How to find large e-mails/attachments in GMail and delete them easily?

Many a times, you are struck with a scenario that only a last few % of free space is avilable in Gmail. Though GMail has been growing everyday (or every 2 seconds) in increasing your online storage space - but yet for a person like me who has been using GMail for more than 5 years now as a primary e-mail account, it does become full at many a times.

Today my Gmail account read as "You are currently using 6538 MB (88%) of your 7429 MB.". Now that was a bit worrying for me and decided to bring it down atleast by 5% and here's what I did for it.

Head over to the search bar on top of your Gmail account and type as "has:attachment (*.mov || *.mp3 || *.wm || *.avi || *.wmv )" and the results you get could be the large file attachments that are sitting in your GMail account and making it bulky. Evaluate if you need it else you can select them and delete.

To find large zipped attachments use this search option.

has:attachment (*.zip || *.rar || *.7z )

To find large pdf / doc / xls / ppt / docx / pptx / xlsx attachments use this search option.

has:attachment (*.pdf || *.doc || *.docx || *.xls || *.xlsx || *.ppt || *.pptx )

Usually ppt / pptx are large culprits too.

P.S: After you delete the mail and attachment, it still remains in your GMail Trash folder. So go over to that folder and hit "Empty Trash". Now you can finally see some very good increase in the storage area of your Gmail account.

As for me, it went upto "You are currently using 6138 MB (82%) of your 7429 MB." which was a pretty good increase for me.

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Free Invites for new Orkut – anyone wants?

Many of you folks send e-mails to me asking for an invite to the new Orkut eversince I wrote about the New Orkut. Though the steps were very simple to get an invite easily on the New Orkut but many were unable to get one.

So, here’s some very good news for you folks.

Well I am giving away the invites on a FCFS (First Comment First Serve) basis. You simply need to comment on this post below and also mail me at .

So what are you waiting for folks!! Get started – the new Orkut is really worth the wait I feel.

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Simple Steps to easily get an invite to the New Orkut for Free

A new avatar of the popular social networking website - Orkut has been launched a few days back by Google. It seems that Google has finally woken up to the strides taken by Facebook to make it more leaner, fun and simple to work with. The new Orkut seems more like a union of the existing (or should I say OLD) Orkut and Facebook.

Orkut has been on a steady on a decline as more and more users are switching to FaceBook. This includes even me - I too was a loyal Orkut user for years until I was sucked into Facebook a few months / year back and ever since haven't looked back.

So the new Orkut is only open to private invitations currently. Here's how you can easily get an invite to access the all new Orkut. Since the new Orkut is available to only a few users - so make haste!!

Follow the steps given below and you can easily get a Free invite to use the new Orkut :

• Head to the Official webpage of the new Orkut Community.
• On the page you will find a link marked as "BE THE FIRST TO PREVIEW THE NEW ORKUT HERE!". Click on it and it opens a form to enter your details and lo!! your on your way to get an invite for the all new Orkut!!
  

Ain't this simple? Do try it atleast for the fun of it.

Here are a few screen shots of the all new Orkut.





Here is also an official video released by Google. BTW, most of this work was done at the Google R&D hub at Hyderabad, India.

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Search for any mobile number details online easily using Google PhoneBook effectively

Most of us love to Google about ourselves to keep a tab on what's going public about something our friends or even some unknown folks have written about us online, on chat boards or forums. What you must also know is that a large number of employers / prospective employers also consider this route to do some background checks on their employees before even considering some candidates for an interview on their premises. Well, these can be for good for many and also bad for a few - but nowadays many of us use online aliases to conceal or have a distinctive online identity. For example take my 'jsbi' well - I started out to use jsbi to abbreviate Jason S Bangalore India, now lot of you folks now the url of the website as jsbi. But did you know that you can use Google for even personal benefits, like looking up the phone number of your friend that you may have lost touch from a few years.

Yes it is possible with Google, nowadays it's like anything you want look up for it on Google - that's the kind of analogy!! But many folks who use Google daily too - or even every minute donot know about the Google Phonebook feature or even it's existence. The easiest way to search in Google is to use the regular search but that'll return you most likely a million records and sifting through all the junk it returns will take a few light years I suppose. On the contrary when you want to search for someone's name and phone number, you just have to put quotes around the name or phone number and search it helps narrow the results down to the minimum.

But if it is a phone number that you are searching, you'll need to know how to search for it on Google Phonebook. This is akin much more simpler and very easy than you need to do a regular search. All you have to do is type phonebook: in the search box followed by the name and then hit search. Eg. phonebook: Jason S. If Google has a match in it's vast database - it'll come out with all the results. But the only catch here is that it works on in US currently.

