import posts

Filed under: Utilities, E-mail, Web services

Gmail rolls out mail and contact import for all users

by Jay Hathaway Aug 20th 2009

For a while now, new Gmail users have been able to import messages and contacts from email accounts on other services like Yahoo or Hotmail. If you had an older Gmail account, though, you were left out in the cold with no import tool. Now the Gmail team is solving that problem by making importing available to everyone.

You can find the option to import in your Gmail settings, under "Accounts and Import." One caveat: Google says it can take up to a week to import all the mail from your old account. If you're worried about people still using your old address, you can have it forward to Gmail for 30 days. After that, you should be fully ready to ditch your old account and enjoy your shiny new gmail.

Tags: email, gmail, import, pop3

Filed under: E-mail, Productivity, Google

Importing your email and contacts to Gmail is now much simpler

by Jay Hathaway May 14th 2009

It's pretty simple to set up your Gmail to forward to Yahoo!, Hotmail or whatever other email account you might have, but not all of your other email accounts have a way to export contacts and messages to Gmail. The Gmail team has taken matters into its own hands and added new import settings that make it easy to switch to Gmail.

Now you can bring your contacts and mail from Yahoo!, Hotmail, MSN, AOL and a bunch of others over to Gmail in a few steps, and have new mail from those accounts forwarded to Gmail for the next 30 days. That gives you time to let everyone know what your new address is. You can also label all of the imported mail, so you know which mail is coming from which account.

Tags: contacts, email, gmail, google, import

Filed under: Internet, Photo, E-mail, Web services, web 2.0

2Pad imports pictures from your webmail to share or print

by Lee Mathews Jan 23rd 2009

2Pad is a new and interesting photo importing service. The process is compatible with GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and AOL Mail, Mobile Me, and any mail server with IMAP support.

Provide your credentials, and 2pad will begin culling your stored messages for picture and video attachments. You'll receive an email notification when the process starts and again when it's complete. Files 2pad finds will automatically get sorted - by GMail labels, in my case. It also has a built-in slideshow feature, duplicate file remover, and several other handy features.

Like any decent photo gallery app, 2pad allows you to easily manage albums, organize and share your photos, and even create Flash photobooks to share online or order in print.

They do offer their assurance that your password is fully encrypted, and you'll be logged in via an SSL connection. If you still have qualms about providing your mail account credentials, 2pad is probably not for you.

Tags: email, import, photos, slideshow

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

All in one driver solution with DriverMax

by Nancy Messieh Jul 8th 2008

Need to reinstall Windows but you misplaced your driver disks? Not sure you have everything you need? DriverMax has you covered. Backing up and reinstalling your drivers couldn't be easier.

After installing DriverMax, go into Driver Operations and click on Export drivers. A list of all your installed drivers will be displayed and you can pick and choose which ones to export, or simply export the whole lot in one go. Once you've reinstalled Windows, go back into Driver Operations, click on Import drivers, and point to the folder containing your saved drivers. The import can take a while, but in comparison to manually installing each driver individually, this is a walk in the park.

DriverMax is also useful even if you don't need to perform a complete reinstall - you can use the program just to make sure that your drivers are up to date or export a list of your installed drivers as an html or text file.

DriverMax is compatible with Windows 2003, XP and Vista and you have to supply your email address in order to receive a registration code.

Tags: drivers, export, import, installing, vista, xp

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Beta, web 2.0

Organize and share your online content with SecondBrain

by Nancy Messieh Jun 24th 2008

SecondBrain is a personal aggregator that doesn't just aim to collect all your online content in one place - it helps you organize it. It's a bit del.icio.us, a bit FriendFeed and a bit Onaswarm, all rolled into one, with a new twist you're not going to find anywhere else.

You can import content from Twitter, del.icio.us, Blogger, Wordpress, Digg and StumbleUpon, and that's less than half the list. You can also get your content into SecondBrain by adding links directly to the site. With most other aggregators or social bookmarking sites, that's all you have to do. This is where SecondBrain gets interesting, because it allows you to organize your content into collections and share it with your people who follow your updates. SecondBrain's latest feature gives all users 1GB free storage.

It's still lacking certain features, the most significant one being the inability to export your links, but we've been told that's in the works.

SecondBrain appeals to that obsessive compulsive need to keep all your online content neatly tagged and filed away. And what better way to do this than with a service that allows you to share it with other like-minded people?

