windows 7 where the defragmenter is quite good). That’s why it’s best to use a third-party tool that can defrag both the files and the free space.


These quick and simple slow computer fixes will help you revitalize your computer and keep it fast and healthy.

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Put all your Emails on a USB Drive for Offline Access

How do you ensure that you always have access to all your emails - even at places where there is no Internet or when you aren’t carrying your own laptop?

One of the popular options is that you use a tool like Microsoft Outlook to download all your emails to the computer beforehand and you can then read them anywhere even in offline mode. Both Gmail and Hotmail offer POP3 access to help you download messages using any email client while there are easy workarounds for Yahoo Mail.

There are some downsides though. First, most email clients aren’t portable (can you carry emails on a USB drive?) and second, if all you want is offline access to your Gmail messages and nothing extra, Outlook is probably too heavy a tool for that purpose.

I have been testing a Windows-only utility called MailStore that seems like an ideal solution for such a problem – the tool is free, there’s a portable version for your USB stick and best of all, it works out of the box with your email account without requiring any configuration.

Step by Step – How to Backup your Emails

The way MailStore works is something like this. You install (or unzip) the software to a folder and then select the email accounts that you want to archive. They can be your Gmail accounts, Microsoft Exchange, your old Outlook PST files, Thunderbird and any other web email service that supports either IMAP or POP3.

The tool will pull your email messages from all these places into a central location. If you have a large mailbox, you may specify criteria to skip emails that are older than ‘n’ days. It skips the Spam and Junk folders by default but you may also manually specify any folders /labels that you wish to include (or exclude) from the backup.

That’s it. There’s a convenient search box allowing you to search all your email accounts from one place. You can copy the MailStore folder to your USB drive, or even your Dropbox folder, and access all the emails from anywhere, anytime. Since this is more of an email backup utility and not a full-blown email client, it cannot be used for replying or sending new emails.

To quickly recap, here are some scenarios where you may find Mail Store useful:

0. You want to backup all your web mails to a safe location.

1. You want to carry your Microsoft Exchange / Outlook emails on a USB drive.

2. You have multiple email accounts and need to search all your mailboxes from one place.

3. You want offline access to all your web-based email accounts.

Download 

Read More

What is the difference between Cc and Bcc?

In e-mail terminology, Cc stands for "carbon copy" and Bcc stands for "Blind carbon copy". The difference between Cc and Bcc is that carbon copy (CC) recipients are visible to all other recipients whereas those who are BCCed are not visible to anyone. 

To specify the recipients, an e-mail message can contain addresses in any of the 3 following fields:

• To: field recipients are the audience of the message 

•  CC: field recipients are others whom the author wishes to publicly inform of the message (carbon copy) 

• BCC: field recipients are those being discreetly or surreptitiously informed of the communication and cannot be seen by any of the other addressees. 

It is common practice to use the BCC: field when addressing a very long list of recipients, or a list of recipients that should not (necessarily) know each other, e.g. in mailing lists.

Example of CC vs BCC

From: Frank Sinatra

 To: Kurt Cobain

Cc: Bob Dylan; Jim Morrison

Bcc: Mark Knopfler; Paul McCartney

In the above example, all recipients of the email (including Mark Knopfler and Paul McCartney) will see the following email header information when they receive the email:

From: Frank Sinatra

To: Kurt Cobain

Cc: Bob Dylan; Jim Morrison

This means that none of the recipients will know who the Bcc recipients are. Each of the BCCed recipients will, of course, realize that they were on BCC but they will not know who else was on BCC.

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Any Folder as a Photo Folder

         This tricks shows you how to setup any folder to display its contents as a photo folder. In many cases, you save your images/photos in a folder different than "My Pictures" (under "My Documents"). Since this folder you choose is just like any other normal folders, its contents displayed as a listing of files. You can temporary change it by just right-click and select "View" >> "Thumbnails". But if you want to change the folder so that everytime you come back, the folder itself, as well as all its subfolders, display the contents as photo thumbnails. 


