Gmail: Filter to Find your Most Important Emails

Your Gmail Inbox is overflowing with email messages. Some are newsletters that you are subscribed to, some are messages from friends and colleagues that you would like to read as soon as they arrive while the rest could be spam that managed to trick the built-in Gmail filters.

Focus on the Most Important Emails First!

When you only have a limited amount of time to process that long queue of unread messages, it is important that you prioritize your emails and defer reading stuff that is not very important and can wait (like those newsletters).
Here are two simple Gmail filters that will automatically move out all the low-priority emails out of your Inbox so that you can focus on the important ones. They should also come handy when you are checking emails on the go – the high-priority items will be delivered to your mobile device while everything else will stay in your Gmail account for you to follow up later.

1. Filter out emails that are not addressed to you

If your name is not in the TO: or CC: field of an email message, chances are that you may not have to worry too much about responding to that message.
The following filter will automatically move messages out of your Inbox to another folder that are of less-priority as they are not addressed to your directly.

• From: –you@email.com
• To: –you@email.com
• Has the words: cc:–you@email.com
• Skip the Inbox (Archive It)
• Apply the label: Not for me

If you have more than one active email address, you can either add them all to the above filter separated by the OR operator or setup another similar filter per address.
2. Move Bulk Emails to another folder
Bulk email messages are likely to contain words like “click here” or “unsubscribe” even if those hyperlinks are just a tactic of the spammer to confirm your email address. In either case, the existence of such words in the message can help us easily filter out bulk emails:

• Has the words: unsubscribe OR “click here”
• Skip the Inbox (Archive It)
• Apply the label: Bulk Mail

Not everything under the “bulk mail” folder will be spam as it will also match email newsletters that you are subscribed to. That said, email newsletters never require immediate attention so they safely reside in a folder other than your inbox.

Wolfram Alpha search Engine: Some Questions Can’t Be Answered by Google

Some Questions Can’t Be Answered by Google but done by Wolfram Alpha

1. Your Location

A query like “where am i” will reveal your IP address and your current geographic location. Alternate queries that will get the same information about your computer include “who am i” and “what is my ip.”
2. Date and Time
You would normally need an Excel spreadsheet and may have to learn some formulas to perform basic calculations involving date and time but not with Wolfram Alpha. The tool lets you work with dates using natural English (similar to Outlook Calendar).



If you are to calculate the number of days before your next holiday, use “how many days until <holiday name>”. You can subtract dates  like regular numbers or compute new dates with natural phrases like “second saturday of next month” or “now + 10 days.”
3. Food
Wolfram Alpha can instantly answer most of your food and nutrition related questions like how many calories are present in a bottle of Coke? Which is healthier – the french fries served at Burger King or the ones at McDonald’s?



4. Time Zones
You know that a query like “time in <city>” will display the current time of that city. This works for most search engines but Wolfram has an additional feature that works in reverse.
You can specify the time of any city and it will convert that time into your local timezone. This should be handy when a client suggests a meeting time using his timezone and you have to quickly figure out if that time works out for you.

Also see: A Less Confusing View of World Time Zones
5. Astronomy
If you are a fan of Astronomy, you’ll absolutely love Wolfram Alpha and it can compute the position of stars and planets for any given day.
The tool can tell you the exact dates for astronomical events like when the next solar eclipse will take place while a specific query like “solar eclipse in new york” will show you the date for the next eclipse that will be visible from New York.


6. Finance
Want to know the number of people who are working for a particular company. Wolfram Alpha can get this information and more using simple queries like “market cap of Apple” or “revenue of Google.” You may also use the tool to query past stock prices and indices.


7. Colors
What do you get when you pour some red paint in a bucket of yellow paint? What’s the HTML and RGB equivalent of Purple?

8. Comparisons
Wolfram|Alpha is an excellent tool for performing comparisons and it presents results in a neat table making it easy for you to interpret the data.
You may compare almost anything and everything from airports, universities, size of popular structures (Statue of Liberty vs Eiffel Tower), quantities (10 lb vs 12 kg), stock quotes, sales tax rates in various cities, sports teams, and even standard paper sizes.

9. Weather
Most search engines offer weather forecast for the next 7 or 10 days but with Wolfram Alpha, you can get historic weather conditions of a city as well for any given date.
And unlike Google which will only give you sunrise and sunset times for the next day, Wolfram Alpha can compute that information for any past and future date.