Tags: aggregator, bookmarking, import, lifestream, organization, secondbrain, social, socialbookmarking, storage

Filed under: Business, Design, Internet, E-mail, Productivity, Web services, Yahoo!

MyYahoo updates with POP Mail and Gmail modules

by Chris Gilmer Jun 14th 2007

my yahooo updates pop modules with gmail access

If you are a big fan of custom start pages like the new MyYahoo, and a user of a POP mail account, you might get excited about a new feature Yahoo has added.

In iGoogle, you can only pull in your Gmail account, well, Yahoo thought hey, why not, let's make it so that any mail account can get imported into our customers start pages in the new MyYahoo. So they came out with the POP Mail module that launched yesterday; Pull in mail from any mail account, Yahoo or not, as long as it supports POP.

Yahoo also added in a Gmail module, because hey why not allow Google's Gmail users the ability to pull in their mail. If you want to get hooked up with the new My Yahoo beta that serves this content, sign up for an upgrade if you haven't already, and you'll be on your way. The page is clean and as easy to use at Netvibes. However, even though I enjoyed having the Gmail/POP modules preview my emails, when emails are clicked out to read more, you will have to sign into your email account. A little hassle, but that could be easily forgotten about. Yahoo is on their way to building a serious contender here, and it's definitely one you might want to consider. Netvibes is still a leader in this space, and is for sure a location that Yahoo and other "start pages" want to study when finding out what works, especially when it comes to a clean and uncluttered space. In other words, if My Yahoo got rid of that giant ad, and tightened up the top of the page so that we could fit in more content, it might get a little higher on the list.

MyYahoo has also updated their Scoreboard, Weather and Shopping modules.

Tags: gmail, import, mail, my yahoo, MyYahoo, netvibes, pop, start, web 2, Web2, yahoo

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Social Software

Jaiku - feature-packed online presence service

by David Chartier Apr 7th 2007

If Twitter and all its buzz in the web community can be considered its own growing world of sorts, then Leo Laporte - one of the service's foremost users according to Twitterholic - just sent ripples through its oceans by announcing his decision to move to Jaiku, a similar service that seems to have longer legs and quite a few more features. Since this was the first we've heard about Jaiku, we couldn't resist swinging by to sign up for an account to see what this micro-blogging, über-status message service has to offer.

In a nutshell: a lot. For starters, Jaiku acts as more of an 'online presence,' allowing you to do things like import RSS feeds from any of your other web properties (including photo feeds from the likes of Flickr) in addition to its fundamental feature of allowing you to post 140-character, SMS-friendly updates of what you're thinking or doing. Jaiku also has refreshing bits of genius sprinkled everywhere, such as the ability to group update notifications via email instead of sending single notices every time any contact posts something. On the downside, however, Jaiku doesn't seem to have nearly as much of a 3rd party following. It has no API (yet), so we're having a hard time finding Jaiku equivalents for TriQQr and the Iconfactory's spectacular Twitterrific client, let alone all the widgets, plugins and mashups which Twitter has quickly grown a reputation for.

Still, Jaiku offers plent of micro-blogging goodness, so give it a spin if Twitter simply isn't offering enough meat to sink your free time into.

Tags: feeds, groovr, import, jaiku, micro blogging, micro-blogging, MicroBlogging, rss, status, twitter

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Web services, Social Software

Tumblr introduces feed importing

by David Chartier Mar 3rd 2007

We're becoming big fans of Tumblr here at DLS headquarters, and the 'blogging scrapbook' service just introduced a new feed importing feature that makes it an even more appealing tool. A new option in the settings area allows users to add multiple feeds from their other blogs, with the ability to aggregate your other content as regular posts, photos (say, from a Flickr feed) or mere referential links. Combine this feature with Tumblr's option to publish under a custom domain name, and you have one powerful über-blogging service that could even trump Yahoo!'s Pipes in terms of making it easy to aggregate yourself on the web. This way, you get a live HTTP page, as well as an RSS feed, of everything you're publishing.

Setup is dead-simple, and feed aggregation kicks into gear almost immediately. While there is certainly the potential here for this to be abused (as in Tumblr users aggregating and re-publishing content they don't have the rights to), we aren't too worried about it. All in all, this looks like a great new feature to one of the more unique publishing services to arise out of this whole blogging movement.

Tags: aggregating, feed, feeds, import, importing, rss, tumblr

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