How to Transfer Mails from one Email Account to another for Free

There can be several reasons why you may want to switch email service providers.

Reason #1. Your existing email address gets too much spam so you plan to dump the old account and switch to a new email address (a form of email bankruptcy).

Reason #2. You are leaving your existing job for higher studies and need to transfer all personal emails from the Microsoft Exchange server to your new university email account.

Reason #3. Your ISP's email service isn't reliable and you therefore plan to move to a free web based email service like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc.

Reason #4. You think the new email service from XYZ Inc. offers more features than your existing mail provider and hence want to make the move.

Moving Emails from One Account to Another

This illustration will help you visualize how to transfer email messages across the three most popular web email services. The transfer will happen online and you just need to specify the credentials (user name & password) of your old email account (from where you want to move message out) and your new email address (where you want to move messages in).

Moving to Windows Live Hotmail

Windows Live Hotmail is integrated with TrueSwitch so you can easily transfer emails from Yahoo Mail, AOL, Gmail, Live.com, .Mac, etc. to your shiny new Hotmail address. The same service may also be used for copying old email from an existing Hotmail account to a new Hotmail address.

Moving to Yahoo Mail

Like Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail too provides integration with TrueSwitch so you can easy copy mails from Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Juno, Rocket Mail, etc. into your Yahoo! account. With TrueSwitch, you can also copy mails from one Yahoo! inbox to another without upgrading to Yahoo! Mail Plus.

Moving to Gmail / Google Apps

Gmail (or Google Apps for Email) has a built-in Mail Fetcher feature that lets you download email messages from 5 different email accounts that support POP access. You may therefore use this feature to move your old Hotmail or AOL messages into Gmail as both these service provide free POP3 access.

The migration from Yahoo! Mail to Gmail is slightly tricky but possible. Keep reading.

Trick: Move emails from Yahoo Mail to Gmail or Outlook without POP

The free account of Yahoo Mail doesn't provide IMAP or POP3 access so you can't move these emails into Gmail or a desktop client like Microsoft Outlook.

The Yahoo! Mail Plus upgrade will add POP3 access to you account at $20 per year but if you want to save some money, here's an alternate but simple trick:

1. Create a new account at Windows Live Hotmail and fetch all your Yahoo! mails into this account using the free TrueSwitch Service.

2. Now that your mails are inside Hotmail, you can setup POP3 configuration to fetch those Yahoo messages into Gmail via Hotmail.

Migrating Emails Away from your ISP Account

TrueSwitch mentioned above supports all popular ISPs including Comcast, Verizon, CableVision, AT&T, etc. but if your ISP is not in the list and you don't have the time to configure your email client for POP3 or IMAP access, check out Yippie Move.

It's a online email transfer service similar to TrueSwitch but supports an even larger number of email service providers including the .edu addresses of certain colleges and universities in US. With YippieMove, you can choose folders (or labels in Gmail) that you want to copy to the new location without having to move the entire mailbox. The service is quick and easy but costs around $15 per email account.

Copying emails from Microsoft Exchange / Outlook

Every organization has a different policy with respect to corporate email so check with the administration if your Exchange service offers POP3 or IMAP access - if yes, you can easily transfer messages into any of the free web mail accounts directly as listed above. Also see these guides:

• Export Outlook email to your Gmail Account
• Copy Outlook Mail to Google Apps
• Transfer Mail to Hotmail via Outlook Connector

Email Transfer Complete? The Next Step

Now that all your message have moved to your new email address, you can set up a vacation responder in your old email account to auto-inform contacts about your new email address. Also check this guide on how to manage multiple email addresses.

Related tip: Get Read Receipts For Web Email

An SEO Checklist for your Website

Adam Lasnik, along with members of the Search Quality team at Google, picked up a couple of audience websites and reviewed them live to provide feedback that will help these sites become more accessible and ultimately improve visibility in search engines.

Following are the key areas of a website that were examined during the Site Clinic for potential issue and you too can follow this simple checklist to improve upon your own site or blog.

1. If there are pull-down menus on your website, they should be accessible even without JavaScript - this is all the more important because a lot of mobile phone browsers either don't support JavaScript and have that disabled so save on data costs.

2. The contact information on your website should be available in plain text and always provide a link from the home page.

3. Make sure a robots.txt file exists on the root directory.

4. The logo image of your site should have proper ALT text - good for graphic accessibility as well as search.

5. Always check for URL canonicalization else you may splitting your PageRank across different pages and this may also lead to tracking issues in Google Analytics. Here's how to check for canonicalization:

5a. Type your domain with and without www and both links should point to the same URL. So http://labnol.org and http://www.labnol.org will both redirect to http://www.labnol.org/

5b. If you have index.html, index.html and index.php pages on the server, they too should redirect to your preferred domain.