10. Understand Relations
This is one of my favorites. Put it any complex family relationship – like your mother’s sister’s son’s wife’s father – and Wolfram will map it into a genealogical tree making it easier for you make sense of that relation.

These are just some uses of the very-awesome Wolfram|Alpha. Do check this page for more examples and then go here to add Wolfram to your browser’s search box.

Google and Wolfram on the same page :

Firefox users can now use the brilliant Wolfram search engine alongside Google.
Google and Wolfram on the same page

This is possible through a new Firefox add-on that displays search results from Wolfram Alpha in a neat sidebar whenever you perform a search on the main Google website.
You can use this to compare Wolfram Search with Google and the nice part about the add-on is that it auto-hides Wolfram from Google pages where there are no Wolfram results available for a particular search query.
All results pages on Wolfram can be downloaded in PDF format. Give it a shot.
Compare Wolfram with Google

Gmail Priority Inbox: Clean up your Gmail Inbox Automatically

Gmail has always had an excellent spam filter that keeps junk messages out of your Inbox. Then, earlier this week, Google added a reverse feature that is quite unique to Gmail – it’s called the Priority Inbox.
Priority Inbox is like having a personal secretary whose job is to sort your incoming mail based on importance. She knows about your friends, your colleagues and other people with whom you interact regularly and can therefore categorize your email accordingly.
Priority Inbox is something similar – it’s an intelligent, self-learning filter that automatically puts your most important email messages at the top of your Inbox so that you may deal with them first. The feature is now live for both Gmail and Google Apps email accounts.

Sort your Emails by Priority

Priority Inbox has one limitation – it works with incoming emails only and doesn’t really care about the hundreds and thousands of messages that are lying in your Inbox unattended.
I have been testing an impressive web app called Other Inbox that brings much need order to your existing Gmail Inbox and looks like a perfect complement to Google’s Priority Inbox.

Other Inbox scans your mailbox for less-important emails and sorts them into relevant categories. For instance, email alerts from CNN, BBC, Google News, etc. would go into the News folder while messages from Amazon, iTunes, etc. will find their place in the Shopping folder.
You just have to authorize Other Inbox to access your Gmail account once and it does the rest automatically. Other Inbox is reasonably good at categorizing your emails but you also have the option to choose your own labels (see next screenshot).

Depending up the size of your inbox, it might take anywhere between 5-10 minutes for the whole process to complete.
I have used this service with my Gmail and Google Apps mail accounts and the results have been fairly impressive. Now if I ever want to clear my inbox of all notifications from Twitter and Facebook, I can simply open the “Social Media” label and empty it with a click.
That said, a lot of us will obviously not feel very happy sharing our mailboxes with a third-party. Now they do have a privacy policy in place and you can always manually revoke access to sites that are authorized to access your Gmail and Google Account.

How to Secure Your Wi-Fi ( Wireless Network)

How 2 secure your Wi-Fi:
 
The good news is that it is not very hard to make your wireless network secure, which will both prevent others from stealing your internet and will also prevent hackers from taking control of your computers through your own wireless network.
Here a few simple things that you should to secure your wireless network:

Step 1. Open your router settings page

First, you need to know how to access your wireless router’s settings. Usually you can do this by typing in “192.168.1.1” into your web browser, and then enter the correct user name and password for the router. This is different for each router, so first check your router’s user manual.
You can also use Google to find the manuals for most routers online in case you lost the printed manual that came with your router purchase. For your reference, here are direct links to the manufacturer’s site of some popular router brands – Linksys, Cisco, Netgear, Apple AirPort, SMC, D-Link, Buffalo, TP-LINK, 3Com, Belkin.

Step 2. Create a unique password on your router

Once you have logged into your router, the first thing you should do to secure your network is to change the default password* of the router to something more secure.
This will prevent others from accessing the router and you can easily maintain the security settings that you want. You can change the password from the Administration settings on your router’s settings page. The default values are generally admin / password.
# What do the hackers/bad guys use - This is a public database of default usernames and passwords of wireless routers, modems, switches and other networking equipment. For instance, anyone can easily make out from the database that the factory-default settings for Linksys equipment can be accessed by using admin for both username and password fields.

