How to Know if Your Gmail Account has been Hacked

Security and privacy are one of the main thing which has been rolling in everyone’s mind if they want to do any sort of things; especially various online queries has made them to think about the privacy of their personal data. In this post, I have shared an interesting bit of information about the way to know whether your Gmail account has been hacked or not. In order to know that, no need to install any additional features in the Gmail account. Thankfully, Gmail account has many in-built features that assist you to find whether your account has been accessed by other persons or by any suspicious login attempts. By verifying the following information, you can find whether the account has been hacked or not.

1. Last Account Activity: Last Account Activity gives you the last activity of your Gmail account. By accessing the Last Account Activity, you can easily found out whether your account has been accessed by the others or not. Last Account Activity gives you the list of IP addresses along with the time in which your account has been accessed. So that you can easily found out the login details of your account.

2. Go for your Login Sessions: Login Sessions provides you various levels of activities of your Gmail account. You can find the Link to the Login session which is present next to the Last Account activity and named as Details. The Details tab shows you various activities of your Gmail sessions and it displays a page which shows you information about the recent activities of your mail account. It gives you various detailed information about the Browser type from which the account has been accessed and also where the IP addresses are from.

3. IP addresses from various countries: Don’t get afraid if you’re noticing any IP addresses from various countries. Suppose if you’re seeing any sort of third party tools which are accessing your Gmail account, then they will mostly show in the activity log. This helps you to trace those IP address and you can easily start your own investigations. There are lots of tools which are available in the Cyberspace from which you can trace the IP address information very easily.

4. Unwanted Login activities and Suspicious-activity monitoring by Google: Suppose if your account has been accessed by any suspicious login; Google will automatically provide you information regarding those sessions. You will be getting alerted if any one accessed your account from unknown locations.

5. Log out from all Sessions: Make sure you have been signed out your session when you’re using any public computers. If you’re not sure that you haven’t signed out your account, you can easily sign out the various sessions by using SIGN OUT ALL OTHER SESSIONS option found in your Account activity area. This will help you to resolve any careless mistakes that have been made by you.

If your account has been hacked, then immediately change your password for better security and privacy.

How to Send personalized Mail using Mail Merge in Gmail

Are you going to celebrate birthday party at hotel and need to invite all your colleague and friends through email?

Wish to send mail in a personalized way to recipients, at this scenario Mail merge can be handy. To know start up with Mail merge, no installation of new software required, it is just in build feature of Microsoft outlook and Word. If you aren’t using Office, that is not going to be a great deal. You can perform mail merge using Gmail and Gmail Docs in your browser.

Mail Merge with Gmail – Procedures

• Login in to your Gmail and compose a new mail. Don’t wonder that it is like the same, some exceptions occur while marking the text that varies from other messages. If Dear First –Name is going to e your text, then you have to convey Gmail that First name is variable field.

• This is not going to be a great deal, you just need to replace First-name in the message by $%First-Name%. As you performed now replace the remaining variable field in body or else replace in subject line of your Gmail.

• Now finishing all these steps save the mail in draft message in Gmail. Now make a copy of this draft message to spreadsheet in your Google Docs account. Your expected magic happens here.

• Open up with Mail Merge HD, spreadsheet you copied just appears. You’ll find some dummy data t get started with it. You have to do some editing works like replacing column names so that the replacement variable field matches with Gmail draft message.

• You can also either add or remove number of column as per the requirement, but at default one mandatory column must be present. Important note that must be kept in mind is that column name in spread sheet and variable field name in Gmail draft message are same, so Gmail variable is mapped to column in Google Docs.

• As you created column likewise create a row to specify personalized recipient to whom you need to send.
 
On filling up with necessary data, you are prepared to send. Go to Mail Merge menu in Google Docs and click on to hit Mail Merge. Since this is the first time you are sending, it may conform for access you may grant to your Gmail to your won Google account. Hence on doing this you will have more secured nature to your data and no one will access to your data.

