How To Undo Sent Mail In Gmail

This is a how to on undoing the sent mail in gmail. However, this method has severe limitation at the time of writing this post since we are allowed to have maximum time of 30 seconds as a cancellation period but lets hope this gmail lab feature gets integrated in gmail with longer cancellation period.

Sometimes we send an e-mail to somebody and later realize that we should not have sent that particular e-mail. Though not so helpful, the "Undo Send" feature from Gmail Labs can be useful sometimes.

By default, you will not have Undo link after you just sent the message.



Click on the icon(see screenshot below) at the top left corner of your gmail interface and then click on Settings



Click on the Labs Tab and then in the lab search box, type Undo Send.

Now select the Enable radio button and then Save changes.

By default, the cancellation period is 10 seconds(at the time of writing). To change the default time to 30 seconds, again go to settings and in general tab, you will find the Cancellation period dropdown list. Choose any value you want.

Now you can undo the just sent emails as below:




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Email Obfuscation Tricks In The Age Of Spammers

Every day thousands of spam emails are propelled to our e-mail addresses and the algorithms used by the spam bots are increasingly getting sophisticated and are able to harvest few kinds of obfuscated e-mail addresses already. While this race between spammers and web users goes on, we can still use several of the obfuscation tricks either to prevent bots from harvesting the emails or to fool bots to pick completely wrong e-mail adresses. Here, I am going to illustrate some useful obfuscation tricks I've come across over.

The Very Basics

A very basic way of obfuscating emails is by replacing the characters such as @ and . with at and dot. Following are few samples:

samar[at]techgaun[dot]com
samar (at) techgaun (dot) com

And, below are some examples that would be nearly impossible to harvest :P. Just be more creative with them and no automated spam bot/email harvester out there will be able to get you :D. However, this might possibly create some kind of DoS like scenario for many legitimate users.

<myfirstname> (at) techgaun (dot) com
<myfirstname> (at) <lastname> (dot) com

Using Image

Another method is to create a small and appropriate image that will display your e-mail address. Should be more than enough, so just create a PNG/GIF of your e-mail address.

Text Encodings

You could perform text encodings and javascript obfuscations, etc. An example of this is using ascii to unicode conversion and applying other level of obfuscations again to it.

The unicode version:

&#0115;&#0097;&#0109;&#0097;&#0114;&#0064;&#0116;&#0101;&#0099;&#0104;&#0103;&#0097;&#0117;&#0110;&#0046;&#0099;&#0111;&#0109;

will properly show as:

samar@techgaun.com

Obfuscations using CSS

Reverse Text Direction

CSS allows you to display the text in the reverse direction. For a HTML entity,

<div class="email">
moc.nuaghcet@ramas</div>

you can specify the following CSS property to use this obfuscation trick.

.email
{
     unicode-bidi: bidi-override;
     direction: rtl;
     float: left;
}

Hidden Text Within E-mail address

Another method is to put some hidden html entity between the parts of e-mail address and then set its display style as none. The spam bots while trying to extract the data from such e-mail information are subjected to get wrong information. An example is:

samar@tech<span class='display: none;'>nique</span>gaun.com

Edit: I found this link with some good examples so I thought I would rather refer you all to this webpage.


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Extract and Download Multiple Attachments At Once

I was searching for a way to extract and download multiple attachments at once and came across a thunderbird plugin that allows you to do this.

Just select the messages containing the attachments you want to extract and select 'Extract Attachments' and this extension does the rest. No more having to go through each message to extract the attachments!
Check out the settings dialog for the different options.

For downloads and further information, check addon's page.


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