Well, but you can always use Google Phonebook to easily know who was trying to reach you whenever you get a phone call from some unknown number. Many a times we get phonecalls from numbers which we are not aware off and at these times you can easily search for it online and find out who it was really. You can also try this Phone book if you want to store the contact's details.

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How to easily open an encrypted / password protected PDF document

I am not very sure if you already know about this method – but for all those who are unaware of this, here it goes. PDFs (Portable Document Format) documents can be easily encrypted/password protected so that any un-authorized user cannot view or edit the PDFs content. The secured PDF document can also have DRM restrictions embedded right into the PDF document to provide further restrictions on the user from copying, changing / editing or printing the PDF file.

To remove all the DRM restrictions or the password of the protected PDF document you will need to just forward the PDF file as an attachment to your Gmail account and then simply open them in HTML mode from within your Gmail Inbox – now isn’t that so very simple to remove the PDF restrictions and password protection.

I have previously written macros to remove password protection from excel files – but never this easy to remove a password protection. But you have a few trade-offs in that the formatting of the PDF file is lost to a great extend but you get all the content that’s inside.

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Microsoft Soapbox to Shutdown

MSN will no longer offer Soapbox!! Soapbox was Microsoft's version of user generated video service and was also a part of MSN Video. Sadly it has met the grave and will be laid to rest on August 31, 2009. Microsoft Soapbox was considered to be the tech giant’s answer to Google’s most-popular video sharing service YouTube. The demise was announced via a formal e-mail a few minutes ago.

Microsoft hasn't completely backed out of the video sharing/streaming market though - as MSN Video will remain online. MSN Video gets roughly about 88 million unique visitors per month that translates to 480 million video streams a month. On the other hand Soapbox was getting a mere less than 5% of what MSN Video gets. So, it was quite obvious that the service need to be shut down. Hope Soapbox videos don't get listed on Irish buy and sell web site.

From 29th July 2009, users will NOT be able to upload any videos onto Soapbox and those folks who have uploaded videos earlier into their Soapbox account will have time until August 31, 2009 to download them. So maybe you need to download and upload onto youtube for greater prosperity!! I feel that the folks at Microsoft should have given an easy option for the SoapBox users to directly send the videos onto their MSN Videos account.

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How to easily set the Bing Wallpaper of the Day as your Desktop Wallpaper automatically?

Bing – The latest web search engine from the Microsoft Stable is liked by some and scorned by others who would bet that Google is the best anytime. But whatever side you take – whether you like it or hate it – you will always like the daily changing background image that Bing sports.

Now if you want to automatically set the Bing Wallpaper of the day as your desktop wallpaper, you have a small utility that has been developed by MugunthKumar called as Bing Downloader. It is a small exe that is just about 10KB in size and can be easily downloaded here. All this fantastic utility (BTW, the code is open source – so you can change the C# code to ur whims and fancies) does is that it picks up the latest wallpaper from Bing and automatically sets it as your Desktop Wallpaper.

But what is missing in this light weight app is that there is no “Advanced Options” which would allow us to say download yesterday’s or any previous background wallpaper. Also, the user will need to run the Bing Downloader once a day to download that day’s Bing background image to the computer’s Desktop wallpaper.

Also, another issue is that the Bing background wallpapers are usually 958×512 pixels in size and this maynot make them very suitable for use on many Desktop Computers with large screens and having a larger display. But such users can easily center the wallpaper to make it look more pleasing. As for general NetBook or Laptop users this must be great. But my Acer D250 has a native resolution of 1024x768 so this is smaller for it too.

Below are some cool Bing Wallpapers that I have seen over the days.

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Gmail Finally graduates out of Beta

Yes, it seems that GMail has finally graduated pretty silently out of Beta. Sometime back we had an answer on Gmail Support which read as,

What happens when Gmail goes out of beta?

Once you have a Gmail address, it's yours. Even after Gmail goes out of beta, you'll keep the same address and username. We can't say when we're coming out of beta, but we're looking forward to it!

Even, that question has now been removed!! Guess, they found the answer. The official Google Blog and also the GMail Blog has a detailed article and also information that many other Google Apps have also graduated out of the Beta stage. The other Apps are Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both their enterprise and consumer versions will now be out of Beta. For regular users there is NO change in any of the apps, but for the enterprise users Gmail will now support mail delegation, mail retention and also a slew of ongoing enhancements to Apps reliability!!

