E-mail tools: miscellaneous
Hidden passwords
Did you know that lots of passwords are likely to be hidden in your mailbox? Think of the confirmation e-mails after you’ve signed up with a forum or webshop: these messages sometimes contain your password in full. If a hacker enters your mailbox they will have access to your accounts easily - especially if you use the same passwords for all your services. It’s therefore a good idea to have your mailbox scanned by Dashlane Inbox Scan ( https://www.dashlane.com/scan/11#/login - free), a tool which specialises in finding passwords in mailboxes. Dashlane is compatible with Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Outlook.com. After your mailbox has been scanned you can take the appropriate action: delete the e-mails or reset the passwords concerned.
Monitor your e-mail habits
Do you sometimes wonder how much e-mail you have to process and how efficiently you do this? If you have a Gmail account, you can have statistics drawn up by the Gmail Meter ( http://www.gmailmeter.com - free). This tool tells you how your e-mail volume evolves, which contacts are most active, how fast you reply to messages or how many hours a week you devote to your e-mail. To analyse e-mail accounts with other services, there’s Conspire ( https://www.conspire.com/welcome ). Its basic aim is to chart your professional network via your e-mail archive, but as a by-product it also provides useful statistics about your e-mail habits.
Bring together contacts
Has it been a long time since you’ve taken the trouble to update your contact list? If you do this manually it can take a lot of time, so try an automatic tool such as FullContact ( https://www.fullcontact.com - there’s a free basic version, the premium version costs $10 or £6.60 per month). The only thing you need to do is link your social network accounts to FullContact. It can also pull in all the contacts from your mobile phone or from a file. It’s all aggregated into one uniform contacts list, without any duplicates and complemented with lots of extra information. You can then have this list synchronised to a Google or iCloud account.
Safer e-mailing
Encrypting e-mail messages isn’t simple (see http://lifehacker.com/how-to-encrypt-your-email-and-keep-your-conversations-p-1133495744 ). If you need encryption only occasionally, it’s therefore best to resort to a simpler encryption tool such as Virtru ( https://www.virtru.com - free for personal use). It’s available as an add-on for Chrome, Firefox and Outlook, and as an app for iOS and Android. Virtru is compatible with Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Outlook.com addresses and with any e-mail account that you add in Outlook. To encrypt a message, you only need to select the appropriate option. Recipients can decrypt your message without a Virtru add-on, but in this case they will be asked to identify themselves first. Not ideal, but at least this procedure gets rid of the problem of working with “encryption keys”. An alternative solution is Mailvelope ( https://www.mailvelope.com - free). This encryption tool is more complex than Virtru but offers the advantage that it doesn’t involve an external service.
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