Put your email address online and you’ll be at the mercy of spam bots and email harvesters.  These are automated robots which troll the internet looking to add to their ever growing spam mailing list.  So how do you share your email without getting hit? 

Scr.im is a free service which helps put a layer of security around a short URL so that spambots will not be able to find your email address easily.

Sharing your email

Simply just type in your email and pick your short URL for easy reference

…Then share it easily across various mediums.

Reading a scr.im email address

When someone clicks on your link, they just have to click on the correct captcha answer…

…and bingo, the email address is displayed.

There you go, simple one click steps to ensure your email is not abused when you put it online.

There can be many reasons why you’d want to send a Facebook, Twitter or Email message later.  Maybe you’re in another part of the world and you want your Facebook to be updated at a different time.  Maybe you want to send a tweet to all your friends so you want to space it out across the day.  Maybe you just want to say something – but not right now.  Here’s a useful guide on how to do just that.

1. How to Schedule Your Facebook Status to Be Automatically Updated Later

LaterBro is a free service which helps you update your Facebook status on any chosen time and date.  It even lets you schedule Facebook updates to be recurring so you can share the same thing daily, weekly, or however often you so desire.  Perfect for updating Facebook when you’re not at your computer.

2. How to Schedule Your Twitter Status to Be Automatically Updated Later

Future Tweets allows you to also schedule your twitter to be updated later.  It’s got an extremely slick user interface which also allows you to set recurrences and buffer up your tweets along the way.  Perfect for wishing someone on Twitter ‘Happy Birthday’ in advance so you never forget.

3. How to Schedule Your Email to Be Automatically Sent Later

DeferredSender has got to be the most elegant email scheduler I’ve ever used.  Once you sign up, you just need to send your email to deferred@deferredsender.com, and then inside the email body, just state your recipients email address and time, and it will deliver it accordingly.  The really cool part is that it will understand what you mean in regards to timing. 

For example you COULD say 4pm, or you could say in 3 hours, or you could just say tomorrow or next month, and it will understand and process the timing of your email delivery.  Also, the email will look like it’s coming from your actual email address, so everything’s pretty seamless.  Perfect for sending important email reminders.

When do you schedule messages for later?  Tell us in the comments :)

Gmail, Yahoo, Msn and other email providers do not allow users to send large files by email. The maximum limit in all of these email services is 20 MB – which isn’t a lot if you want to send movies, videos, or large files.  The following is a list of free ways to send large files online. 

1. How to Send Multiple Large Files at Once

File Factory lets you upload files of 300 MB size. The convenient thing about File Factory is that you can upload multiple files (up to 25) at once. You can upload files from your Computer or from a remote server. The premium account lets you upload files from FTP or using a torrent file.

2. How to Send Large Files Without Even Registering an Account

YouSendIt is another file sharing service that has become popular in recent times. It lets you upload and share files of sizes 100 MB each. The site contains an email form and you can send an email containing your file from the home page itself where your uploaded file is available for download for only 7 days

3. How to Send Large Files via Firefox Extension

Another file sharing service is Drop.io which lets you upload files of sizes 100 MB each. The files uploaded can be downloaded any number of times and you can also password protect your files to retain privacy. If you are a Firefox fan you can use the Drop.io Firefox add-on.

4. How to Send and Password Protect Large Files for Security

TransferBigFiles lets you send large files of size 1 GB each by email. The files can be password protected and you can add a personal note to the email you send to the recipients. When your friends download the file, you will receive email notifications which is a feature. You can send the uploaded file to multiple email recipients with a single click.

5. How to Send up to 5GB Files for Free

The service which allows the biggest file to be sent in the list is File Dropper. This site lets you send files as large as 5 GB in size. You can upload movies, videos, executables, photos and possibly any type of file with File Dropper. The only downside with File Dropper is that you cannot upload multiple files at once.

After the upload is complete, you are given a personal link of the uploaded file. Just copy that link and you can email the link to your friends so that they can download it. There are no sign ups or registrations involved with File dropper. However, signing up has its own benefits as you will be able to keep track of your files, add password protection, mark files as private and delete files later on.

6. How to Email Large Files Without Having to Upload Them Anywhere

Tonsho is an interesting twist to the service.  Rather than uploading files yourself, you can use a normal email client such as Microsoft outlook and Thunderbird, and send your email normally.  Your email will then pass through Tonsho servers and if the attachments are too large, it will automatically upload it to a server, and provide the recipient a link. 

While this takes a lot of hassle away from the whole process, you have to be wary of email security.  I’m not sure I’m comfortable passing my email through anyone else’s server.

7. How to Send Large Files Using a Desktop Client

Dropsend is a free service which allows you to send files up to 2GB large.  While most of these web-upload interfaces work well, for me, nothing beats a desktop client.  It just feels more robust, and its certainly more comforting to use when you’re spending a few hours sending a very large file.

