Permanence, impermanence (K2 #79)

Question of the Week 
How do I recover emails that were permanently deleted a few months ago?
— Samden, Chhukha

Answer
Dear Samden,

All three popular online email services - Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail (now called Outlook.com), and Google Gmail - allow you to recover recently-deleted messages. This is similar to the Recycled folder on Windows. Gmail keeps deleted messages in the Trash folder for about 30 days. After 30 days in the Trash folder, the message is deleted permanently (but keep reading). Hotmail and Yahoo have similar policies. To restore messages that were deleted recently, go to the Trash folder (or the Deleted folder), check the checkboxes of the messages you want to un-delete, and move (or drag) the messages back to the Inbox.

Sand mandala: nothing is permanent

If you are using Hotmail (or Outlook.com), you can ask Microsoft to recover even more messages. Go to the Deleted folder, and look for the “recover deleted messages” option at the bottom of the screen. Clicking the option will request the server to retrieve as many deleted messages as possible.

Even if you used Gmail, do not despair.Google has an online form to request email recovery in case your account was hacked. It might be worth a shot. The link is http://goo.gl/88ka7J

Since free email accounts these days come with tons of storage (Gmail has 15 GB, enough for tens of thousands of text emails), many people choose to keep all of their correspondence (in Gmail, you can hit the Archive button to move the message from the Inbox to the Archive). Archiving emails saves you the effort of thinking which conversations to delete as well as reduces the chance that a message you deleted will end up being important.

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Readers are encouraged to submit technology-related questions to boaz@thimphutech.com

Free calls from Bhutan to the U.S. and Canada (Cont'd)

A few months ago we blogged about using Gmail to make free calls from Bhutan to any phone number in the U.S. and Canada. This free offer was initially destined to be good until the end of 2010. Good news: Google recently announced that they are extending the offer throughout 2011.

Seven free online tools

ThimphuTech.com co-blogger Galit Shmueli was recently covered in Business Bhutan, sharing her favourite free online tools with readers. Here's the online version.

Four ways to share files - without getting infected

In a interesting recent PaSsu Diary post, Passang Tshering wrote about his USB flash-drive being infected by a rather nasty virus after inserting the drive into a student’s laptop. Since so many laptops and desktops in Bhutan are infected with viruses, exchanging flash-drives is extremely risky. In fact, this is the most common way by which viruses are spread.

Here are four ways which enable file exchange with a very low risk of infection. They might need a bit more work that just swapping the flash-drive, but they will save your laptop.

New phishing scheme

I just received an email that appears innocent, but is actually a tricky phishing scheme. "Phishing is a form of fraud in which a message sender attempts to trick the recipient into divulging important personal information like a password or bank account number, transferring money, or installing malicious software. Usually the sender pretends to be a representative of a legitimate organization." (Gmail's definition). The email that I received (which was able to pass through the Gmail spam filters) looks like this:

The scammers here are posing as Adobe, a credible company, well known for their Acrobat Reader software. This email is tricky for two reasons:

• It doesn't directly ask for your password or other personal information. (That will happen only after you click on the link to their website) 
• The URL mentioned in the email actually links to that exact URL (In some schemes, the URL written in the email is linked to a different URL -- placing your cursor on the link will reveal the destination URL). In other words, these scammers purchased the domain "adobe-software-2010.com". If you examine the actual sender's address, you'll see that it is "newsletter@adobe-software-2010.com". 

If you receive such an email, protect yourself by not responding or clicking on any links within it. If you are using Gmail, you can help others by reporting the email as Phishing (as shown in the picture above). I reported this one, so hopefully you will not receive it!

Free calls from Bhutan to the U.S. and Canada

You can now use Gmail - Google's free email application - to call regular phones from your computer. And calling numbers in the U.S. and Canada is free until (at least) the end of 2010. That's 4 months of free phone calls to your relatives and friends in New York or elsewhere in North America. Calling other countries is not free, but the rates are excellent (e.g., 2 cents per minute to Australia). However, this will require a credit card.

I tried this new service from Google, and it works well.

You can read all about this new feature in the official Google blog. If you don't have a Gmail account, you can get one here. It's free.

Note (1): This service is supposed to be available only to U.S. customers. However, it appears that the way Google currently checks if you're a U.S. person is by looking at your Gmail language settings. Make sure it is set to "English (US)". I previously set to "English (UK)" so I couldn't make any calls. Once I switched to "English (US)", the magic happened. You can change the language settings by clicking on "Settings" on the top right corner of your Gmail page.

Note (2): If you're using Bhutan Telecom's broadband connection (aka ADSL), the calls are not really free - you're using Internet data. According to my calculations, the new service uses up to about 1MB per minute, which at BT's rates (Nu 399 per 2.5GB) translates into approximately Nu 0.15 per minute - still much cheaper than a phone-to-phone call.