Before :

After :

So, it’s taken Google almost 5 long years to graduate Gmail out of Beta. But, there many of us who have been so very familiar with the grey BETA added to the logo and simply can’t really stay without it – Google has an option for such users. Just head to Settings in your Gmail Screen, click on Labs, and turn on "Back to Beta," . You will now have the GMail logo replaced with the earlier Beta one!! One hell lot of innovation I would call (Pun Intended).

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Direct Download Links for Final Version of FireFox 3.5 leaked

FireFox 3.5 is scheduled for an official release in a few hours from now – but I have got the leaked links of the direct download installers from the Mozilla website. So, all you folks don’t have to wait for the official release or the update notification – go ahead and download the latest and most awaited version of Firefox right away.

Here are the Direct Download links for the Final version of FireFox 3.5

• Windows Version of FireFox 3.5 : http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=win&lang=en-US
• Linux Version of FireFox 3.5 : http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=linux&lang=en-US
• Mac OS X Version of FireFox 3.5: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=osx&lang=en-US

Go ahead and download the next major version of Firefox and take it for a spin.

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Free Online Computer Training Courses on YouTube

If you're looking for using free online video sharing websites, such as YouTube or Google Videos, for enhancing or honing your computer skills or simply to attend online training, then you're unquestionably in luck. On YouTube, you can find thousands, if not millions of video recordings that are available for you to view, often most of them are full length and also for free.

YouTube makes video viewing at ease. They do this by placing all the video recordings into several channels or categories. You will be able to easily find online video recordings by seeing the ones that are watched the most, the ones that have the most remarks and gossips or simply the ones that are rated the highest. Besides those categories, you'll as well find categories that break up videos into particular subject categories, based on the specific video content. The category that we will need to look up for particular is the Technology Category.

YouTube also has a channel that is labeled Science and Technology. The Science and Technology or Education videos often include videos that help you master on a specific configuration or use of a particular feature. The best thing online is that these video's are a shot from different parts of the globe. Popular video tutorials are mainly on Windows Technologies and I found the k alliance sub site on YouTube to be particularly useful..

As you might already know, the biggest reason why YouTube is so popular is because it's free. Yes, absolutely free. This signifies that you are able to not only view as many video recordings as you wish, without being forced to pay a thing, but you will be able to also produce and share your own. Though YouTube is free to utilize, they do request that you register with the website and that can be done with your existing gmail ID too. This registration is absolutely free of charge. In spite of being optional, the registration will render you access to other additional YouTube features, including the power to rate/comment videos that you've lately watched.

The above-named channels / categories are just a couple of the numerous that you will be able to find on YouTube. So make the best use of technology when you can easily get it for free!!

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Is Website Monitoring services really needed?

Website Monitoring was much of an unheard off terminology until a few years ago. Nowadays I would suggest that every company having a web presence must have a dedicated website monitoring service contract in place. As most companies nowadays use Web Intelligence in the form of incorporating the free Google Analytics or the paid services into their existing and upcoming websites - so do the need for website monitoring services.

There are quite a few websites that offer FREE web site monitoring services. This services allows you to monitor almost anything that is online - be it web servers that serve out websites or File Servers or e-mail Servers or even routers for that matter. So, you will be the first person to know whenever something goes down or there is an unscheduled downtime on your server.

The other advantage of this service is that it keeps checking the state of your server 24/7 and also more than a 1000+ times in a single day - so chances of it missing to alert you are very rare. Also, it just doen't monitor from a single geo location but the test servers are located all across the globe and makes the monitoring much simpler and also very very reliable. This kind of a setup also virtually eliminates the rise of any "False Alarms" so you can always be sure when an alarm that is raised to be very true and needing your expertise.

Downtime is something that your customers will not be happy about - and customers who are unsatisfied with your service will be your competitors real gain. The loss in revenue can also be very large for a small % of downtime in a single day. The loss can be much more for e-commerce websites and business that harness the power of the web to a large extend.

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Download the latest version of the Portable Google Browser - Google Chrome

An expert method of trying out the most current versions of the Google web browser(Google Chrome) is by running a portable edition of Google Chrome. The exclusive trouble that comes up in running a portable version of the software is that it can be quite a baffling task to remain up to date with each of the frequent web browser updates that the Google Chrome team releases on a regular basis(once in few weeks).

The latest version of the portable Google browser can be easily downloaded from the following Google chrome internet site. The web browser can easily be launched by hitting the file ChromeLoader.exe for a standard Google web browser to start or IncognitoChromeLoader.exe for beginning the anonymous mode of the Google web browser.

Also, do note that Newer updates that are released can easily be copied over the existing files of the Google web browser folder in your machine / usb stick that you have stored it. Users merely have to be sure to avoid overwriting the profile directory which stores user associated data.

