Advanced Filtering in GMail

GMail provides filters and labels that are an effective way to organize and access the huge number of emails that we receive everyday.

Recently I came across another feature of GMail that takes filtering of email to a whole new level. Every GMail address can be suffixed with a + followed by some text. E.g. john@gmail.com can be aliased as john+family@gmail.com, john+facebook@gmail.com or john+cv@gmail.com. All of the aliased mail gets sent to the primary account (john@gmail.com). This opens up whole new possibilities for powerful filtering.

Take for example the email address you provide on your CV or at a job search website. At times when you are actively looking for a new job, these emails are highly important. During other times, you might not want your Inbox to be cluttered with job notifications. This can be easily handled using GMail email aliases. Simply provide john+cv@gmail.com (or john+123@gmail.com if you wish to be discrete) when signing up at a job search website and on your CV. Next setup a GMail filter that looks for emails sent to john+cv@gmail.com and either flags them for your attention or at other times automatically deletes them!

Email rules and filters have existed for a long time but GMail aliases take this to a whole new level. The possibilities (of email suffixes) are indeed endless!

Secure Email Attachments with TrueCrypt

Digital documents have finally come of age. We now increasingly receive our bank statements, insurance quotes and receipts as digital files such as Word or PDF. Also, there is often a need to attach these documents to an email. Securing these attachments in transit over the Internet is an immediate concern. There are a number of solutions available such as Hushmail, a secure free email provider and PGP Desktop Email, a commercial email encryption product. The solution that I discuss here is based on a free, open-source encryption software called Truecrypt.

Truecrypt makes using bullet-proof encryption really easy through the concept of virtual encrypted disks. Each disk is stored as a single encrypted file and can be mounted as a real disk. Once mounted, it can be used as a local drive on the system. Entire hard-drives or USB memory sticks can be encrypted as well. Volumes can be protected using a password or through key files. Any file on the system can be used as a key file as an alternative or in addition to using a password. The key file or sequence of key files is required to encrypt and decrypt the disk.

The concept of key files makes using Truecrypt really valuable while sending sensitive attachments over email. In addition to using a password, if the sender and the receiver agree on a common file or a sequence of files that are uniquely present on both systems such as digital photographs or video clips, the encryption can be made highly secure. Hence the encrypted attachments are useless if intercepted during transit without the key files.

Truecrypt is extremely simple to use and hence there is just no excuse for not securing confidential files on storage or in transit.