webmail

Deter phishing attacks by consolidating your contacts

Once or twice a week a phishing scam eludes my mail services' filters and lands in one of my inboxes. Usually a familiar name appears in the From field and something like "Take a look" or "What do you think of this?" is in the Subject line. In the body of the message is a strange link. (Don't click it!)

In one of the phishing messages I received recently, my sister's name is listed in the From and "Reply to" fields, but when I hover over the name, two unknown addresses appear.… Read more

Three ways to prevent inadvertent e-mail replies to all

The dreaded Reply All button rang up another victim last week when a Los Angeles Police Department commander asked his officers in an e-mail to arrest someone for the illegal sale of underage bunnies so the department wouldn't receive a "black eye" in the media.

As Ana Garcia reports for NBC Southern California, the commander didn't realize his reply to an LAPD officer was also sent to the TV news producer who requested information on the lack of animal-cruelty arrests months after the department claimed to be cracking down on the practice.

Unlike many Reply All … Read more

Find, retrieve and share photos in your e-mail account with Lost Photos

If you've got an old legacy Webmail account (AOL, anyone?) that you know contains buried treasure in the form of old pictures, Lost Photos is a Windows app that makes it simple to easily excavate the best. It supports quite a few e-mail services, and lets you share pics quickly on social networks. Here's how to use it:

Install Lost Photos here. Run the app and click Options. It's probably best to keep the first options checked; this will keep most little logo files and other non-photo images from popping up. Ignoring GIF files is … Read more

How to add and use Outlook.com e-mail aliases

Microsoft just revealed the preview of its latest incarnation of Webmail, Outlook.com. One particular Outlook.com feature worth noting, is its support of multiple e-mail aliases. They're a great way to protect your primary e-mail address. And because you can't log in to your Outlook.com account with an alias, it adds another level of security.

Add an alias To add a new alias to your primary Outlook.com account, click on the gears icon in the upper right-hand corner and select "More mail settings." Under the "Manage your account" section, select "… Read more

11 ways to make Gmail smarter

Gmail comes packed with plenty of smart, sleek features, and smart users are discovering (or building) new ones every day. Here are some of our favorites:

Use keyboard shortcuts. Once you start using shortcuts to access commonly used Gmail tasks, you'll find them hard to give up. Ed Rhee covers some of the most useful ones, and includes a bonus shortcut that lets you add hypertext links to your messages.

Sign in to multiple accounts simultaneously. Many users need more than one account. Maybe it's for work, maybe it's for juggling separate boy- or girlfriends, but it … Read more

How to keep tabs on multiple e-mail accounts

If you are like me, you have a number of Webmail accounts. I have two Gmail accounts, an old Hotmail account I use for filling out Web forms, and a Yahoo Mail account for fantasy baseball purposes. Thankfully, I can keep an eye on all of these accounts with a single Firefox extension.

WebMail Notifier is a simple Firefox extension that alerts you when new e-mails arrive from a variety of Webmail clients, including Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and even ol' AOL. After installing WebMail Notifier, you'll see that a small envelope icon gets added to your Firefox toolbar. It's gray when no new messages await (or before you add any accounts). When you have unread e-mails, the envelope turns yellow and displays the number of unread messages to the right. And by default, a subtle audio alert plays when new messages arrive.… Read more

You've got mail!

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

Facebook gets ready to make an announcement about mail and messaging

AOL unveils its new Webmail client, Project Pheonix

The Sony Dash touch-screen device snags Hulu Plus

Netflix can now stream on Android but only on a select few handsets

Google Earth adds user-contributed panoramic photos

Basic mail tool

WebMail Notifier for Firefox is a basic add-on that checks e-mail for a variety of different types of e-mail accounts. There's nothing particularly exciting about it, but it works just fine if you need a simple e-mail alert that's well integrated with Firefox.

The program appears as a small envelope icon within Firefox's status bar. It's quite inconspicuous, which is nice. When there are unread messages the envelope turns from gray to yellow, and the number of messages appears to the right. An optional pop-up window shows a brief preview of newly received messages. We liked … Read more

Glide OS connects across devices, desktops

There are few, if any, horizontal platforms that offer users the capability to e-mail, create, and edit documents and pictures, and collaborate across all three major desktop computing platforms as well as almost every major smartphone platform. Glide 3.0 has just updated, introducing changes aimed at parental control and creating a child-friendly environment.

The new e-mail filter lets parents intercept all messages sent to a child's in-box. Parents can then approve or deny the e-mails so children can only see preapproved messages, filtering out pornographic spam, phishing attempts, and other junk. Parents need to create a secondary e-mail … Read more

Your data is the cloud's best bartering tool

TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid asks, "Since when did my data become a bartering tool?"

Answer? Ever since we started ceding control of our code and our data to the cloud.

One response is easy: demand that the underlying source code behind Web services be open source. No, 99.999 percent of the population won't be able to do anything with it. But .001 percent will, and that's the percentage required to ensure that your data remains your data. The interim response is, of course, competition simply based on data retention policies.

Kincaid's complaint stems from … Read more