6. Run a query like site:abc.com Viagra to make sure that hackers have not inserted spam links in your content.

7. Always have different feeds for different topics. So if you have a blog, you can have individual feeds for all the categories.

8. Comment moderation in blogs is very essential because if too many comments on a site end up linking to bad neighborhoods, Google may have problems with your site.

9. Google (probably) doesn't use META description tags for determining organic ranks but it does read this information to know what a page is all about.

10. Adam recommended the following TITLE structure - "Page Title - Category - Site Name"

11. Use the site: and intitle: operator in Google to determine that all web pages on your site have your company name. This is because when people bookmark your pages in the browser or social sites, the title of your site will also be added to the bookmark.

12. Don't repeat keywords and synonyms in your content.

13. The URL structure doesn't matter from the perspective of search but clean URLs can give users a clue about the target landing page and hence may get more clicks in search results.

14. If doesn't matter if have categories or directory names in URLs - just make sure that you follow a consistent URL structure across the website.

15. Don't use the same images across multiple pages of your site. You should consider including targeted pictures that are very relevant to the content of the page where you are embedding them.

16. Use the Enhance 404 Widget in Google Webmaster Tools to embed a search box on your 404 pages.

17. Don't do a soft 404 as it might penalize your site in Google.

You can easily check this by observing the HTTP headers. Install Firebug in Firefox, type a URL that points to some non-existent page of your site (e.g. labnol.org/abc.html) and see the response code - it should always say 404 Not Found and not 200 OK or something similar.

18. Always block pages (via robots.txt) from Google that contain search results as users don't want to see another search page in Google search results and this may even invite a penalty.

19. Good links are like votes. They are given consciously.

Web 3.0 Concepts Explained in Plain English (Presentations)

This slide neatly sums up the main differences between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.

Web 1.0 - That Geocities & Hotmail era was all about read-only content and static HTML websites. People preferred navigating the web through link directories of Yahoo! and dmoz.

Web 2.0 - This is about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in the Web 2.0 era.

Web 3.0 - This will be about semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization (e.g. iGoogle), intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.

If that sounds confusing, check out some of these excellent presentations that help you understand Web 3.0 in simple English. Each takes a different approach to explain Web 3.0 and the last presentation uses an example of a "postage stamp" to explain the "semantic web".

FOR MORE INFORMATION CLICK HERE

Edit Google Documents Directly in Microsoft Office & Save Your Changes Online

Oudi Antebi, a former marketing manager at Microsoft, has developed an awesome plug-in that turns your copy of Microsoft Office into an offline Google Docs editor. You can save your Office documents directly to Google Docs or directly open your online documents in Microsoft Office programs for reading and writing.

Here's a quick tour on how you can integrate Google Docs with Microsoft Office via Offisync.

Step 1: The plugin adds a new toolbar to your Microsoft Office suite of applications (both Office 2003 & Office 2007 are supported). You can then log-in to either Google Docs or your Google Apps Account or both.

Step 2: Once logged-in, you can browse through the list of your existing Google Docs documents from within Microsoft Office as if you were browsing files stored on the local file system.

The plugin implements some sort of a filter so you will only see .doc files inside Word, .xls inside Excel and ppt presentations inside PowerPoint. If you have too may documents in the root folder of Google Docs, you can use the built-in search function to limit that document list to a small set.

Step 3: Now click the document name in Google Docs to open that file in the corresponding Microsoft Office application. A limitation is that you can't download multiple documents from Google Docs in one go.

Step 4: If you are editing an existing Google Docs document in Office or need to upload a new document from Microsoft Office to your Google Docs account, simply hit the "Save" button and the modified copy of the document will be saved to your online Google account.

Another advantage is that you can share Google Docs documents with multiple people right from Microsoft Office. Just specify the email addresses of your contacts along with permissions (read-only or read-write).

It can't get easier than this. And since Google Docs now supports the new Open XML format, you can also save Office 2007 format files (pptx, docs, xlsx) via the same plugin.

Office Live Workspaces will also be integrated with Microsoft Office 2010 but until that is released, this plugin is a great choice. Also check this detailed Google Docs Guide for more tips and tricks.

Related: Sync Google Docs with Microsoft Office

Know What People Are Saying about a Web Page

If you want to know what people are currently saying about any web page on the Internet, you can either copy-paste the link (URL) of that page in a blog search engine like Technorati or, if you need something more instant, try any of the following bookmarklets.

These bookmarklets will help you know which other sites are linking to the web page that you're viewing and the best part is that you don't have leave the page that you're on.

See what others are saying about a web page

ConvoTrack This! - This bookmarklet will pull posts from Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed,  Reddit, Hacker News and any other blog that mentions the article and the reaction will load it in neat sidebar.

