Send secret mails using Outlook / Gmail

Do you want to send a private mail from within a public mail? Something like below?

bccthis is an addon through which you could append a private note for a subset of recipients in a group e-mail without having to compose a second message. It is available for MS-Outlook, Blackberry and Gmail (firefox addon).

If the receiver also has bccthis installed, then there’s an option of consolidation of the messages. Otherwise the private message will be sent as a separate email to the receiver.

Try it out!

Read more...

Shrink Pic

Do you frequently upload photos to blogs and web galleries or send pictures through email (web based email providers or MS Outlook) or share photos through Skype / MSN Messenger? Then Shrink Pic is the image resizing application you’ve always wanted.

Shrink Pic is a free software which automates the entire task of reducing the size of images and allows you to send dozens of photos as email attachments - quickly and with no effort at all!

All you need to do is install Shrink Pic. It automatically detects when you're sending large photo files and compresses them in the background.

How does it work?

1. It runs silently in the background

1. When you are sending a photo, it will automatically detect and resize the photo and store it in a temporary area and send that resized photo. It gives you a message on the compression status.

1. You can control on the compression ratio of the photos via the settings.

1. If you need to send full sized pics for any reasons, you can disable the program from the taskbar.

It works perfectly on Windows XP / 2000 / 2003 / Vista & 7 and supports Vista Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Poco Mail, Incredimail as email clients and Skype & MSN Messenger as IM clients.

You can also copy the program to your flash drive and add it to your portable list of softwares. You can download this incredible freeware from here

Read more...

Office Tab

Tabs are synonymous to multi tasking. As more and more applications are adapting to the tabbed interface, addons are available to add tabs in the existing applications.

Office Tabs

Office tabs makes it possible to add tabs to Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Powerpoint individually.

The tabs can be configured for each product individually.

Tested it on Windows 7, Office 2007. Working fine. But if you have Office 2010 Technical preview edition running alongside, be ready for crashes.

Read more...

Softwares I cannot live without

Below is my list of “Top 21 freewares”. While compiling the list have thought of categories and softwares that are essential in order for me to survive in front of a computer for a long time.

Blogging tool: Windows Live Writer

There are very few softwares from MS which have found a fan following from both pro & anti MS enthusiasts and this is one of them. Makes blogging very very easy.

Internet Browsing: Google Chrome

Redefined the meaning of “Fast Browsing”.

PDF Reader: Foxit Reader

Adobe Acrobat Reader is not the only software that can open PDF files. Foxit is a lightning fast pdf file reader.

PDF Writer: PDF Creator

Create quality PDF files from any windows application with advanced features such as copy protection, password control and others.

Text File Reader: Notepad ++

Tab windows is the life line for any multi tasking person. With syntax highlighting, auto completion, ability to add plugins, this makes text editing and programming much much easier.

Compressing software: 7-zip

Fast, light weight, and enhanced compression make it a better choice than any other software available.

File Search: Windows Search 4.0

Inbuilt in Vista & 7, and available as an addon for XP, another product from MS which does exactly what it is supposed to do. Search -> Results –> Open. Quickly. Natural search is also supported.

System Housekeeping: CCleaner

It optimizes system, removes unwanted logs, internet history, temp files and is a must for keeping any system spic and span. It saves on hard disk space and also had a registry cleaner helps in keeping the registry in top shape.

Anti spyware: Spybot Search & Destroy

An anti spyware which is still the best amongst the host of new anti spywares that crop up every single day.

File copier: Fast copy

Fastest copy / delete software on windows. Period.

Codec: K-lite

A necessity because it makes viewing of any types of media files so much easier. know know VLC player is there, but guess habits are hard to die.

File Renamer:

Lupas Rename 2000 – Has been previously reviewed over here.

FTP Client: FileZilla

Forget the command line / explorer to do file transfer.  Filezilla supports FTP, FTPS and SFTP with an intuitive graphical user interface.

Download manager: Free Download Manager

With integration support for Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, there’s no reason why one should choose ANY other download manager. I Keep trying other managers and then keep coming back to using this. Supports video downloads and increases download speed manifold.

Web content filtering: Privoxy

It’s a Web proxy based on Internet Junkbuster with advanced filtering capabilities for protecting privacy, filtering Web page content and removing ads, banners, pop-ups, and other obnoxious Internet junk.

Password Bank: Keepass

The only software that I entrust with all my passwords, except the banking ones, which continue to remain in my head ;), though there is no reason why I should not transfer it on this.