Right-click on the folder you choose and select "Properties"

Select "Customize" Tab. Then under "Use this folder type as a template", select "Pictures (best for many files)"

Check on "Also apply this template to all subfolders" to apply the setting to subfoders as well

Click OK to exit

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Put all your Emails on a USB Drive for Offline Access

How do you ensure that you always have access to all your emails - even at places where there is no Internet or when you aren’t carrying your own laptop?

One of the popular options is that you use a tool like Microsoft Outlook to download all your emails to the computer beforehand and you can then read them anywhere even in offline mode. Both Gmail and Hotmail offer POP3 access to help you download messages using any email client while there are easy workarounds for Yahoo Mail.

There are some downsides though. First, most email clients aren’t portable (can you carry emails on a USB drive?) and second, if all you want is offline access to your Gmail messages and nothing extra, Outlook is probably too heavy a tool for that purpose.

I have been testing a Windows-only utility called MailStore that seems like an ideal solution for such a problem – the tool is free, there’s a portable version for your USB stick and best of all, it works out of the box with your email account without requiring any configuration.

Step by Step – How to Backup your Emails

The way MailStore works is something like this. You install (or unzip) the software to a folder and then select the email accounts that you want to archive. They can be your Gmail accounts, Microsoft Exchange, your old Outlook PST files, Thunderbird and any other web email service that supports either IMAP or POP3.

The tool will pull your email messages from all these places into a central location. If you have a large mailbox, you may specify criteria to skip emails that are older than ‘n’ days. It skips the Spam and Junk folders by default but you may also manually specify any folders /labels that you wish to include (or exclude) from the backup.

That’s it. There’s a convenient search box allowing you to search all your email accounts from one place. You can copy the MailStore folder to your USB drive, or even your Dropbox folder, and access all the emails from anywhere, anytime. Since this is more of an email backup utility and not a full-blown email client, it cannot be used for replying or sending new emails.

To quickly recap, here are some scenarios where you may find Mail Store useful:

0. You want to backup all your web mails to a safe location.

1. You want to carry your Microsoft Exchange / Outlook emails on a USB drive.

2. You have multiple email accounts and need to search all your mailboxes from one place.

3. You want offline access to all your web-based email accounts.

Download 

Read More

Why Do We Love Skype?

     Undeniably the most popular voice over internet provider across the world, Skype has clearly gone a long way evolving from being just another provider to ultimate holy grail in the VOIP industry.

As on 2010, Skype commands an impressive 12.8 billion minutes out of the overall 413 billion minutes of international telephone traffic. In addition to this, Skype users generate 190 billion minutes of “on-net” Skype-to-Skype traffic to make this young company the fastest growing telecommunications behemoth.

While there are hundreds if not thousands of similar VOIP providers on the internet, it’s interesting to note how this one brand has successfully created a niche for itself without really pumping in truckloads of marketing dollars.

Recently Microsoft has made its enormous crush for Skype public by announcing the $ 8.5 billion takeover and I am sure that with 145 million active users, there would be hundreds of reasons why people love Skype, but here are top three of my personal favorites:

• Quality: The VOIP market was always like a dollar store. You get excellent bargains, really cheap rates but equally cheap products. While the competition just spoke about how fantastic their rates were, Skype ensured quality of service. Of course VOIP quality is heavily dependent on how good the subscriber internet connection is, but by using a smart peer-to-peer technology, Skype delivers a better quality experience with an inexpensive, easy to scale architecture.

• Customer Focus: Conventional telecom companies are limited by their regional focus and therefore tend to provide services catering to very specific segments for example calling from US to India. Skype takes advantage of its global presence on Internet to create a ‘long-tail’ strategy, thus catering to hundreds of different segments of customers from across the world through one single product.