8. How to Send Large Files and Tweet them from your Phone or Desktop

FileSocial is one of the easiest ways to share files on twitter.  Just attach your file and a link will be posted to your file.  Sharesend is another alternative for this, but I’m wary about their non-usage of OAuth for twitter, so I’d recommend Filesocial if you want to send and tweet securely.

This post was written by Abhishek Palit who also writes other useful tips at his blog Softtricks, and James Yeang.  Do you want to write for Friedbeef’s Tech?

Which services do you prefer to send large files? Do let us know your views and suggestions through a comment.

Say what you will about the up-to-date twitters and chat away on your instant messengers, but web users will always come back to their email. With many types to choose from, including various webmails and POP3 emails, it’s no wonder that most users will have more than one email account.

Checking each and every account regularly just to see if there’s any new mail becomes tedious very fast, which is why email notifiers have become such a big hit with many users.  Here are 5 of the best email notifiers for your perusal.

1. How to effectively manage 16 email accounts

ePrompter is a free service that allows you to easily handle up to 16 email accounts at one time.  ePrompter lets you read, delete and respond to any of your messages with a simple click on the account of your choice – without ever having to launch your email program or go to your webmail’s site. Importantly, when ePrompter retrieves messages, it leaves the original messages on your various email accounts’ servers and/or webmail sites.

2. Where to get an email notifier which is portable

POP Peeper is free another system tray app that offers visual and audio alerts for when a new email arrives in your inbox. Working with POP3 and IMAP servers, it also responds well to Gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail along with other major webmail services.  One key feature is that it is able to run directly off your portable storage device so you can take it anywhere and use it on any machine.

3. How to use email notifiers on Firefox

WebMail Notifier is a Firefox add-on that checks your webmail accounts and tells you the number of unread emails.  It handles most of the major webmail services and also allows you to set up user scripts for the webmail services that it doesn’t come preloaded with. It is however tied to Mozilla Firefox browsers only, so IE and Chrome users won’t be able to benefit from it. 

4. How to get notified about your webmail via Outlook

Released under the GNU GPL license, FreePOPs allows checking and downloading of e-mail from webmails from any conventional POP3 client program. This means it works in tandem with your normal POP3 email client like Outlook Express, allowing it to handle any POP3 email along with most webmail services.

While it isn’t exactly an email notifier per se, it does offer email checking services along with plenty of extra functions and plugins that allow it to be expanded for even more uses. FreePOPs is cross-platform and should work anywhere. It also works in the background, reducing system slowdown.

5. How to fight spam and get notified of email at the same time

The Chrysanth Email Notifier can handle POP3, IMAP4 and Gmail. More than just a notifier, it offers audio and visual alerts along with an internal email viewer. It can handle multiple email accounts and supports extra features like blacklists, whitelists and various customizable filters. For the most part, Chrysanth is quite easy to use with its most notable feature being its filters, minimizing the occurrence of spam to once in a blue moon. The app is freeware and runs in the background as a system tray icon.

This article written by Aaron Pek & James Yeang

Do you use email notifiers?  Tell us in the comments!

Formatting is contextual.  One style may look great in one place, but look horrible in the next.  Here are a few quick tips on how to remove unwanted formatting from your documents.

1. How to remove unwanted formatting from your email

If you’ve received an email which has been forwarded multiple times, you’d notice that it can be hard to read if every line is prefixed with on more more ‘>’ characters.  Stripmail is a great piece of freeware which will help you strip any unwanted characters from your email and formats it into proper paragraphs and indentation so it’s much easier to read.  Stripmail is a free standalone utility which does not require installation so it’s incredibly light and portable.

2. How to remove unwanted formatting from any text in Google Docs AND MS Word and Powerpoint

Want a quick way to remove formatting in your document? Select the text you want to remove formatting from, and click Alt + Spacebar.  This built-in function will instantly do the job, and will work both in Google Docs and Microsoft Office.

3. How to remove unwanted formatting from Excel

The Alt + Spacebar trick doesn’t work in Excel, so what you can do is select an already unformatted cell, then click on the format painter button, and then select the area which you want unformatted.   

4. How to remove unwanted formatting when pasting web pages into MS Word

Things you copy from the web tend to end up looking really bad when you paste it into an MS Word file.  The way to get around this, once you copy the text, go to MS-Word and click Edit-Paste Special – Unformatted Text.  If you tend to do this very often, check out this excellent video tutorial on how to set up this up as a macro.

