Store Your Stuff Online For Free

I had an idea when thinking about making backups of my data– store it online, for free! Just create a Gmail account and email yourself your files. Don’t go sending any whopper files or anything, but you could easily send documents and stuff like that.

You see, I make weekly backups of my blogs xml files. I save the xml files on my computer, but what if my computer were to fail? I would lose all those backups. I could copy them to a flash drive or a CD, but like I said– I make weekly backups, and I have eight blogs! That’s a lot of work. I wonder if I would really backup as regularly if I had to do all that work…

So I thought: Why not email it to myself? Gmail gives you a ton of storage– what is it now, 2 GB? That’s a lot! So I’m going to be emailing my xml files and other files to myself, for Google to store on their servers. And it’s all for free.

Here’s a little caution, though– I don’t recommend that you store sensitive data online like that, such as passwords or medical or financial statements. The chances of your email being hacked ot stolen is pretty slim, but there is a possibility. And email can be opened and read along the way to the server. So it’s still a very good idea to store your sensitive data on a hard copy, like CDs or even print outs.

A Cool Site For Us Forgetful Folks

I found a really neat website called ReSnooze. It looks pretty neat for those of us who are, um, forgetful, sometimes. I have a big problem with forgetting things. And NO it’s not OLD AGE! I have so much stuff crammed in my little ol’ head that it sometimes goes irretrievably spilling out! lol. My kids love to send me IMs, and they sometimes send them with important news, like “remember to schedule that orthodontic appointment!!!” or “You need to buy a playstation 3 game for cousin’s birthday!” Well, needless to say, I rarely remember these IM messages. “EMAIL ME, kids!” I say. They’re getting pretty good at it.

I do sometimes email myself with important messages. But the problem is that the email is usually sent right away, and is received into my Inbox, where I sometimes, uh, FORGET that it’s there. So I find ReSnooze appealing.

It’s a free little online application. You enter in your email address, your message, and how often you want to be reminded. ReSnooze’s policy says they don’t share your email address with anyone. And it looks like the program is free to use (although I think there is a paid version coming up). There’s an informative viral video about ReSnooze:

It’s another very convenient way to get reminders. Check it out if you are inclined.

Sneak a Peek at Email

I get a good amount of spam. You probably do, too. UGHHH! I hate it. I HATE the stuff and I HATE hashing through it. It’s also not safe to open it unless you know exactly who has sent it. But sometimes it’s really hard to tell. How do I know for sure that the email labeled “Your Order Has Been Shipped” is the real discount furniture I ordered, or is it a scam? And is that “PayPal Receipt” is really from PayPal and not a phisher?? Well, here’s a little tip for you:

Right click on the suspicious email and choose “Properties.” A new window will pop up. You can see the sender’s email here. Now see that tab that says “Details”? Click it and you will see all the techincal information about the sender, his IP, his email, your email, and other tidbits of information. Look for the “Received from” and you can see the sender’s email source and his IP. If you take that IP and search for it using Whois or a tracing site, it will give you a general idea of where the email is coming from. So that email may LOOK like it’s from Uncle Bob in Kansas, but the IP is showing an address in Russia. Hm.

Now this is not 100% fail-proof. Emails go ’round and ’round various servers. And if Uncle Bob uses Hotmail or Gmail, hgis location is going to show the location of the Hotmail or Gmail server. So sometimes knowing the IP address is unhelpful. You can view the message without opening the email. In the Properties window, where you clicked the Details tab, you can see a button that says “Message Source.” If you click that, a new window will appear, with the message content in text form. All html source coding (and any pixel spies and also all images) will not show. You can scan the message. You’ll also see alot of html code in there for images or special font characters.

The “Properties” element in menus is one of my favorite features. I use it all the time to see what’s underlying!

Too Much Email!

This is just a small rant. :S I’m realizing that I have subscribed to far too many emails. I have over 300 waiting in my inbox, email that has been sitting unanswered for about a week. I love all the email subscriptions, and a lot of them are helpful for this blog.. but I just can’t read them all anymore! How about you? Are you overwhelmed by email??