Start Mail Merge in Google Docs 

On gaining access Google Docs clack on Star Mail Merge, which shows Gmail template that you created before. Now enter Sender’s name, if Bcc option required tick and hit Start Mail Merge. It all over and your mail are sent in a secured way.

Make a note that Gmail offers this to a certain limit. Only a maximum of 100 messages in a day are allowed, exceeding this may lead to locking of your account by Google temporarily. If this methods seems to be little confusing use a simpler version of Gmail Mail Merge.

Direct Marketing Strategies for SaaS Vendors

The cloud industry is continuously growing and thriving that software companies find the market appealing and lucrative. With SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) still being one of the dominant cloud platforms there is, cloud adoption has increased in various industries. The IT industry creates and innovate products and services by leveraging on the cloud’s ability to scale and host an array of SaaS applications that are offered to consumers, start-ups and small businesses.
“The Future of Cloud Computing Survey Third Annual Survey 2013,” was recently published by North Bridge Venture Partners and GigaOM Research, which indicated that 63% of 855 respondents (comprising business in various industries, IT decision makers and cloud platform vendors) are using SaaS in their companies.
The growing deployment of SaaS applications provides endless opportunities for software companies to improve the services to meet the growing demands of the clients’ business operations. Moreover, this is an opportune time to strategically promote the products directly to get a share on market. Whether you’re a start-up SaaS vendor, a budding entrepreneur or an established SaaS provider, below are direct marketing strategies you can implement to increase your consumer’s base and clients worldwide:

1. Publish white papers – A rule of thumb in publishing white papers are to provide new perspectives on the industry. Companies publish white papers to explain newly developed technologies as well as to educate people about their products. Generally, white papers should be short, concise and readable. Three to five pages maximum should cover the topic, with a clear synopsis of the paper.
2. Educate through webinars – Webinars allows you to connect and engage current and possible clients. These seminars are conducted over the Internet, using social media, blogs and corporate websites to promote them. Educate your viewers regarding the industry and provide thought-provoking ideas to help them on making decisions in their IT needs. Invite them to register via newsletters, and use a reliable webinar solution such as GoToMeeting for videoconferencing and live chats. Allot a time for Q/A for your viewers and listeners.  
3. Be visible on your blog and other blogs with guest posts – Work with someone, who is an expert in content marketing to help you create optimised and concise contents that can be posted on the corporate blog and to other blogs. Provide interesting topics and ‘how-to tips’ that add value to your product. Pitch in to high traffic blogs for guest posts, but make sure you don’t directly sell the product there. Provide rich, in-depth analysis of the industry and solutions for their IT infrastructure. Your goal must be to educate, share and inform readers, more than selling just a product.
4. Write an e-book – Self-publishing an e-book will create a strong branding on your side. Popular SaaS vendor such as HubSpot is maximising this approach. You will see “Marketing Whitepapers & E-books” constantly on Twitter, which is always promoted as free, and it grabs people’s attention, which leads them to take an action even just by clicking the link.

The statistics prove true that SaaS deployments will experience growth in the coming years. However, whilst the resources to produce software are already available, from cloud servers, hybrid cloud platform to cloud app hosting, the biggest challenge is how to maintain product innovation as the SaaS market gains momentum.

Patrick Li is a tech addict who’s looking at ways to streamline business performance using cloud technology and other new services.

How to Host your Website on Google For Free

Do you know that Royal family of UK has preferred Google as the Hosting contributor for Prince William’s official wedding Website. This site you can view it at officailroyalwedding2001.org which contains the news related to it, updates, photo gallery, videos and the whole thing is hosted to the Google App Engine.

Don’t you find something new in this? Actually Google App Engine has used to host web apps in the cloud that in sense says hosted to Google. And to give you info this is the first time ever that Google infrastructure is being used to host a ‘static Website’. This event will acquire bounty of Press attention and web traffic for the coming days.

Interested to Host Your Own Website at Google App Engine?