Step 3. Change your Network’s SSID name

The SSID (or Wireless Network Name) of your Wireless Router is usually pre-defined as "default" or is set as the brand name of the router (e.g., linksys). Although this will not make your network inherently* more secure, changing the SSID name of your network is a good idea as it will make it more obvious for others to know which network they are connecting to.
This setting is usually under the basic wireless settings in your router’s settings page. Once this is set, you will always be sure that you are connecting to the correct Wireless network even if there are multiple wireless networks in your area. Don’t use your name, home address or other personal information in the SSID name.
# What do the hackers/bad guys use - Wi-Fi scanning tools like inSSIDer (Windows) and Kismet (Mac, Linux) are free and they will allow anyone to find all the available Wireless Networks in an area even if the routers are not broadcasting their SSID name.

Step 4. Enable Network Encryption

In order to prevent other computers in the area from using your internet connection, you need to encrypt your wireless signals.
There are several encryption methods for wireless settings, including WEP, WPA (WPA-Personal), and WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access version 2). WEP is basic encryption and therefore least secure (i.e., it can be easily cracked*, but is compatible with a wide range of devices including older hardware, whereas WPA2 is the most secure but is only compatible with hardware manufactured since 2006.
To enable encryption on your Wireless network, open the wireless security settings on your router’s configuration page. This will usually let you select which security method you wish to choose; if you have older devices, choose WEP, otherwise go with WPA2. Enter a passphrase to access the network; make sure to set this to something that would be difficult for others to guess, and consider using a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters in the passphrase.
# What do the hackers/bad guys use - AirCrack and coWPAtty are some free tools that allow even non-hackers to crack the WEP / WPA (PSK) keys using dictionary or brute force techniques. A video on YouTube suggests that AirCrack may be easily used to break WiFi encryption using a jail-broken iPhone or an iPod Touch.

Step 5. Filter MAC addresses

Whether you have a laptop or a Wi-Fi enabled mobile phone, all your wireless devices have a unique MAC address (this has nothing to do with an Apple Mac) just like every computer connected to the Internet has a unique IP address. For an added layer of protection, you can add the MAC addresses of all your devices to your wireless router’s settings so that only the specified devices can connect to your Wi-Fi network.
MAC addresses are hard-coded into your networking equipment, so one address will only let that one device on the network. It is, unfortunately, possible to spoof a MAC address*, but an attacker must first know one of the MAC addresses of the computers that are connected to your Wireless network before he can attempt spoofing.
To enable MAC address filtering, first make a list of all your hardware devices that you want to connect to your wireless network**. Find their MAC addresses, and then add them to the MAC address filtering in your router’s administrative settings. You can find the MAC address for your computers by opening Command Prompt and typing in “ipconfig /all”, which will show your MAC address beside the name “Physical Address”. You can find the MAC addresses of Wireless mobile phones and other portable devices under their network settings, though this will vary for each device.
# What do the hackers/bad guys use - Someone can change the MAC address of his or her own computer and can easily connect to your network since your network allows connection from devices that have that particular MAC address. Anyone can determine the MAC address of your device wireless using a sniffing tool like Nmap and he can then change the MAC address of his own computer using another free tool like MAC Shift.

Step 6. Reduce the Range of the Wireless Signal

If your wireless router has a high range but you are staying in a small studio apartment, you can consider decreasing the signal range by either changing the mode of your router to 802.11g (instead of 802.11n or 802.11b) or use a different wireless channel.
You can also try placing the router under the bed, inside a shoe box or wrap a foil around the router antennas so that you can somewhat restrict the direction of signals.
Apply the Anti-Wi-Fi Paint – Researchers have developed a special Wi-Fi blocking paint that can help you stop neighbors from accessing your home network without you having to set up encryption at the router level. The paint contains chemicals that blocks radio signals by absorbing them. "By coating an entire room, Wi-Fi signals can’t get in and, crucially, can’t get out."

Step 7. Upgrade your Router’s firmware

You should check the manufacturer’s site occasionally to make sure that your router is running the latest firmware. You can find the existing firmware version of your router using from the router’s dashboard at 192.168.*.

Connect to your Secure Wireless Network

To conclude, MAC Address filtering with WPA2 (AES) encryption (and a really complex passphrase) is probably the best way to secure your wireless network.
Once you have enabled the various security settings in your wireless router, you need to add the new settings to your computers and other wireless devices so that they all can connect to the Wi-Fi network. You can select to have your computer automatically connect to this network, so you won’t have to enter the SSID, passphrase and  other information every time you connect to the Internet.
Your wireless network will now be a lot more secure and intruders may have a tough time intercepting your Wi-Fi signals.