Convotrack provides a permalink to every URL (see example)  but if you don't want to install bookmarklets, simply prepend "http://convotrack.com/" to any web page URL and the conversations will still appear in the sidebar (see example).

Bit.ly This! While bit.ly is a URL shortening service, their sidebar bookmarklet can do much more that shorten lengthy links.

Bit.ly will show you conversations from Twitter, FriendFeed and blog comments that reference the page you're currently on. You can also share the short link of that page page through Twitter, Facebook or email from the Sidebar itself.

TBuzz This! Unlike the previous bookmarklets that track reactions from multiple sources, TBuzz (short for Twitter Buzz) is limited to tracking mentions on Twitter only but the advantage here is that it TBuzz doubles as a Twitter client as well.

 

TBuzz uses the OAuth protocol to log into Twitter so you don't have to share your password anywhere.

Microsoft is Getting Things Right This Time

Geeks and some part of the tech world consider it cool to hate everything that comes out of the Microsoft campus. Let me share a few instances.

Microsoft develops Vista and the vocal crowd immediately dubs it a failed product although a majority of these people may have never used the software. Microsoft releases a new "I'm PC" ad campaign and that provides some more fodder to *nix nerds because the ad agency, who Microsoft hired to produce these ads, probably made them on a Mac. Microsoft adds instant messaging in Hotmail and blog headlines scream to suggest that Microsoft is doing this "ages after Google". These are the same people who get excited when Gmail adds a "delete" button though that thing has been present in Outlook since birth.

Anyway, it seems that the age-old trend to criticize everything "MSFT" is on the decline and that's because there are some things that have gone right for Microsoft in the consumer technology space in recent times:

1. The Laptop Hunter Ads - Their previous campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates got slammed but the new Laptop Hunter ads are proving very effective especially among the 18-34 year olds.

Apple did a great job of putting Microsoft on the defensive. It made them look old, stodgy, complicated to use and unhip. But Microsoft has started to hit back, and younger folks are more cost-focused. Microsoft's so-called value perception has risen steadily since the campaign began in March, while Apple's has fallen - Adage

2. Windows Internet Explorer 8 - IE 8 may not be enough to stop the rise of Firefox but some of it's unique features like Web Slices, Accelerators, InPrivate browsing and visual search suggestions have received positive attention.

Overall, Internet Explorer 8 is an impressive package, and while it lacks the raw speed of Chrome, the flashiness of Safari 4, and the extendibility of Firefox, it does offer reliability and some good features, which could be enough to win it some fans. It's certainly the best version of IE in a long time - ITPro

3. Windows 7 - Technically, Windows 7 may have lot of things in common with Windows Vista but it's better, faster and requires less resources.

In general, I have found Windows 7 a pleasure to use. There are a few drawbacks, but my preliminary verdict on Windows 7 is positive. Even in its preliminary form, Windows 7 looks very promising, and could well help expunge the bad reputation of Vista. - Walt Mossberg

For decades, Microsoft's primary strategy has been to put out something mediocre, and then refine, refine, refine, no matter how long and no matter what it costs, until it succeeds. That's what's exciting about the prospect of Windows 7. It's Windows Vista — with a whole heck of a lot of refinement. - David Pogue

4. Windows Live Mesh - This allows you to synchronize file and files across multiple devices include Windows PCs, Mac computers and mobile phones. It's one of our favorite web applications and others agree as well.

Live Mesh is both exciting and useful. It erases years of doubt about Microsoft's understanding of the computing industry and how it's changing. It proves that the company is no longer interested in simply milking its past successes. Most important, for users, it provides a hopeful glimpse at a future in which heterogeneous devices and environments will no longer be islands of functionality that are hard or impossible to connect - Paul Thurrott

5. Zune HD - The only advantage of having a Zune MP3 player vis-a-vis an Apple iPod is that the former device lets you tune in to FM radio on the go. That perception is likely to change with the launch of Zune HD that features a Wi-Fi enabled touch-screen browser and support for HD radio.

The thing kind of rocks. In your hand the Zune HD has a nice, solid feel, with good heft to it and a surprisingly thin profile. The OLED screen looks absolutely stunning — even at severe viewing angles, colors were super bright, edges were crisp, and text looked beautiful. While the OS isn't finished, we didn't notice a single hiccup while jumping through menus or playing back HD video - Engadget

6. Bing - Just when 60% of Internet users were feeling satisfied with their existing search engines, Microsoft rolled out Bing to take on Google (check out some Bing Tricks). Early reviews suggest that Bing has enough potential though it may not be a "google killer" yet.