Users who are worried in remaining up to date with the portable Google Chrome releases are advised to add the RSS feed of the Google Web Browser / Chrome website to their RSS feed reader as this appears to be the best way to be advised of computer program updates.

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Google Chrome 2.0.181.1 Beta Ready for download

A new version of Google Chrome is out - namely the 2.0.181.1 Beta. Chrome has been a browser that has a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier. It has one box for everything: Type in the address bar and get suggestions for both search and web pages. Also it will give you thumbnails of your top sites; Access your favorite pages instantly with lightning speed from any new tab.

Though I personally see Chrome as a bare bones browser but it is quite good. Aside from being ugly, it does everything right. I also use FF3, IE8 and Opera 10. Although the other browsers have lots more bells and whistles they also have quirks. Chrome on the other hand has few if any bells and whistles, but is straight forward, faster and better at page rendering than either FF3 or Opera 10 and slightly better than IE8.

Go give it a try if you haven't yet done!!

Download : Google Chrome

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New Changes to your favorite Google Search - Is it fighting against Twitter Search?

Looks like the Google Engineering Team has finally sensed a clear and present danger from a least expected quarter. Since, Google Search is not real time and the indexing is based on the frequency of when the Google Bot has visited and indexed a particular website. Many folks who want to find instant news head over to another service called Twitter - yes you heard me right Twitter is where people are searching to get the latest updates.

Though the authenticity of the news on Twitter may not match that on other reliable news websites that Google links to, but the first hand report as sensed by people can be easily obtained on Twitter. Currently you have a who's who on Twitter ranging from professional organizations like Nasa (the recent Hubble Repair was tweeted), White House, and even the recent epidemic like Swine Flu was tweeted first hand across the globe.

Now coming to the changes made by Google is the new link that you get called "Show options...".


On clicking "Show options..." you get the new options to narrow down on your search - and lo, you have a new options there called "Recent results" and also "Past 24 hours" which is clearly going in the path of true instant search.

Way to go Google - we hope to see more such innovations!!

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How to easily view any complete FaceBook profile using the Free Facebook Private Profile Viewer

Many a times you may want to view the profile of a person on Facebook but since the person hasn't added you as a friend you will not be able to view the complete FaceBook profile. You have help at hand, though this could be mis-used by others, I hope my blog readers will not mis-use this FaceBook Private Profile Viewer.

Here are the list of websites from which you can easily view the complete profile of any FaceBook user if you happen to know the Profile Id of that person. Tip: You can easily find the FaceBook Profile Id of any person when you are trying to add a person as a friend, check the link of the person's picture and you will get to know the FaceBook Profile Id.

• http://www.facebookspy.org
• http://freeprivateprofileviewer.com/?v=fb
• http://www.easyprivateprofileviewer.com

P.S: I have not enabled the link for these websites, since most of them seem to be SPAMMY - so please be carfeul when you visit the above links. DONOT enter your e-mail address or any personal information on any of the pages.

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Complete list of Free Proxy Servers in India to access Blocked Sites easily

My last two articles Complete list of Free Proxy Servers to access Blocked Sites easily and Indian Proxy Servers :: Complete list of Free Proxy Servers to access Blocked Sites easily have benefited a large number of internet users to access websites like Facebook/Orkut/Gmail/Yahoo that are usually blocked in Offices and Schools.

These proxy websites allow you to type in the url of the website you want to visit and they fetch the website from their own webserver - so the blocking done by your network administrator will not hold good.

Here is an updated list of new proxy webservers that are based out of India (So it'll be very fast for those accessing the proxy site from India).

• www.espressotoday.info
• www.proxy105.info
• www.unhideweb.com
• www.proxyfanatic.com
• www.proxy110.info
• www.surfhappy.info
• www.bestespresso.info
• www.proxy107.info
• www.webfilterbypass.info
• www.proxyspace.biz
• www.espressonow.info
• www.digitalwin.info
• www.theespresso.info
• www.bypassway.net
• www.blockedass.com
• www.weightes.info
• www.zapii.info
• www.freeespresso.info
• www.proxy106.info
• www.digitaltop.info

Related Articles :

• Complete list of Free Proxy Servers to access Blocked Sites easily
• Indian Proxy Servers :: Complete list of Free Proxy Servers to access Blocked Sites easily

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What is the process JQS.exe and how to easily disable JQS.exe?

