AutoCorrect Gmail Typos in Chrome

UPDATE: Newest version lets you define your own corrections.

AutoCorrect Typos In GMail When Composing Emails [Chrome]

As a word processor, one of the greatest things about MS Word is that it fixes your typos and grammar automatically, as a browser, the great thing about Chrome is spell check (Internet Explorer 10 might have an edge over it though) and of course, Gmail too saves you from coming off as a bad speller. The point is, all these spell checking and grammar correcting features save our skin, they’ve been covering our hides so long we’ve become bad spellers and we love them for it. So, Gmail is naturally great because it tells you when you’ve misspelled a word but what it doesn’t do is auto correct your typos. ezAutoCorrect for GMail is a Chrome extension that auto corrects select typos as you type in Gmail.

To get a better sense of how this extension works, open MS word, type teh (typo for The) and press the spacebar, it is automatically corrected to The. Now imagine this happening in Gmail, that’s what this extension does. It runs quietly and unobtrusively in the background and fixes those little mistakes you make as you type. As opposed to having to right-click a misspelled word and choosing the right one from the context menu, this extension will automatically correct the words when you hit the space bar.

The list of typos (which aren’t listed anywhere) are, for now, hard coded (i.e., you get what you get). It corrects words like teh to The, yuo to You, dont to Don’t and i to I. The slight short coming with the extension is that you can’t add your own customized corrections. The developer has promised to add the feature if the extension is deemed useful by users, i.e. shown some love. I personally found it amazing and will be sending the developer a cake in hopes that it’ll get that feature implemented sooner.

Even if it doesn’t correct all the typos you make, it corrects some of them and there is no harm in having it run in the background.

Install ezAutoCorrect for GMail Extension For Gmail

AutoCorrect Typos In GMail When Composing Emails [Chrome]

Rethinking the 'Never Unsubscribe' Rule for Spam

Rethinking the ‘Never Unsubscribe’ Rule for Spam

When it comes to junk mail, the rule, for 15 years, has been: Never respond. Don’t even try to unsubscribe, even if they give you instructions for doing so. You’re just letting the spammer know that your e-mail address is “live,” and that you’re a dummy who actually opens those messages and reads them. You’ll wind up getting put on even more spam lists as a result.

Well, I think it’s time to revisit that advice.

I use Mac and Windows, but my main carry-around machine is a Mac laptop. Onto it, I’ve installed an amazing antispam program called SpamSieve. After reading countless glowing reviews, I gave it a try, and found it indispensable. It works with all Mac e-mail programs, and does an astonishing job of putting all spam from all my accounts into the Spam folder.

I still have to pore over it, though. Every now and then, a piece of legitimate mail winds up in there.

Now, my e-mail addresses are fairly public. I do have one private address that I never, ever use on the Web. (That’s how spammers get your e-mail address, by the way — they scour the Web for e-mail addresses that people type into forms online. Which is why you, too, should have a separate e-mail address that you use only for private correspondence and never use when, for example, ordering products or signing up for things.)

But since my addresses are public, I get added to every mailing and spamming list under the sun. And even with SpamSieve’s assistance, it’s gotten out of control — the amount of time I have to spend double-checking the spam folder is growing year after year.

So a couple of months ago, I decided to try an experiment: I’d violate the old rule. I’d deliberately try to unsubscribe from every spam list. And I’d report on my findings.

First, the good news: it worked. An awful lot of the spam comes from “legitimate” companies. Now, I don’t consider spamming O.K., ever, and I think these companies should be ashamed of themselves. But “legitimate” means that they’re real companies with real Web sites and names and addresses — and, almost always, real Unsubscribe buttons at the bottom of the spam.

The best Unsubscribe button by far is the one provided by something called SafeUnsubscribe. I don’t know much about it, except that it’s a service offered by a company called Constant Contact, and it claims to have 370,000 customers — companies who pay to use SafeUnsubscribe.

Bottom line: When you see SafeUnsubscribe at the bottom of the message, click it. You land on a Web page that basically says, “O.K., that’s it. We’ve taken you off ALL mailing lists.” One click.
These 370,000 companies, clearly, are the ones with a guilty conscience. “We’re going to spam you, but gosh, we feel bad about it — at least we’ll make it easy for you to get off our lists!”

