Workers' Edge

A couple of weeks ago, I described how to sync contacts between Outlook, Gmail, and your iPhone. The program missing from this contacts mega-merge was Thunderbird (download for Windows | Mac), and for good reason. Mozilla's free e-mail program is not particularly contact-friendly.

The first time I attempted to use Mozilla Thunderbird's import function to bring my Gmail contacts into the client e-mail application, I was seriously disappointed with the results. Most of the contact information was squished into a single nondescript field for each record. The few fields that did make the conversion were incomplete. The entire process was pretty worthless, overall.

Then I found the free Zindus add-on for Thunderbird. The program brings a subset of contact fields from Google and Zimbra into Mozilla's free e-mail program. For Google, the fields imported include the contact's name, primary and secondary e-mail addresses, phone numbers, IM names, company, title, and notes. (I didn't test the program with Zimbra.)

After you download and install Zindus, a "Zindus" option is added to Thunderbird's Tools menu. Clicking it opens the Zindus Configuration Settings dialog box where you're presented with a handful of contact-sync options, including a Sync Now button.

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Last February, I described losing half my iPhone contacts after an iTunes sync. Even though I tried the Filadex Web-based contact manager, I don't like the fact that the information is stored unencrypted on Web servers.

More importantly, my iPhone always has my most up-to-date telephone and address contact list, while Gmail knows more about my e-mail correspondents than the iPhone does, and Google Calendar is my primary scheduler. Just to complicate matters, I spend most of my workdays (and some weekends, unfortunately) in Outlook.

I need to export my Google Calendar and Gmail addresses to Outlook and my iPhone, and move my iPhone telephone numbers and physical addresses to Gmail and Outlook. Simple, right? Well, it turned out to be not too difficult or time-consuming, although the result was a bit messy.

Sync Google Calendar with calendars in Outlook and the iPhone
Who knew Google Calendar and Outlook could play so nice? The aptly named Google Calendar Sync does the trick with just a few clicks and a minimum of thumb-twiddling. The program works with Outlook 2003 and 2007 on XP and Vista PCs, though it doesn't support 64-bit XP, according to Google.

After you download and install the program, you enter your Google ID and password and choose one of three options: sync from and to Google Calendar and Outlook; sync from Google Calendar to Outlook; or sync from Outlook to Google Calendar. The default sync time is 120 minutes, and the minimum setting is 10 minutes; there's no mention of a maximum setting. The sync begins after you click Save.

Up-and-down arrows on the Google Calendar icon in the notification area indicate a sync in progress; hover over it to see the percent complete or the time of the last sync.

The program converted my relatively simple Google Calendar to Outlook 2007 with surprising accuracy. In fact, the two calendars appeared and acted very much alike. Keep in mind, I didn't transfer any tricky repeating appointments, invitations, or time-zone changes. But for my meager calendar needs, the sync was fast and comprehensive.

To sync your Google Calendar and Gmail contacts with an iPhone, simply use the phone to create a Google Sync account. Instructions for OS version 2.2 and 3.0 are on the Google Mobile Help site.

Unfortunately, Google Sync is limited in the fields it supports and doesn't let you exclude entries or deal with duplicates. These and other of the program's limitations are described on the Google Sync Help page.

Move your iPhone contacts to Gmail and Outlook, or vice-versa
Use iTunes to export your iPhone contacts to Outlook--and Gmail, if you choose not to go the Google Sync route described above. Plug your iPhone into your PC, choose the device in iTunes' left pane, and select the Info tab. Pick either Outlook or Google Contacts in the "Sync contacts from" drop-down menu. (Yahoo Address Book and Windows Address Book are the other options.) For Outlook, you can choose which groups to sync. For Gmail, you enter your user ID and password.

Your only sync options are to merge or replace the entries iTunes identifies as duplicates, and to choose between two entries pegged as conflicts. The resulting sync was full of double entries, but I would much rather deal with manually merging the dupes than losing the information either entry contains.

I'll probably spend another hour or so cleaning up the extra entries created by the contact sync, but that's much less time than I'd spend trying to replace the info.

A reader named Eric found himself locked out of his Vista administrator accounts:

"Somehow, my account and my son's accounts were downgraded to standard user on his new computer using Vista Home 32-bit. I cannot seem to log in to make any changes to the accounts now. It prompts me to enter a password but no password box is available to type it in. How can I log in to change my account back to administrator?"