GMail Goes Dark

Did you notice? I did not. I don’t use Gmail unless it is to sign in to Blogger. But according to the New York Times, the Mighty Google Gmail system was down for the count Monday night.

One of the best places to track the outage is Twitter. Users are venting their frustrations about Gmail being down — at a rate of 100 or so messages per minute. As a user who calls himself dashmybuttons said, “it’s like a neighborhood blackout, now everyone’s out in the street trying to assess what went wrong.”

I called a Google spokesman, who said he would check and get back to me. For a company that is trying to pitch its Web applications to business customers, not to mention millions of individual users, this can’t be good news.

Someone in the comments made the good point: why would Google “have to go check”? Wouldn’t they already know if Gmail was down, IF Google was using it? It made it seem like Google doesn’t even use it’s own mail program! Funny. If I was Google, I wouldn’t. I’m not fond of Gmail; it’s clumsy and bulky. I only have Gmail because I have to in order to use Blogger (and now YouTube has included it).

Nonetheless, aren’t power outages expected? I think it odd that some people are angry at the outage, and especially for a free service!

Zookoda Email for Your Blog

Got a blog? Got readers? I have several blogs, and many readers, yay! I haven’t been too astute about providing easy means of accessing my content for my readers, however. I have RSS feed for some, but setting up RSS accounts is a real pain to do (and when the blog or blog server is down, so are all the feeds). I personally prefer receiving email updates to my favorite blogs, more than reading RSS feeds and reading them in third-party feed readers. That’s why I’m looking into Zookoda. It’s FREE and we all know how much I love that price tag! Zookoda is offered by the folks at IZEA (the brains behind PayPerPost, SocialSpark, and the Blogger’s Choice Awards).

IZEA offers Zookoda, which is an online software program where you can send email updates of your latest blog posts to your readers’ email inboxes. It’s a sophisticated piece of “bloggerware,” but it is extremely simple to use. With Zookoda, you can also manage all your subscribers, design newsletters to match your blog, schedule broadcasts, and even email in text format (this is great for mobile users who read your blogs). There is much more you can do, too. I’m very impressed with the software and how easy it is to use. And it’s free! Pretty amazing. There is also a terrific forum set up by IZEA (it includes boards for all IZEA products and services, but also has a specific one geared for Zookoda users). The IZEA forum is one of the best on the Internet, too, so you can’t go wrong with that. Check it out. I’ll be gearing up with it soon, as I want to create a subscription service for my travel blog, first. So, stay tuned for that!

Amic Email Backup Program

Amic Email Backup
I was initially very impressed with this program. It’s is a speedy little program that will backup all your emails, whether it be Opera Mail, Eudora mail, Thunderbird, or the ubiquitous Outlook Express. It will backup all your emails and settings with the click of the mouse. It stores the information in a small file and keeps it in the My Documents folder. You can move it to a safe place (like a flash drive separate from your computer’s hard drive) in case of a computer crash or reformat. I love that you can schedule it to backup automatically (I have mine set to every 2 days but you can backup every month or two or three).

When the day comes and you need to restore, you click on your stored file, and Amic begins. The process of restoring your email is another simple click away. IF IT WORKED. It didn’t work for me. The backup process went smoothly, but when I tried to restore, an error notification popped up telling me the file was corrupted.

This could be a great little program. I use Windows Vista, so perhaps this was the problem. I have not tried it on XP yet. If you are looking for a quick little program to save your email, this is free, at least. If it works for you, please let me know!

I’m Just So Impressed

Have I said how much I love windows Live Mail, lol. The more I use it the better I like it! I just figured out how to show the Menu bar (by default Microsoft hides it). To the upper right hand side of the program is a little question mark button– it’s blue and is the typical “help” icon. To the left of this button is a little folder icon with a menu arrow. Click the menu arrow, and choose “show all menus.” The menu bar will appear!

I also love the fact that I can delete, with one swift click, the Junk Mail or Deleted Items box. In Outlook Express, I used to have to right-click, search the pop-up menu, choose “Empty Deleted Items,” choose “yes, I’m sure” etc etc. It’s so easy with WLM!

I really like this program.

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