Image editor & viewer: Irfanview

The Best image viewer. Simple yet powerful. You can use this for viewing to converting to creating images. Don’t forget to download the plugins available which enhances the experience of using this masterpiece.

Music Player: Foobar 2000

An amazingly light piece of software that does best what it has to do. Play music.

Audio & Video Converter: Super

Have had a high success rate for converting multimedia files with this software. It might take some time to get used to the interface. But once you are aware of the features, it is a very powerful application. It can convert audio and video files to virtually any format. Their website has the comprehensive list of possible conversions.

Torrent: uTorrent

The homepage of this software says everything, “A Powerhouse With a Tiny Appetite”. Look forward to a future post explaining the whole torrent business, if you are not aware of what exactly is a torrent.

CD/DVD Burner: CD Burner XP

Have tried lots of softwares for burning CD / DVD. The simplicity and reliability of this one makes it a must for everybody.

Read more...

MS Outlook Autocomplete

Each time that you send a new message in Outlook, the emails that you type in To/Cc fields, are automatically inserted into the AutoComplete list, so in the next time that you type an email address, Outlook automatically completes the right email address for you. This autocomplete list grows over time and will contain not only valid email addresses but also those that are no longer working and those with typos.

The AutoComplete file of Outlook is stored under [Your Profile]\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook , and it always saved as the profile name of Outlook with .NK2 extension. The Microsoft Outlook mail autocomplete manager NK2View by Nirsoft is a portable software for the Windows operating system that provides the means to view, delete and edit all email addresses that are stored in Outlook’s autocomplete database. The software program can be used to load a valid Microsoft Outlook n2k file after startup.

It displays the information in the usual table layout that is known from many other Nirsoft applications like the one that can be used to display and save email attachments in Outlook. Columns that are displayed are the display name of the user, the email, the autocomplete value, the protocol, the recipients field and the cryptic entry id and index parameters. They can be sorted for easier access to the information.

The Outlook tool provides the means to backup and restore n2k files. Creating a backup before processing the file is recommended as it is the only way of ensuring that the file can be restored if something goes wrong during the editing process.

The usual options to export information into various formats such as xml, txt, html or csv are provided in the interface. Another interesting option is the ability to add entries from an Outlook address book into the autocomplete file.

Read more...

Thread Compressor for MS Outlook

In the usual course of communication via e-mail, there’s a conversation chain. Conversations do usually follow a simple principle. User A writes an email to User B. User B receives the email, reads it and replies to User B. The reply includes all of the content that was send to User B plus the reply. User A receives the email and then replies back, again with all the contents included that he initially send to User A, plus the reply of User A plus his own answer. And so forth.. The amount of data in mail keeps on increasing as we just hit either to reply which by default carries the previous mail data.

Thread Compressor (http://threadcompressor.co.uk/) is an add-in to Microsoft Outlook, which removed unnecessary emails from a "thread" - reducing the amount of storage required (maybe keeping your mailbox within its size quota) and reducing the number of emails you need to read.

Once this is installed as an addin, it automatically compresses all the mails by default which the author also warns on his site “Let me say that again: Thread Compressor, as it is configured by default, WILL DELETE DATA FROM YOUR INBOX.”

With TC, you may choose to have it actively delete content. Otherwise, you could have it move "compressed" items to your Deleted Items folder or some other folder you may create (in a PST file, for example). There's also an option on the Advanced tab to have it not remove mail, but just mark it as read. Or to keep various flavours of mail (like high priority ones).

Installation & Instructions to use can be found from the author’s site. Play around, you’ll end up saving a good quantity of mailbox space.

Read more...

Free Temporary Email Address

Have you ever come across a website that required you to fillup a registration form with valid email id to give download link or software key or just to validate email before getting registered on their site?

Did any website reject your gmail, hotmail, yahoo & other free webmail id?

Do you have the necessity of creating an email id for temporary use only (say minutes or hours)?

If you have answered yes to any of the above questions, then the below websites will be very useful (in order of my personal preference). All of them provide free temporary email address.

10MinuteMail (http://www.10minutemail.com)

• Any e-mails sent to that address will show up automatically on the web page.
• You can read them, click on links, and even reply to them.
• The e-mail address will expire after 10 minutes.
• You can also extend the expiration for another 10 minutes.
• The domain names are not fixed and keep changing.

YopMail (http://www.yopmail.com)

• Lets you choose your own username @yopmail.com
• Is feature rich and has an interface similar to any other realistic webmail provider.
• Provides RSS Feeds, ability to delete mails, forward to other mail id.
• Messages are kept for 5 days.