Who is Connected to your Wireless Network

If you are worried that an outsider may be connecting to the Internet using your Wireless network, try AirSnare – it’s a free utility that will look for unexpected MAC addresses on your Wireless network as well as to DHCP requests. Another option is that you open your router’s administration page (using the 192.168.* address) and look for the DHCP Clients Table (it’s under Status > Local Network on Linksys routers). Here you will see a list of all computers and wireless devices that are connected to your home network.
*It is also a good idea to turn off the router completely when you are not planning to use the computer for a longer period (like when you are out shopping). You save on electricity and the door remains 100% shut for wireless piggybackers.
**If you ever want to let a new device connect to your network, you will have to find its MAC address and add it to your router. If you simple want to let a friend connect to your wireless network one time, you can remove his MAC address from the router settings when he or she leaves your place.

Google Talk Bots ( You Must Add as Friends)..very Useful !!!

You can do lot of interesting stuff with Google Talk like get alert notifications, save bookmarks to delicious, manage web calendars, set reminders, write blogs, and so much more. Such features can be easily integrated into Google Talk through ‘bots’ which, in simple English, are like virtual friends who are online 24×7 and will always respond with a smile to your questions or requests.

Here are the eleven most useful ‘bots’ that transform Google Talk into a more useful program:
1. imfeeds@gmail.com – Add this IM Feeds bot as your Google Talk buddy and you’ll be able to read any blog or website that syndicates content via RSS feeds.
To subscribe to a website in GTalk, simply send a new IM message that says "sub labnol.org" where labnol.org is the site address that you want to read inside Google Talk.
2. friendfeed@bot.im – This secret bot lets you post to FriendFeed from Google Talk. You may submit either hyperlinks or text messages.
3. imified@imified.com – This imified bot turns Google Talk into a real powerhouse.
You can post bookmarks to delicious, send messages to Twitter, submit blog entries to WordPress, Tumblr or Blogger, manage events in Google Calendar, shorten long URLs, run whois and so on.
4. inezhabot@gmail.com – Like IM Feeds, iNezha bot helps you read feeds inside Google Talk but this is slightly more versatile. For instance, you can simply say "digg" and it will show a list of all feeds that match that search term so you don’t have to type (or copy-paste) feed addresses.
5. Translation – This is a free service from Google that helps you translate words from a foreign language into your native language. Just add the relevant bot (e.g. hi2en@bot.talk.google.com for Hindi to English or en2hi@bot.talk.google.com for English to Hindi) as your buddy, send him a message and it will get translated instantly.
6. Use Google Talk with Twitter – Invite twitter@twitter.com to become your friend in Google Talk and verify your account. Now whenever you IM this new friend, the message will automatically publish on your twitter account.
7. Set Task Reminders – If you need to remember something important, Google Talk can send you reminders for that event.
Just add timer to your Twitter friend’s list and then add twitter@twitter.com to your buddy list in Gtalk. Now if you want to get a reminder after 50 minutes, send a direct message to twitter  like "d timer 50 pick kids from school" and a reminder will automatically pop up in your Google Talk after 50 minutes.
8. Transliteration – If you want to chat in your mother tongue (like Hindi or Tamil) but feel more comfortable using the English keyboard, Google Transliteration bot will come in handy.
For instance, add en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com to you friend’s list in GTalk and all messages you type in English will get transliterated in the language of your choice.  Available only for a few Indian languages.
9. Xpenser – With xpenser, you can record travel expenses via email, SMS or even Google talk. Add xpenserbot@gmail.com as your buddy and send a message like "lunch 33.2 with Bill Gates" and that will be added as an expense to your online spreadsheet that can be accessed from anywhere.
10. Ping.fm – Like Imified, ping.fm is one of the most useful Google bots out there especially if you are a social networking or micro-blogging addict.
Add pingdotfm@gmail.com to Gtalk and you can communicate with twitter, jaiku, wordpress, identi.ca, facebook, myspace, bebo, friendfeed, linkedin, tumblr, plaxo, friendster, delicious and more.
11. Meshly – Add meshly@gmail.com as your friend and you’ll be able to post web link to your Meshly account via Google Talk. You can also add tags, categories and description to your hyperlink via Gtalk itself.