Google actually defines that it is a more secured site than any other site. The first and foremost advantage of hosting to your website to Google App Engine is that it provides the more reliable, because it is served by Google’s own data centers.

Next to that if it seems to have low traffic website, you need not have to spend a dollar for web hosting. On posting your image you are provided with 1GB of bandwidth per day. On exceeding that limit you will have to pay-per-use similar to Amazon S3 which charges you for what you use or how much memory space you occupied.

Are you ready to Host?

As usual you can web host to a particular company by rending some storage space on their server. This can let you send or transfer HTML and several files to their server using some link like FTP or cPanel. On completing this process your Website is ready to serve. Google App engine puts effort in similar manner except the file transfer mechanism, because it is bit similar from others a bit.

• Set out to appengine.googel.com and try to generate a new application. If you haven’t used App engine in prior you have to verify using your mobile number on trying to create a new app.

• Now on creating your application a name must be provided. It should be unique from other and you have to name through lowercase alphabets and digits. For instance your app can be identified as “thisismyawesomewebsite”.

• The next two sub-steps involved might be a little bit tougher, but that is not to tough. Just try to download and install two installers in sequence. First file to be installed: install phython form phython.org Next to that: Install App Engine SDK from code.google.com

• Once the downloading process is competed it will be in Zip format, unzip it the file name is wesite.zip in your computer. It will contain some HTML pages, images and CSS that will try to host Google App Engine.

• Now you have to open up app.yaml file with notepad and replace word with ‘labnol’ with the application that has been created.

• You have come to the final step and deploy your website to Google App Engine. Open the Google App engine from the launcher program from the Start Menu.

Hit the Deploy button and you site is ready to host. And deploy once again to insert the edited files.

How to Download Youtube Videos in their Original Format

Youtube videos can sometime be watched at offline mode by using intermediary software; by third party you can download videos form Youtube through a website. So they may not the original resolution. Is this a legal way for viewing a video. The Third Party usually breaks the terms and condition of Youtube. Till date there has been no way to download the Youtube videos in their original format that they have uploaded.

Youtube videos can also be watched offline with some third party software. Websites offers you to download many videos of Youtube, but these are not going to be as the original version of Youtube. But for those who are not willing about quality or resolution you can surely download from the intermediary. Surely this intermediary will crack the terms and conditions of Youtube.

So you may be feed up how to download Original resolution of Youtube. Earlier Youtube allows downloading that to the transformed version of video that you uploaded. That was also allowed only till September 26. That to with some terms and condition only they were allowed to download. They condition was only two videos can be downloaded from the Youtube Channel.

So from your own Youtube channel you can download video in a transformed way through edit button. That is Youtube Video manager will download as individual videos. The format you could download is MP4. MP4 is most easily download able format to get your own videos. Actually this MP4 format is only a legal way of downloading video. Here both offline and online video are available. The limitation given to this is that original 1080p HD version will not be given to download.

At last you have to make yourself happy here is a way to download original version of Youtube videos. This much time we have discussed about how to download in an illegal way, now it is time to go in for a legal way of download.

Download Youtube videos in Original Resolution:

• Do you have account in Google Takeout? If not so create with your present and valid Gmail ID. This is because you have sign in with the same email ID to create Youtube channel.

• Once you have created you will find a TakeOut screen, almost at the bottom of the screen. Thatwill be filled up with red Rectangular “Create Archive” button.

• Next to that Google will create a packed in (.zip). Archive with the videos that you have uploaded in Youtube channel. • On completion of the archive formation with 100%, next step is go to ‘download’ option and get all the files that you required.

• At this stage of downloading you have to make a note that your archived video doesn’t exceed 2GB of data. If so it will by design split up into compactable mode.

Your process is not completely over.This process is going to have a restriction. If you are interested in downloading your high resolution video it is not possible. You will have to download the full archive that is not completely possible. Since the service provided by Google is new, they have to fix this issue in the mere future so that user will able to download the high resolution video.

Hope so you have a clear idea to download Youtube videos in a legal manner.