TOOLS TO SECURE GMAIL DATA

By Ishant Gupta

Last month when around 40,000 people logged into their Gmail account, they found that their mails, attachments, contacts and documents had gone missing and the inbox contained only welcome mails from Gmail. To save you from such situations we bring you a few security tools.

Tools to secure Gmail data

1. Two is better than One/ Alternate account

If there is a software bug or a system crash, it becomes very difficult to salvage/retrieve the information from Gmail. In such cases it is good to have an alternate Gmail account where in you can import all your mails and contacts from your primary account. To do this- sign into your new (Alternate) Gmail account, click on the gear icon on the right and then click on the mail settings.

2. True Switch

Even though in terms of features Hotmail lags behind Gmail, but it still has around 360 million users which is more than any other Email service provider. To make Hotmail more popular among the users, it has signed a contract with True Switch which enables users to automatically switch to another email account provider. Once you create another account, all your mails and contacts are automatically transferred to the new account and the new mail address is forwarded to all your contacts. It also forwards incoming mails from your old mail address to your new one. Since True Switch is a paid service, it can make Hotmail a little expensive for you.

3. Local Email Client Backup

This is very simple to understand. You can use this feature while working on Gmail or any other email account. For this you need to start a facility called POP3 (Post Office Protocol version 3) on Gmail. This is a user friendly program which enables changing settings quite easily. The incoming server is pop.gmail.com, protocol is POP and the port is 995. You already have your Gmail username and password. This protocol allows you to retrieve your mail/messages when online and download it to the PC. You can then access these messages when offline and even edit them.

4. Gmail backup

This is a software tool which you can download for free from gmail-backup.com. To use this, IMAP service must be activated on your Gmail account. For this, first sign into your Gmail account and click on the small gear icon. Then click on the mail settings. Through forwarding and POP/IMAP you can access your mails immediately (ASAP). Gmail backup shall save your data on the hard drive.

[ Related Article:- BACKUP YOUR GMAIL ]

5. Mail Store

Mail store (mailstore.com) is another free backup service in which you can access various mail accounts through POP3 or IMAP. It is a very easy process. You just need to download the free software and go to your email credentials. Just like Gmail-backup, mail store also has an online community to solve/handle your backup problems. With Mail Store you can take a backup of all emails in a central archive, even if they are distributed across different computers, programs or mailboxes. You can reply to or forward archived emails in the normal way.

6. Backupify.com

This is gives a backup to all the online services (like Gmail, Google docs, Picasa, Twitter, Flicker, Facebook, Zoho and blogger) that you use. Once you have taken the backup, you can download it or save it anywhere you like. Last year Backupify.com provided backup to 13.6 million tweets and 71.3 million emails.

7. Gmail Keeper

You can purchase Gmail keeper for about Rs.900. This has been designed to give an easy explanation of Gmail backup tools. It provides a backup of all the folders in Gmail like inbox, sent mail, drafts etc. The Gmail keeper will save all the messages from the folders into the hard drive in a zip file. It can provide a backup of several mail accounts at the same time.