Mailinator (http://www.mailinator.com)

• Alternate domains
• Provides RSS, widgets for checking mails
• Messages are kept for a few hours

Do not provide your personal email id for temporary or common registrations. Use a disposable email id instead.

Read more...

Outlook Attach View

To those for whom Microsoft Outlook is second life and their administrator has set limits on the mailbox size, Outlook Attach View is a tiny(78k) portable life saver.

The software program scans the emails of the Microsoft Outlook version that is installed on the computer system for email attachments. These Outlook email attachments are then displayed in a table format which gives the user options to sort the data in all possible ways. The information that are extracted from the Outlook emails are the filename of the email attachment, the recipient, file size and data of creation among other values.

Email attachments can be selected by the user to retrieve additional information about them. It is possible to save email attachments by selecting them and clicking on the Save selected items button in the software program. It is furthermore possible to delete selected email attachments directly in the software as well. This could be a handy way of copying email attachments from Outlook to another hard drive to free up some disk space.

The list of email attachments that has been found can be exported into various formats including text, html and xml.

Read more...

ManicTime

Ever wondered how much productive have you been each day? How many hours have you spent in front of computer each day?How much time you spent on each application? And the trend of usage?

Previously reviewed Rescue Time did a similar thing but then all the data was uploaded on their servers which was a concern.

Enter ManicTime. Collected data is not transmitted anywhere or shared with anyone. Only you have access to it, which means no privacy concerns. Having a local database also enables you to use ManicTime offline, without an Internet connection. The reporting features are also pretty good.

On my Windows 7 laptop, it takes about 290 MB of memory.

You can download this utility from here.

Read more...

Foxit PDF Preview Handler

For many of the people who are using Outlook as the means of communication, the auto preview of attachment is a boon. While the default preview handlers are restricted to MS-Office applications, images & text files, we are left wanting for quite a few other previewers especially zip & pdf.

Tim Heuer has come to the rescue by writing a preview handler for PDF’s using Foxit Reader, which is the best software for reading pdf files, called Foxit PDF Preview Handler.

It does exactly what is required and is very light weight. There is no official foxit support included for this add-on, but Tim will offer assistance in troubleshooting in case of any problems.

It works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 build7000. You can download the software from here.

Read more...

Get alerts on new emails via SMS

GSN SMS Notifier is an application that alerts you about new e-mails via SMS, directly to your cell phone.
SMS delivery can be done via ICQ (for free) or Skype (Skype Credits required).
Currently supported e-mail types are Gmail and POP3.
GSN is FREEWARE.

GSN will need to be configured before it is used.

 

The program has to be running in the background to be able to check the email account regularly and send SMS messages out if new emails have arrived that are matching the rules.

Read more...

Want to test some software on your machine?

Have you come across an application but not sure whether it’s a malware or spyware? Do you want to test any software without messing up your machine? How about installing the software in a completely isolated environment on your machine and testing it out without making any changes to system files or registry?

Enter Sandboxie. It runs your programs in an isolated space which prevents them from making permanent changes to other programs and data in your computer.

The red arrows indicate changes flowing from a running program into your computer. The box labeled Hard disk (no sandbox) shows changes by a program running normally. The box labeled Hard disk (with sandbox) shows changes by a program running under Sandboxie. The animation illustrates that Sandboxie is able to intercept the changes and isolate them within a sandbox, depicted as a yellow rectangle. It also illustrates that grouping the changes together makes it easy to delete all of them at once.

Benefits of the Isolated Sandbox

Secure Web Browsing: Running your Web browser under the protection of Sandboxie means that all malicious software downloaded by the browser is trapped in the sandbox and can be discarded trivially.
Enhanced Privacy: Browsing history, cookies, and cached temporary files collected while Web browsing stay in the sandbox and don't leak into Windows.
Secure E-mail: Viruses and other malicious software that might be hiding in your email can't break out of the sandbox and can't infect your real system.
Windows Stays Lean: Prevent wear-and-tear in Windows by installing software into an isolated sandbox.

Read more...

File Renaming Software

Have you ever faced the task of renaming multiple files? How have you achieved it? Renaming it one by one or searching for software which will help in doing this in one mouse click?

Have evaluated lots of tools which can do this, but Lupas Rename (535kb zipped package) is the best of them. It gives you lots of options on renaming, auto numbering with a preview facility etc.

Lupas Rename 2000

Read more...