Web posts - How To- Page 96

Highlight messages sent only to you in Gmail, Outlook 2010

As your e-mail inbox fills up, it can be difficult to distinguish the important messages from the ones you can read later--if at all. One way to help identify personal e-mails from impersonal ones is by the number of recipients. By highlighting messages sent only to you, you're less likely to miss mail requiring your immediate attention.

Last November I described how to merge multiple e-mail accounts and organize them by using filters and labels. This can help shuttle less-important messages out of your inbox and into folders you can peruse at your leisure.

But not all the non-filtered … Read more

Back up or transfer your iTunes library--free!

Want to back up your iTunes library and/or transfer it to another PC? iTunes itself has a backup option, but it requires blank CDs or DVDs. Bleh.

CopyTrans TuneSwift will back up your iTunes library to the media of your choice (including network folders, flash drives, and external hard drives), or let you transfer it to another machine--Windows or Macintosh.

(Just to clarify, TuneSwift itself is for Windows only, but it includes an option for transferring iTunes libraries to Macs. Pretty neat!)

The program will cost $20-30 when the next version is released, but right now you can get TuneSwift free of charge. … Read more

Android Market online: If your app never downloads

Google wasn't the first mobile platform provider to introduce an online app catalog, but its Android Market Web store is the first to offer seamless over-the-air installation.

Using the online Android Market is fairly straightforward. Apart from some initial hiccups everyone encountered when the Web store first launched, it takes just a few mouse clicks to wirelessly download both paid and free apps without craning over your smartphone screen or straining your peepers.

However, those early frustrations are telling. Scrambling to test the online Market just after it launched, I had no problems selecting apps to download, but several … Read more

How to stop paying for AOL

If you're still paying for AOL, there's a good chance you don't need to. Molly Wood shows you how to switch to a free account for AOL e-mail.

How to secure your Facebook account

If you tend to fall for Facebook posts like "Lose 18 pounds now!" or "WTF I can't believe this picture of you is online!" I can't help you. But if you'd like to secure your Facebook sessions from hackers and spies, you're in luck.

Facebook is now rolling out a new security feature that enables HTTPS encryption throughout your Facebook session. This long-awaited feature, which encrypts data transferred during Facebook sessions, is designed to prevent attackers from compromising users' accounts.

Here's how to enable it:

Until now, the only way to … Read more

How to delete address, cell number from Facebook

Update January 18, 2011 at 12:52 PST

As reported by Lance Whitney, Facebook has temporarily suspended providing cell numbers and addresses to application developers. Still, it's a good idea to at least consider not posting that information or limiting who can see it. This post shows how to delete the information. For details on how to control access, see my post at SafeKids.com.

On Friday, Facebook made yet another change to its privacy policy, enabling third-party application developers to access your street address and cell phone number. This information was made public Friday night on the Facebook … Read more

How to avoid growing number of Internet scams

Hard times seem to make people more vulnerable to ploys designed to separate them from their money and personal information. At least half of BBB Online's list of the Top 10 scams of 2010 occur in whole or in part over the Internet.

The best way to avoid being victimized by scammers is to be very careful about who you trust. Here are five ways to protect yourself from attacks on your bank accounts and private data.

Don't pay upfront One thing several recent scams have in common is a request by the scammer for you to pay … Read more

Future-proof your data archive

It's easier than ever to make sure copies of your most important records, documents, photos, videos, and other personal data will be readable/viewable/playable long after the hardware and software used to create the files have bitten the dust.

The four keys to safe data archiving are to choose file formats that won't become obsolete, use storage media that won't deteriorate or become inaccessible, make multiple copies stored apart, and check your archived data regularly to ensure it's still readable.

Don't get stuck with outdated data formats Most of the files you want to … Read more

Fix Gmail's failure to launch in Chrome and other browsers

Google's Chrome browser is noted for being faster and smaller than Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox. That's why it caught me by surprise when Gmail wouldn't load in Chrome but would open without a problem in Firefox and IE.

A quick Web search led to a thread on the Chrome Help forum dating back to March 2009 but updated as recently as this month. Several solutions to the Gmail slowdown were proposed in the thread, but it appears that Google engineers haven't yet figured out why Gmail sometimes balks in Chrome.

The fix … Read more

Delete accounts in Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live

The Internet makes it so easy to share data that once a bit of information gets planted on a Web server, it's nearly impossible to remove all traces of it. The e-mail, photos, and other data we upload to Web sites will travel far and wide, whether we intend it to or not.

(The dark side of this sharing is shown by the recent Gawker security breach, as reported by CNET's Steven Musil. See below for links to more information on the Gawker data leak.)

When it comes time to remove an account, we can only hope the … Read more