A search engine with solid relevancy plus some new features that might hook a few of them into staying - Danny Sullivan

Bing is a solid improvement over the previous search product, and it beats Google in important areas. It will help Microsoft gain share in the search business. It's surprisingly competitive with Google - Rafe Needleman

7. Office Live Workspace - Enough has been written about the demise of "desktop software" at the hands of "web applications" but the immense popularity of solutions that bridge the online and offline world prove that people still prefer to have both choices.

Microsoft will add Office web applications to their Office Live Workspace service sometime later this year and that might give them an edge over Google Docs as existing Office users are more likely to prefer Office Live because integration between Office (on the desktop) and Office (in the cloud) would be much better.

8. Windows Live Skydrive - Other than Adobe (they have Acrobat.com), Microsoft is the only "Internet giant" that offers a free file hosting service on the web with plenty of storage. 

AOL have closed their XDrive service, Yahoo! never offered any online storage closed Briefcase while rumors of Google GDrive have been circulating on the web for long but nothing concrete yet.

9. Xbox 360 & Project Natal

You have never seen anything like this before. Project Natal enables you to control and interact with Xbox 360 games through gestures, spoken commands, facial recognition and can even scan images of real objects or drawings made on paper.

Import Google Images into your Office Documents

The Office Online website is an excellent resource to find high-resolution stock photographs, clip arts, GIF animations and other graphics that you can use in your PowerPoint presentations or Word Documents for free without having to worry about any licensing issues.

You can also search through this huge collection of images using the Insert -> Clip Art command available inside all Microsoft Office programs. These images can then be downloaded to the local hard-drive so you can quickly use them in other documents as well without having to search the Office Online site again.

The Microsoft gallery of images, though huge, looks miniscule when compared with Google Images which has a few billion images in its index (warning - not all images found via Google Image Search can be used in documents due to copyright issues).

However, if you limit your search to images that are either in the Public Domain or available under some sort of Creative Commons License, Google Images (or for that matter, any image search engine including Flickr) is a good place to find photographs and clip-arts for inserting in documents.

Offisync, a free plug-in that lets you open Google Documents in Microsoft Office, can now be used for importing images from Google Image Search into your Office files as well.

The image search feature of Offisync is pretty similar to the built-in Clip Art gallery search. Upon installation, Offisync will add a new Google Search option to your Office Toolbar - you can directly search for pictures and then insert any one of them into document or presentation that you are currently working on.

The plug-in won't add any attribution related information but it shows the URL of the page containing the original image so you copy-paste that information into the document manually.

While Offisync officially works only with Google Image Search, here's a simple tip that will help you search other photo websites via Offisync as well -  use the site: operator with your search query.

For instance, if you want to limit your search to Flickr, use site:flickr.com <query> and it will only display pictures that are on Flickr. Use site:gov with the query to search for US Government photos that normally don't carry any restrictions.

Add Website Screenshots in Documents

Other than inserting images, you may also use the Offisync plug-in to add website screenshots into your documents or spreadsheets.

Use the web search feature to invoke the built-in web browser, type the full URL of the website in the Address bar (or use Google Search to find that website) and Clip. Drag the marquee around the area that you want to capture and hit the Insert button.

Related: How to Edit Clip Art in Office

Send SMS Text Messages from Your Computer to Any Mobile Phone With Outlook 2007 and Microsoft SMSOfficer

With Microsoft Outlook 2007, you can easily send (or receive) SMS text messages from computer to any mobile phone - just write a new SMS text message (like the way you compose emails in Outlook) and hit Send.

Similarly, you can also forward emails, pending tasks and calendar items from Outlook to your mobile phone via SMS.

How to send SMS text messages from computer using Outlook 2007 ?

To SMS enable your copy of Microsoft Outlook 2007, first register your mobile phone number at SMSOfficer. This new service from Microsoft supports almost all cellular operators in US and other international countries including India.

You will soon get an SMS verification code on your mobile phone, confirm and the SMS feature is activated in your Outlook without you having to download any additional software - you will need to click on a configuration link which sets the entire configuration for you. 

Forward Emails as SMS Text Messages

To compose an SMS message in Outlook, select New -> Text Message.  Outlook is automatically set up to use the standard text message limit of 160 characters. If your message exceeds the 160 character limit, the extra characters are truncated and delivered as a separate text message.

There are no registration charges and you also get 10 SMS credits for free at the time of joining SMS Officer. Once you exhaust the free limit, you need to pay for using the Outlook SMS service - payment can be made via PayPal.

When the other person replies to your SMS message, it will arrive in your mobile phone. Am not sure if you can use Outlook 2007 to send bulk SMS messages - i.e., one SMS message addressed to multiple recipeints.

Resources: Microsoft SMS Officer, Microsoft Training, Ellen Adams