~TECH-BYTES~

Google has finally realized that it’s a bad idea to automatically add to the list of Gmail contacts all the people you’ve sent an email. An updated version of Gmail’s contact manager has a separate section for the people you’ve emailed: “suggested contacts”.

“My Contacts is a place to import, store and view all of the contact information that’s important to you. You can also create your own groups of contacts to easily email many people at once. We add people you’ve emailed to Suggested Contacts. You can move contacts from Suggested Contacts into My Contacts at any time.”

There’s an option to automatically move suggested contacts into My Contacts if you frequently email them, but the previous behavior doesn’t seem to be an option.

I don’t have this new version of the contact manager, so if you notice other changes, post them in the comments.

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After years of testing, Gmail has finally added a very useful security feature: tracking open sessions. If you log in to Gmail from more than one computer and you forget to sign out, you’ll be able to see the list of locations where your account can still be accessed.

Until now, the only solution when you forgot to log out from Gmail after using a public computer was to change your password. Otherwise, anyone could access your account without knowing the password. Now you can sign out remotely from all the locations where your Gmail account is still open.

If you click on “Details” in Gmail’s footer, you’ll find a lot of interesting information about your sessions. “The top table, under Concurrent session information, indicates all open sessions, along with IP address and access type — which refers to how email was retrieved, for example, through iGoogle, POP3 or a mobile phone. The bottom table, under Recent activity, contains my most recent history along with times of access. I can also view my current IP address at the very bottom of this window, where it says This computer is using IP address…“.

This could be useful if you want to find whether someone else has access to your account: you’ll be able to find the IP address and the date of the most recent activity in your account.

Gmail’s blog mentions that this feature is currently being rolled out in the new version of Gmail, so you may not see it right now. Google AdSense, PayPal and orkut are three other services that show the time of your last login so you can protect against abuse, but Gmail’s new feature is much more advanced.

Among the things you can do to protect your Gmail account, it’s a good idea to sign out after reading your email, not to select “remember me” when you log in from a public computer and to choose a good password that should remain secret.

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For those of you using newly released Firefox 3, or willing to give it a try, you can take advantage of a new feature that lets you set Gmail as the default for all email links — those that contain “mailto:” in them. If you’re like me and don’t have a default email client set up, then clicking these links typically launches an installation wizard for a destkop mail client, or opens some email software that you don’t actually use.

Now you can configure Firefox to launch Gmail when you click on email address links and avoid the hassle.

1) Go to Gmail and sign in.

2) While in Gmail, copy and paste the following into your browser’s address bar and hit enter.

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler(”mailto”,”https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s”,”Gmail”)

Google Apps users can use this code (but be sure to replace yourdomain.com with your Google Apps domain name):

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler(”mailto”,”https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s”,”Gmail”)

3) Click “Add Application” when you are prompted¹. Congrats, you just added Gmail to your browser’s list of mail clients.

4) To set Gmail as your default, click on this link and you will be prompted with a dialog box listing available email applications. By selecting Gmail and checking “Remember my choice for mailto links” you won’t have to tell your browser again. (You don’t actually need to send an email after you click that link.)

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We often create more than one Gmail account for various services like one for subscribing to official groups which sometimes set a format for an email id, then if you use Google apps on your website you’ll have one id to cater to your website and readers plus your own personal id.
It sometimes becomes too difficult to check each and every account so what to do?

Here’s the solution…

Step-1>Out of all these id’s pick the one you use the most {your personal id} now on every other account go to settings>Forwarding and POP/IMAP>Forwarding:>use the option to Forward a copy of incoming mail to<personal id> and from the drop down menu you can choose what to do with Gmail’s copy my advice archive it.

Step-2> Open your primary id i.e your personal id>go to filter tab in settings>click on create a new filter in the To field write your other email id click on next step check on apply the label option> and from the drop down menu select new label name it anything you want i would suggest u write your username of the id for which you are creating a filter.

Repeat step 2 for all the email ids you fwded to your personal ID in step 1.

Step-3> In your primary ID only go to settings>open accounts tab>Send mail as: field add all your other ID’s it will send you a verification mail verify and now you can send mail to anyone with any of your ids staying in your primary id only.. when you compose a mail you’ll see a drop down menu in from field choose from which id you want to send  mail.

Also in the field below accounts>

When I receive a message sent to one of my addresses: choose>

Additional step> Make your inbox look better and colourful in your prmary id jst below the gchat field you’ll see label field click on the colour in front of label you created choose from a no.of colours i’ll suggest bright colours that’ll make your inbox quite colourful.

Happy Gmailing!!!

If you happen to be in Germany you can not access your gmail by visiting gmail.com
You’ll be greeted with the following message:-

We can’t provide service under the Gmail name in Germany; we’re called Google Mail here instead.

If you’re traveling in Germany, you can access your mail at http://mail.google.com.

Oh, and we’d like to link the URL above, but we’re not allowed to do that either. Bummer.

For general information about Google, please visit www.google.com or www.google.de.

This is likely because Google lost trademark battle with German Daniel Giersch, who owns “G-mail”. Already since some time, German Gmail users will not see a Gmail logo on top – rather, the logo says “Google Mail” – and upon registering, they receive abc@googlemail.com instead of @gmail.com.

So for German users, the only change as far as I can tell is they now have to enter mail.google.com instead of gmail.com to get to their inbox. As you can see in Google’s message above, Google isn’t even allowed to link to mail.google.com when you enter the gmail.com domain…