This morning I noticed a lot of activity going on my PC, even at times when it was idle. I just got curious to find out what the reason could be in the strange activity on my computer. Well, like any other tech geek - I first pulled up the Windows Task Manager (hitting Ctrl Alt Del keys at once). I noticed a strange process called JQS.exe and also found that JQS.exe was running on low priority. But interestingly this strange process called JQS.exe was using 1.3 MB of computer memory and almost 2 MB of virtual memory. Also, there was a lot of activity by this process at random since it was initiating too many I/O read processes.

Well, I figured out that JQS.exe was not any virus process but was indeed Java Quick Start which was actually designed to reduce the startup time of Java applets
and Java apps by prefetching Java Runtime Environment files frequently into memory and caching it. But I'm not a person who uses Java Applets or Java Apps that often - I hardly use Java related stuff maybe once in 2-3 weeks, so there is absolutely no use for it to run all the time on my box to make a rare use app work faster!!

So here is how you can easily disable JQS.exe :

• Goto the Control Panel (Start > Control Panel).
  
• Double click the Java icon to open the Java Control Panel.
• Now click on the Advanced option
  
• Goto Miscellaneous and you will find that Java Quick Start has been enabled.
  
• Uncheck the box to disable the JQS.exe process.
  

You can now see that JQS.exe has disappeared from the Task Manager.

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Google now offers you Money Saving Tips - courtesy TipJar

Yes you heard me right - the internet behemoth that has amassed fortunes in its Internet business now offers you tips on how to save money. Well, that a very intelligent thought after plan given the current economic crisis.

Head over to TipJar and you can see it all in action. Tip Jar is actually powered by Google Moderator Engine. This itself began as an experiment for the Google App Engine in the early days.

Tip Jar is well thought off and it is segregated into 9 different regions/categories. This allows users to share and receive tips on finance, food, vacation, shopping, kids & family, cars & transit, at home, at work and miscellaneous topics.

But as always, TipJar is riddled with opposition due to the following clauses by Google :
"By posting or voting on a suggestion in Tip Jar feedback, you give Google the right to use it freely without compensation."
and also..
"You agree that Google has no obligation to use any idea or feature request you post or vote on in any Google product, service, or web site. You agree to not post any material that is copyrighted or subject to third party proprietary rights or that violates any third party rights."

What is your opinion on this folks? Do you feel Google must have the last say on this?

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Did you know? Gmail went Down and is Up again

Yes, Gmail went down for quite sometime yesterday. At most times it became totally inaccessible and at many times - one wasn't able to open the mails. GTalk integrated into Gmail didn't work for quite a lot of time yesterday. It was all very new in the world of Google for such a unprecedented outage and there were many of my friends who pinged / called to just clarify if it was really true that GMail has gone down - well the irony was YES!!

This incident has been confirmed by a post on the GMail Official Blog today and they have attributed the outage to some European Data Centers going down for regular maintenance and some new code in Gmail that kept sending requests to the Data Centers in the same region rather than load sharing. Google confirms that the issue has been identified and also fixed.

It may be recalled that only last month, a human error had forced Google to believe every site on the Internet was malware!!. Google search created flutters and a whole lot of online confusion when a glitch in its security programme temporarily warned users that websites from all search results were potentially harmful. All websites turned up in search results were marked as harmful and users received the message: "Warning! This site may harm your computer.", finally Google fixed it and attributed the error to a third party.

But yesterday's incident did bring gitters into many people thinking of the vast amount of persoanal e-mails and data stacked off in the Gmail accounts. As for me, I already am using 4947 MB (close to 5 GB) or 67% of the Gmail storage limit.

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Now watch videos on YouTube in 720p High Definition (HD) quality for Free

YouTube recently launched an exclusive High Definition section for the US users. Users who have access to this section can watch the videos in 720p HD quality.

How YouTube has this working is when you happen to upload a video onto YouTube in HD quality - YouTube will automatically have a new buton called "Watch it in HD" just below the player's lower right hand corner. Currently you have a button called "watch it in high quality" in that space for a few videos. On clicking the "Watch it in HD" button, it expands the standard viewing window to 16 x 9 with a 1280 x 720 resolution for HD viewing.

Also, YouTube already says that users who would like to have their videos available in HD quality need to look at the videos' aspect ratio. Also, the new YouTube widescreen player will automatically add "pillarbox" bars to 4:3 videos, so if a video was already letterboxed to fit the 4:3 window, it will be doubly resized (that's a concern since it will surely create an unpleasant viewing experience).

Currently we are seeing that the HD resolution of 720p is fast becoming a standard among the online video sharing sites. Professional video content syndication web sites such as Hulu already offer HD as an option. Soon we'll have Netflix and Amazon video on-demand services to offer high definition through the browser as well. So this area is gonna be competitive!!

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