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Showing posts from October, 2020

What to expect from your Google Account Security

Google Account Security has been central to many of the things I have been doing of late so it was a no-brainer when it came to picking a topic to write an article for the Cyber-security awareness month. Knowledge about your Google Account’s security is important as it helps you to understand how it works and also for the fact that it is the user's responsibility to ensure the security of their Google accounts. Presently, Google offers four (4) levels of account security on their accounts and this article presents an overview of the details of those four levels and explains how you can best decide on the level of security you require for your account and ways to manage the various security options.  This understanding of the security levels is also very important from the account recovery perspective as the Google user-verification system looks to verify user ownership beyond all reasonable doubts using the most secure process based on the highest security level enabled on that acc

Beyond Undo Send - Preventing the recipient from viewing the message

This blog was written up after I started noticing some queries on sender's remorse. Questions such as "How do I cancel an email after it is sent out" or "When will Gmail introduce the recall feature before the recipient reads or opens the email" among other similar ones. All users of Gmail are aware of its Undo Send feature. It allows the sender up to a maximum period of 30 seconds or as otherwise specified in that section under Gmail Settings, General tab after they have clicked on the Send button to cancel the sending.  But, what if you realize the error thereafter?  There is a feature, presently available in Gmail, that, while not allowing you to cancel the sending or recall an email, will permit you to prevent the recipient from viewing the content of the email, which, realistically, is what you would have wanted to do in the first place. During the initial days of this blog, I wrote two separate articles on how to send messages using the Gmail Confidential

Creating a Draft or Template response from a received email

This blog is inspired by a suggestion mentioned as a feature request on Twitter, where I often visit to answer questions related to Gmail and Google Accounts.  The suggestion was about including an option to make drafts from received email with attachments, without going through the rigmarole of downloading and uploading attachments and also to create a Template response out of it. Given what Gmail presently has. it is possible to make both those things happen. Ideally, the second option should be a "No", because one of the known deficiencies of the Template responses is that it won't take in the attachment file, which is central to this blog. However, a workaround exists, which we shall use. To begin, here is the test email that we propose to convert into a draft and later into a Template response. It has some text content and a PDF file as an attachment. The first thing we do is to save the attachment in Google Drive by hovering the mouse pointer over the attachment and