Tag Archives: Gmail

Undo Send: a Gift to Email and the Workplace

The Internet, email and mobile devices are the most essential connectors in today’s workplace.   Between meeting alerts, necessary attachments, and up-to-date correspondence, most of us depend heavily on email in our work-a-day world.

And most of us also have sent embarrassing or regrettable emails: whether in the heat of the moment, when tired, or with an inadvertent ‘Reply All’ – or even, in some cases, hitting send to the wrong person entirely.

These days, when we’re all on tablets and smartphones we’re even more apt to make a mistake with our emails, when writing on the go or “trying” to multitask…and the email autocorrect kicks in. You probably have your own favorite funny and cringing email mistakes due to the ‘helpful’ autocorrect feature in email.

Humor aside, misplaced or poorly worded emails are a major issue for the workplace. One study by an enterprise email provider in 2013, found that 64% of people blamed unintended email for causing anger or confusion in the workplace; 43% found that this communication tool also was the most likely (above phones, IM, and text, for example) to cause resentment between senders and receivers.

Just this past month, Google officially launched its “Undo Send” feature for users of its Gmail accounts. The delete-that-email feature had been available for the past year in beta, housed in its Google Labs section.

If you tried Undo Send via Gmail Labs, your Undo Send setting now will be on by default.

Otherwise, you will find that you can easily enable the Undo Send feature in your Gmail settings. You can even set your system to have up to thirty seconds to review your message before you send.  For details, go here.

For many years, users of Microsoft Exchange Server-based email systems have had the opportunity to recall and replace their emails. But most home and personal email users, and many small business accounts do not use Microsoft Exchange. And, in order, to recall your message, the recipient of the e-mail message that you want to recall also must be using an Exchange account. You can’t recall a message sent to an outside email system, such as someone’s POP3 e-mail account.

There are an estimated 900 million Gmail users, and almost 25% say they use the service during work hours. Some estimates place the number of mid-sized business users of Gmail at 60%. You can do the math and see that the new Undo Send feature of Gmail will be a valuable tool to the workplace.

Unsend? I’m all for it!  But, of course, we should all still review our emails before we hit send…

Hackers-For-Hire: It’s This Cheap to Hack Your Account

That’s only partly true. Business Insider released an interesting list that tells you how much it costs to get different accounts hacked. According to the page hacking a generic website is quite expensive when compared to the other options: You’ll have to pay as much as $2000 to get it done. Getting Facebook account access is a lot cheaper with only $350 and the one for Gmail would only cost you $90. One popular hacker apparently even offers to boost Yelp reviews!

Let’s face it. If you know the right search terms you’ll be able to find almost everything. “While it’s well-known that the dark web offers black market marketplaces for things like drugs and firearms, so too are there places where hackers offer up their skills for a fee. These hackers-for-hire offer a wide-ranging menu of services, many of which are likely not legal, “ writes Business Insider, and one of the pages offering some of the services reads: “Hiring a hacker shouldn’t be a difficult process, we believe that finding a trustworthy professional hacker for hire should be a worry free and painless experience.”

Hacking as something for the mass market? Of course – hackers-for-hire would come in handy if you really need to break into your own accounts; but how often does that really happen? While the above site states in their Terms of Use that “you agree to act responsibly in a manner demonstrating the exercise of good judgment. For example and without limitation, you agree not to: violate any applicable law or regulation, infringe the rights of any third party, including, without limitation, intellectual property, privacy, publicity or contractual rights, etc.” one can only wonder how legitimate the requests made are in the end.

If there is one thing we can take from all of this, it’s that account safety should be takes more serious than ever.

The post Hackers-For-Hire: It’s This Cheap to Hack Your Account appeared first on Avira Blog.

Google Releases Password Alert Extension for Chrome

Google is rolling out a new extension for Chrome that will monitor users’ logins and warn them if they enter a Google password on a non-Google page, a move designed to help protect users against phishing attacks. The new extension, called Password Alert, works for both consumer accounts and Google Apps for Work accounts. Company […]