I like SafeUnsubscribe because it (usually) knows, and fills in, your e-mail address. What really irks me is the other ones: spam with an Unsubscribe button at the bottom — and when you click it, you go to an unsubscribe page when you have to type in your email address! You spammed me, you idiot — you already know my e-mail address!

Those “dumb” unsubscribe buttons mean that I have to go back to my e-mail program and look up which address they spammed, then go back to the Web page and paste it in. When you have 30 of those a day, it’s exhausting.

Anyway: after a couple of months of this, I’m happy to report that, as far as I can see, not a single one of these companies has contacted me again. Unsubscribing in 2011 really works.

(Note that I’m talking about spam with an Unsubscribe button at the bottom. The ones pitching you Viagra or bigger body parts won’t unsubscribe you — and don’t pretend that they will.)

The corporate spam, in other words, is usually easy to stop.

Now, the bad news: That spam isn’t very much of the total volume. I’m still inundated by the less responsible spam:

– All kinds of messages in Russian and Asian languages. (Hint: Dudes, you’re wasting your time.)

– A million, zillion e-mails from a firm called Rodman & Renshaw (not sure if it’s really them, or someone impersonating them).

– The usual phishing scams — fake e-mails from banks (that I don’t even have accounts with), asking me to log in to correct some kind of error.

– A million “I was in the U.K. and I was mugged, old pal! Can you help me out?” scams.

– Variations on the old Nigerian scam: “I’ve just come into possession of $50 million, and I need your help getting it out of the country…”

– Invitations to have my product manufactured at a company in China.

– A lot of weird ones where the entire message is a single Web link. Do they think I’m some kind of sucker?

In any case, I think it’s time to revise the old “Never respond” rule. It’s true that you should never, ever respond to a piece of spam by rewarding it with a purchase. Don’t ever click “click here” — you’re only encouraging them.

But my experiment (confirmed by my Twitter followers) is that clicking legit-looking Unsubscribe buttons does reduce the spam flow, if only from actual companies.

And perhaps best of all, it gives you a fleeting, illusory feeling that you actually have a way to fight back.

Rethinking the 'Never Unsubscribe' Rule for Spam - NYTimes.com

How to Back Up Your Gmail the Easy and Cheap Way

How to Back Up Your Gmail the Easy and Cheap Way

Gmail users put a lot of their lives into their inboxes. Over nearly seven years, with ever-increasing storage, how could you not? So if your inbox suddenly went blank, where would you turn? Now's the time to get a secondary stash in place. Here are four options—free or cheap, easy or geeky—that will give you peace of mind.

Keep in mind that Gmail's data loss from this weekend wasn't actually a total loss for anybody, and that, as a result of a bug caught quickly, only about 40,000 users, or 0.02 percent of Gmail's estimated 200 million, were effected. And everybody got their email back, eventually, as Gmail goes so far as to keep tape backups of everything. But for a weekend, some users had no access to anything they'd ever sent or received. And when more typical site outages occur, one can act the part of a pro if they've got a backup source for anything they need from their life's files.

Below, we've separated a few of your backup options into levels of convenience, price, and geekiness. We recommend finding the option that hits your sweet spot and making sure you've got your email backed up.

For Those Who Don't Mind Paying for Convenience: Backupify

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Once you sign up for Backupify, then authenticate your Gmail or Google Apps account through the service, you really don't have to do anything—and we mean that. Backupify uses its servers to pull data from Google's servers, and after an average of 2-3 days, your Gmail archives are there, and new stuff slowly streams over.

Backupify also backs up Facebook data, Flickr photos, Google Docs, your long-term Twitter stream, and lots of other webapps. Best of all, they're offering one year for free right now with discount code savegmail, so giving Backupify a try is really worth the (very minimal) effort.

For Cheapskates Who Like Automation: Gmail-to-Hotmail

What are the moral implications of using Hotmail primarily as a free, server-to-server backup of your Gmail messages? We cannot say. But Hotmail really, really wants you to transfer over your messages, and they've even created a simple web interface for doing so: TrueSwitch.

First up, though, sign up and secure a Hotmail account, get a good password, and sign into it. Then head to TrueSwitch, enter your Gmail user/pass info, then your new Hotmail login, and choose what you want Hotmail/Windows Live to copy over. As with all the other options, you'll likely have to wait a while, but once all your data has arrived, you'll get an email from Hotmail, letting you know you're all set.