In a post last year, I described how to enable Vista's hidden administrator account and password-protect XP's default administrator account. Of course, this tip works only if you use it before you actually need it because it requires administrator privileges.

I found another approach described by Microsoft MVP Ronnie Vernon on the Soft32 forum. Here it is in a nutshell:

• Restart your PC and press F8 repeatedly before Windows loads to open Vista's Advanced Boot Options screen.
• Use the arrow keys to select Safe Mode and press Enter.
• On the low-res Windows Welcome screen, choose the Administrator account, which by default has no password.
• click Start > Control Panel > User Accounts and either change your standard account to an administrator one or create a new administrator account.

When you restart the machine normally, you'll have access to the administrator account you just restored or created. (Note that I wasn't able to verify this tip because I'm not willing to risk losing the administrator accounts on my Vista PC just to test it.)

Gmail encrypts transmissions, not messages
Another reader named Ian contacted me about some misinformation in a post from last month entitled "Five simple PC security tips":

"In this article, you refer to 'encrypting Gmail' where you urge people to turn on the https: feature when using Gmail. Technically, while any e-mail read/written is encrypted in transit between your browser and Gmail's server, the e-mail is nevertheless still stored in the clear.

"Perhaps you could clarify the wording somewhat so people might potentially avoid interpreting your remarks so as to conclude that their stored e-mail is somehow encrypted on Gmail's servers."

Right you are, Ian, which is why you want to think twice about storing confidential information on Google's servers or any other Web servers that don't support encryption. Google is reportedly considering changing Gmail to default to encrypted sign-ins, as explained by Brian Krebs on his security blog earlier this week.

This doesn't affect your stored messages, however, nor the files you share via Google Docs & Spreadsheets, nor any of your other personal data accessible through Google free services. That's the best reason I know not to keep any sensitive information in Gmail or any other Google app.

In a future post, I'll describe secure online services. You can bet none of them will have "Google" in their name.

Last August, I described how to delay the messages you send from Microsoft Outlook. In that post, I bemoaned the lack of a similar feature in Gmail. Well, Google engineer Yuzo Fujishima comes to the rescue with a new tool called Undo Send, though unlike Outlook's send-delay feature, in Gmail, you have to act--or unact--fast.

To activate the feature, open Gmail, click Settings in the top-right corner, and choose the Labs tab. If you don't see a Labs tab, click more in the top-left menu, select even more, click the Labs link at the top right, choose Gmail Labs. Scroll to Undo Send, click Enable, and select Save Changes.

This feature isn't a miracle worker; it can pull back a message only in the first 5 seconds after you click Send. Still, many an e-mail "Oops!" comes to mind in that split second after you send it.

The Undo option appears for about 5 seconds in the "Your message has been sent" message at the top of your in-box.

If you click Undo in time, your message is yanked from the outbound queue and you see a message informing you that the send was undone.

Clearly, the Gmail Undo Send feature doesn't give you anywhere near the level of control you get when delaying sent messages in Outlook, but Gmail's version is much simpler to implement.

The Send Later extension for the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird e-mail client provides a similar function. Unfortunately, several people report problems using Send Later with the latest version 2.0.0.21 of Thunderbird. The extension appeared to work as advertised on my Vista PC, however.

To activate Send Later, press Ctrl-Shift-Enter when you've finishing composing the message. In the "Send this email later" dialog box that opens, select the time you want the message sent using the drop-down menus at the top of the window, or click one of the three preset delays: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 2 hours.

If only everything we do on a computer had a "do-over" button!

Ever since Gmail became my primary e-mail service in 2006, I've been waiting for the ability to search my voluminous message archive without a network link. My hopes jumped with the arrival in 2007 of the Google Gears plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Gears lets you store Web services data on your local PC, among other functions. Gears and Gmail are such a perfect fit, I was sure that it would be just a few short months until I was rummaging through my Gmail archives while disconnected from the Internet.

Wrong again. That's what I get for trying to outthink Google. Unfortunately, there are still only a handful of Gears-enabled Web apps (Google Calendar isn't one of them).

The wait for networkless Gmail access ended last week, when Google Labs released Offline Gmail.

After you install Gears, you'll see an Offline option under the Labs tab in Gmail's Settings. Choose the Enable button, and when you restart your browser, you'll see an "Offline 0.1" link in the top-right corner of the main Gmail window. Click this link to begin the installation. (You'll also be prompted to download and install Gears, if you don't already have it on your PC.)