• Seamlessness: Skype was not the first-mover in launching features like Skype-out, Skype-in, video calls & conference calls. Though it did not bring any radically new features into the market, it ensured a continuous product evolution. It provided a seamless experience for every new feature on a simple, user-friendly interface and that’s what really makes the consumer happy.

The extent of attention this Microsoft-Skype takeover announcement has gained in the tech/telco world is nothing short of the eyeballs garnered by the royal wedding in the recent past. On a tongue in cheek note, I would say that Skype is pretty much like the blushing, ravishingly beautiful young princess who has, with the culmination of this grand marriage, become the object of attention for all.

The possibilities are endless and almost everybody is nurturing a great expectation. Analysts are already spinning out stories of how Skype integration can become a magic potion for Microsoft by countering Apple FaceTime on video-calling, countering Google +1 on social networking and supplementing its small-business cloud computing portfolio effectively with a telephony solution.

 I expect Microsoft to leverage Skype’s lead & speed to introduce even better path-breaking innovations in the consumer & wholesale telecom space.

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How to Protect your Data ?

     It's a human tendency to lock your home whenever you go out; it makes you feel protected. But what about data what you have saved on your computer? Do you lock it when you transfer it from your computer? Given the threats lurking online - hackers, phishers, identity thieves and the like - you would do well to encrypt your data of you are using the internet to share crucial information with others. This ensures privacy and prevents it from getting hacked. Even if someone succeeds in stealing an encrypted file, he or she will be unable to misuse it unless the key to decode the content of that file is also stolen alongside. Then there are the monetary transactions online and the personal information shared on the Internet. To protect users, the file encryption process is a crucial part of an efficient computer security system. File encryption or data encryption is a process of transforming your confidential information into an unreadable format which cannot be accessed without the correct password or key. Though there are third-party encryption software available like TrueCrypt in the market, you can also use the lesser known, built-in feature of Windows to secure your files. Here to go about this.

How to Encrypt a File? 

1. Right click on a file you want to encrypt. Click the 'Properties' option at the bottom of the context menu.

2. Click the 'Advanced' button located under 'General' tab in the 'Properties' dialog box.

3. Click the 'Encrypt Contents to Secure Data' option and click 'OK'.

4. If the file is in a folder you will be prompted with an 'Encryption Warning' message. If this is the case, click the 'Encrypt the File Only' option and click 'OK'.

Tips

• You can use EFS (Encrypting File System) to encrypt files on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Ultimate, and Windows 7 Enterprise. The filesystem should be NTFS; it won't work on FAT32.

•  Select the certificate of the user whom you want to add (to the access list of the encrypted file), and then click OK. You can do this by clicking Properties -> Advanced -> EFS settings.

• To decrypt a folder, use the same process, only disable the document property encryption by clearing Encrypt Document Properties check box.

• Rename your file with a completely different filename and a different file extension. For example, change filename.doc into general.jpg or filename.xls into birthday.mp3; If file extensions (.doc, .png, .mp3, etc.) are not visible go to: Tools -> Folder Options -> View, and uncheck hide extensions for known file types. Some computer savvy individuals may be able to crack the file.

• You can encrypt your files using strong AES-256 encryption feature of 7-zip, which is a free file compression utility which you might be using already to compress/zip multiple files into one smaller file to be send across internet.

After encrypting the files, you should back up your certificates because there is no other way to recover encrypted files with a corrupted or missing certificate. It is critical that you back up the certificates and store them in a secure location. Here's how to back up your certificate : 

1. Open Microsoft Internet Explorer. On the Tools menu, click 'Internet Options'.

2. On the 'Content' tab, in the Certificates section, click 'Certificates'. Click the 'Personal' tab.

3. Select one certificate at a time until the 'Certificate Intended Purposes' field shows 'Encrypting File System'.

4. Click 'Export' to start the Certificate Export Wizard, and then click 'Next'. Click 'Enable Strong Protection', then click 'Next'. Type in your password.

5. Specify the path where you want to save the key, and then click 'Next'. You can save the key to another location on the hard disk, or on a removable media.

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