Hotmail is a nice backup solution in a few ways, really. First off, you can send messages from your Gmail address using the account importing tool, and Hotmail offers a nice spam-fighting alias feature.

For Free, Local, DIY Backup: Desktop Thunderbird (and Then Somewhere Else)

Gmail offers access to all your mail through desktop clients, even the really old stuff. You could use Outlook or Apple Mail to download all of it, but Thunderbird is free, works on any system, and creates nicely portable packages that are handy for any other backups you're doing (you responsible data owner, you).

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First things first: head to Gmail, click the "gear" in the upper-right corner, choose Mail settings, then head to Forwarding and POP/IMAP. Enable POP for all mail, and set Gmail to keep its copy. At this point, you should download and install Thunderbird, if you haven't already.

You can then click Gmail's link for configuration instructions; their step-by-step walk-through for Thunderbird 3.0 is spot on. Alternately, Thunderbird's automatic configuration usually picks up on the necessary Gmail settings if you enter your Gmail username and password. But if you're only planning to use Thunderbird for this backup job, you only need to have the incoming settings up and running for POP mail, so hit the "Manual Setup" button and drop this in:

Incoming: change to "pop.gmail.com"
Protocol (the drop-down list to the right of the Incoming field): change to "POP"
Port (the field to the right of the protocol drop-down list): change to "995"

Clear out the Outgoing settings if you'd like, but they won't do much harm. After hitting OK and verifying that everything's working, your only job is to keep Thunderbird running on your system whenever you can, and to give it a few days to grab everything.

Your Gmail messages are stored inside your Thunderbird profile, which you can find in a semi-discrete location. We'd highly recommend backing up that profile in the same way you'd back up your other important data, and hopefully somewhere online. Now you've got triple-threat access to all of your mail history, and Gmail's rare service interruptions and hiccups affect you hardly at all.

How to Back Up Your Gmail the Easy and Cheap Way

How to Change Your Facebook Notification Settings

How to Change Your Facebook Notification Settings

If you or someone you know needs help managing their Facebook notifications, either because they can't stand getting all the emails or they just want to adjust them a little, here's how it's done.

The video above will walk you through the process, but here are the steps you need to follow to alter your Facebook notifications settings:

1. Log in to Facebook.
2. Click the Account menu at the top right of the page and choose Account Settings.
3. At the bar on the top of the Account Settings page, click Notifications.
4. You'll now see a large page of notifications with two checkboxes beside them. The checkbox on the left is for email and the checkbox on the right is for text messages. Checking a box means you'll get a notification and unchecking a box means you won't. Simply choose the options you want.
5. When you're done making your choices, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the button labeled Save Changes.

That's it. You're all done! As an alternative, if you'd like to receive all your notifications as a daily email digest, read this guide too.

How to Change Your Facebook Notification Settings (for Beginners)

“Find Big Mail" Sorts Your Gmail Attachments by Size for Easy Clean-Outs

"Find Big Mail" Sorts Your Gmail Attachments by Size for Easy Clean-Outs

If you're running out of space in your Gmail or Google Apps inbox, the quickest fix is nixing the largest attachments you've got stashed. You can't do that from Gmail's web interface—unless you've enlisted Find Big Mail's help.

Find Big Mail creates three IMAP labels on your Gmail account — My Big Mail, My Really Big Mail, My Ultra Big Mail, corresponding to minimum file sizes of 500 KB, 2 MB, and more than 2 MB. Using those labels, you can further refine what you're looking for in Gmail's search: label:my-ultra-big-mail MP3 would help you clear out old songs your friends used to send you before web file transfers were so easy. Otherwise, you're free to run through the labels, select multiple emails, and pare down your account storage. When you're all done, you get an email report showing how your mail divides up into the three categories, along with the total space you'd reclaim by deleting these messages:

You can use an actual size sorting tool if you hook up Gmail to Outlook, Thunderbird, or other IMAP email clients, and there are Gmail-as-file-storage tools that get it done, too—though those tools can sometimes lead to temporary account holds from "unusual use." Find Big Mail authorizes through a temporary OAuth token, sorts your mail in a few easily understood labels, and only stores the sizes of your messages on its own servers, according to the team. It's a free service to use.

Find Big Mail [via Digital Inspiration]

Find Big Mail" Sorts Your Gmail Attachments by Size for Easy Clean-Outs