After the initial sync completes, click the Offline icon to the left of the Settings button to check your online status and view your options (choose Show Actions to see all available options).

Your initial synchronization may take quite a while, especially if you retain as many old messages as I do. The fact is, I was ready for the first sync to take all day, but just an hour and 15 minutes later, my store of Gmail messages--including attachments--was ensconced on my laptop's hard drive.

The first thing that struck me post-sync was how fast my mail searches had become. Having your mail on your hard drive makes fast work of archive searches that can take several seconds when interacting with Gmail's servers.

The Google Labs folks warn that Gmail's offline capability is still experimental, so you may encounter some features that don't work as expected. Still, after using Offline Gmail for a few days, I feel like a kid on Christmas morning. Thanks, Labs guys!

I spend most of my workday Alt-Tabbing between my Gmail inbox and the Outlook account on my employer's Exchange Server. The problem is, when it comes to contacts, there isn't much overlap between the two: Only a handful of Gmail addresses are also in the Outlook contacts list, and vice-versa.

Rectifying the situation takes only a few minutes. Start by moving your Outlook contacts to Gmail. In Outlook 2003 and 2007, click File > Import and Export, select "Export to a file," click Next, choose either comma-separated value option, and click Next again. Browse to and select your Contacts folder, click Next again, choose the Browse button, pick a location for the file, give it a name with the .csv extension, click OK, and click Next once more. Verify the action and click Finish.

After the file-export finishes (it can take a while), open Gmail, click Contacts on the left, and choose Import at the top right. Click Browse and navigate to and select the file you just exported. You can create a new group for the contacts by choosing "Also add these imported contacts to" before you click Import. You'll be prompted to give the group a name.

Once the file is imported, you'll see a summary indicating the number of contacts added, merged, or ignored because they were duplicates. Click OK to return to your list of contacts.

Now turn the process around by moving your Gmail contacts to Outlook. On the Gmail Contacts page, click Export in the top right, choose to export just your contacts or your contacts and Gmail's suggested contacts, select "Outlook's CSV format (for importing into Outlook or other applications)," and click the Export button.

The file is named "contacts.csv" automatically. Select the Save File button (it's chosen by default) and click OK. The list will be saved in your Downloads folder (or whichever folder you've picked as your default). Open Outlook, click File > Import and Export > Import from another program or file > Next.

Choose the appropriate comma-separated-value option and click Next again. Click the Browse button, navigate to and select the .csv file you just created, pick one of the options regarding duplicate entries (the default is "Allow duplicates to be created"), and click Next again. Choose the destination folder (probably Contacts under Personal Folders for your account), verify the action, and click Finish.

Any addresses with unrecognizable names will be listed first with only the e-mail address, but other contacts will appear alphabetically by last name.

When I mentioned in a post last week that I forward select messages from my office Microsoft Exchange account to Gmail, several people claimed that this puts the company's data at risk.

I failed to point out that the information in the messages was not at all sensitive: no invoices, strategic plans, credit-card numbers, customer records, etc.

But what if I had needed to access private information from this account on a system other than Outlook? Assuming that no company can be trusted, how could I use Gmail without worrying about security?

One part of the problem was addressed when Gmail began supporting HTTPS connections. Well, Google claims that Gmail has always supported HTTPS, but you had to add the "s" to the URL prefix manually to access the encrypted version of the service, and log in at "https://mail.google.com," not "https://www.gmail.com." (Note that Google Calendar also supports HTTPS.)

Now Gmail lets you encrypt all your connections to the service via a simple settings change. To secure your e-mail transmissions, click Settings in the top-right corner of the main Gmail page, scroll down to "Browser connection" at the bottom of the window, select "Always use https," and click Save Changes. The next time you open your Gmail in-box, the transmissions will be encrypted.

The Gmail Help Center states that encrypting connections may slow down your page loads, but this is a small price to pay to secure your e-mail link, especially when you're computing in the great outdoors, whether using your own laptop or a public PC.

But does this truly secure your data? There are several Firefox add-ons that encrypt messages and attachments sent and received via Gmail. One of these is Gmail S/MIME by Richard Jones and Sean Leonard. Gina Trapani's Better Gmail includes encryption among many other useful Gmail enhancements.