5. How to remove unwanted formatting when copying from your web browser

Have you ever copied something from your web browser to Outlook or Office and been annoyed that the text formatting (bold, font size, etc) came with it? Don’t you wish you could just copy the text itself, without having to copy it, paste it into notepad, then copy it again? This firefox extension gives you an option to copy text without the formatting. You can even set it to trim extra space in and around the copied text!

How do you deal with unwanted formatting?  Tell us in the comments!

For those unfamiliar with this system, GTD is basically a time and commitment management system, and this definition from Wikipedia truly encapsulates the concept perfectly…

“GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of their mind and get them recorded somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate fully on actually performing those tasks. “

…and yes – speaking from experience, it really works. Jello GTD is a brand new open source plugin which helps you implement this system in Outlook

What’s good?

• It’s free, open source and under constant development
• It’s developer ‘Dr. Uqbarrun’ is quick and responsive to comments and suggestions in the comments sections, which has lead to quick implementation of features.
• Syncs with your handhelds

What’s not?

Having tried it out, it seems that there is no obvious way to associate email to the tasks created. As a lot of of my work is driven by emails that need to be actioned, this is a big drawback.

Conclusion:

If your work is not heavily email based, and you’d like a better way to keep track of your tasks, it’s certainly worth a try… after all it’s free. If anything this program will help whip a scattered workflow back into shape. It’s better than ending up like this…

Try it now – Jello GTD

I hate file size limitations on email attachments.

Yes, I suppose they’re there to prevent abuse of email… but when I need to send something large right away – it can be downright annoying!

Thankfully, we live an age where abundant online storage for consumers is available for little or no cost – leading to a number of free solutions to address our issue for today. One of the services which clearly stands out in the crowd is a little service called YouSendIt.

How it works:

• Send an email from YouSendIt, and attach your very large file.
• What YouSendIt is doing is it offers up temporary storage space on the web and you are actually uploading your files to it when you attach the file.
• YouSendIt will send that email along with a link to the recipient, who can then download the file from the web.

If you do decide to try YouSendIt, you should register (free) for their enchanced beta version which includes new features, which includes a proper status bar, as well as contacts list, and a tracking system to see who picked up your file.

Here’s the weird thing… Yousendit.com does not seem to provide a direct link to the registered version after you’ve signed up… so you may want to bookmark http://beta.yousendit.com for easy reference after you’ve registered.

Specifications:

At this point, it allows 25 downloads per file, up to 50 recipients in a single email, and you can send files of up to 1 Gig in size, and stores it for 7 days, which is pretty solid. You can also set emails to appear as if it came from your own email address, not a YouSendIt address so it does not confuse your recepient.

You can read more at techcrunch, which gave this service a good review.

Security:

Everyone of these services tell you they are secure, but if you’re paranoid concerned about security like me, you might want to zip up the files, and add a password. Of course, send the password to your recipient using your own email, not in the YouSendIt note!

Other services:
I’ve also tried Dropsend, which seems to be a bit more limited than YouSendIt, but I do consider it robust enough to be a backup solution. New services like these are popping up everywhere!

Here is a very good list of similliar services that you can try.

Bonus tip: You can also try this more conventional, but slightly more inconvenient workaround that works with Winzip.

Related Links:

YouSendIt
YouSendIt (enchanced) Beta
Dropsend
Collection Of Online Storage/Email Services
Winzip

Search tools in Windows and Outlook have always been suboptimal to say the least. It always bugged me that I was able to search billions of web-pages in seconds, but had to wait considerably longer if I wanted to find something on my PC.

That changed about a year back when I first discovered “desktop search tools”.

Just enter a keyword or phrase, and Desktop Search would instantly retrieve any relevant email or files. In fact, searching my hard disk is now even faster than searching the web… a sharp contrast to the clunky search functions built into Windows and Outlook.

When would I use it?

Aside from finding past emails and misplaced files, I have found it especially useful when I need to organise information.

For example, if I need supporting material for a client satisfaction survey. I just type in “client satisfaction”… and all the presentations, spreadsheets, email, and word documents where my client’s name appears will be retrieved for me. (I can of course filter them by document type).

Why is it faster?

Imagine flipping through an entire book to find what you want (which is what your computer does by default) then imagine how much time you’d save just by referring to the index.

What Desktop search does, is it indexes your email and files so your computer can refer to it and find information faster. Searches that used to take minutes, now take less than one second. Save a few minutes here, a few minutes there… it all really adds up.

Which desktop search tool should I use?

I’ve tried Google, MSN, and Yahoo Desktop Search tools, but Yahoo really stood out to me in terms of terms of ease of use, power, and flexibility.

*Update* : Yahoo no longer offers this service. Do try the the other free services or X1 which is a paid software but worth every cent

Go ahead, give desktop search a try, and take the information on your PC to the next level.

Desktop search links

Google Desktop Search
MSN Desktop Search
Yahoo Desktop Search
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