Even these measures won't be sufficient to convince some people to trust Gmail specifically or Google generally. Nearly all of my remote connections to the office servers are made over a VPN link. When in doubt--even a little bit of doubt--encrypt.

I always think twice or even three times before I enter my e-mail address in a Web form. Even when the site gives me the option not to have any messages sent to the address (usually by unchecking the Web form's "Notify me" entry that's checked by default), I can't help but think somehow, somewhere, some snake-oil salesman is going to get hold of my address.

Now I register at such sites using a separate e-mail account whose mail I filter out of my in-box. When I have to click a link in a confirmation e-mail to complete the registration, I simply look for the message in the folder I specified previously.

Start by creating a POP or IMAP account only for Web site registrations. Most ISPs offer multiple mail accounts for free. In fact, when I last checked, I had 114 free mail accounts available with my ISP. Of course, I've also registered five different domain names with that company, each of which comes with several mail accounts.(Maybe I could sublease the ones I'm not using.)

If your ISP doesn't offer multiple e-mail accounts, sign up for a free account at a service such as Inbox.com. The company offers up to 5GB of mail storage for free and allows POP3 and SMTP access to your in-box.

Now add that account to your mail client. In Outlook 2007 and 2003, click Tools > Account Settings > New, choose "Microsoft Exchange, POP3, IMAP, or HTTP," and click Next. Add your account information on the next screen and click Next. Outlook will connect to the server automatically and send a test message.

Once the account is in place, return to the Account Settings dialog box, select the account, and click the Change Folder button at the bottom of the window. Choose one of the existing folders, click New Folder, give the folder a name, click OK twice, and then Close.

Since I forward the mail sent to my ISP accounts to my Gmail in-box, I also need to keep messages sent to the throwaway account from cluttering that in-box. To add the account to Gmail, click Settings in the top-right corner, choose Forwarding and POP/IMAP, and select either Enable POP or Enable IMAP, whichever is appropriate for your account.

Now click the Accounts tab and choose "Add another mail account" in the "Get mail from other accounts" section. Enter the e-mail address and click Next Step. Add your password, check both "Label incoming messages" (the address is the default name for the label) and "Archive incoming messages (Skip the Inbox)," and click Add Account.

After the account is confirmed, you'll be asked whether you want to make this account a custom From address. This allows you to send mail from Gmail and make it appear to originate from that account. Click Yes if this sounds like something you might want to do.

When you need to access a confirmation e-mail sent to your throwaway address, just choose the label in the list at the bottom left of the Gmail in-box and select the message in the resulting window.

I started e-mailing files to myself as a form of ad-hoc backup soon after I signed up for a Gmail account. I'm not affected by Gmail's 20MB limit on the size of individual attachments, and I'm nowhere near my storage cap of 6.6GB.

I decided to formalize the process a bit by using the Gspace extension for the Firefox browser. The add-on lets you send files from your local PC to a virtual Gmail folder and view them much like you would in Windows Explorer.

After you install the Gspace applet and restart Firefox, you find a Gspace shortcut on the browser's Tools menu. Click it to open a file-transfer "program" in a new tab. The top-left window shows your local folders and files. In the top-right window are the files in your Gspace virtual folder. Below these are two smaller panes displaying the progress of the current file transfer, and properties of the selected file (including a thumbnail of images).

Gspace's other three "modes" let you play audio files (though I couldn't get this feature to work), view image files, and download--but not upload--files to your Gmail Drive. The File Transfer windows is where you're likely to spend most of your time, however.

When you return to your Gmail inbox, you'll find one message for each file you transferred, with the file itself attached. You can unclutter your inbox by archiving the files. Create a Gmail filter using your e-mail address in the From and To fields, and "$d" in the subject field. Choose the "Skip the inbox (archive it)" option in the filter wizard.

Gspace works only with files you send via the service, not with files attached to e-mails sent to your Gmail account from anywhere else. One way to retrieve Gmail file attachments in bulk is by using the service's own search identifiers "has:attachment" and "filename:doc" (or any other file extension). You have to open the individual messages to view any information about the attachment, however.

Browser helpers such as Gspace make it easy to store your files online, but with a little bit more effort, you can get automatic encryption, scheduled backups of select folders, and 2GB of free storage with services such as IDrive, which I wrote about last month.

Monday: troubleshoot notebook-hibernation problems.