How to Encrypt your Gmail Messages with Google Docs

 

Lately there has been a lot of chatter about email tracking and how government agencies are snooping on email conversations. If you are looking for ways to keep your email private and would not like anyone else to read your confidential Gmail messages (except for the recipient), you should consider encrypting your email before hitting the send button.

There are a couple of browser extensions that help you encrypt Gmail but here we discuss a new and more simple Google Docs based encryption method that works across all browsers and requires no add-ons or apps. You secure your message with a strong password and the recipient will have to enter the same password in order to decrypt your message.

For the technically oriented, our Google Docs based solution encrypts (and decrypts) your email messages using the industry-standard AES algorithm which is implemented in Google Apps Script using SJCL, a JavaScript library for cryptography developed at Stanford.

How to Encrypt Gmail Messages
Sender’s Computer – Encrypt the message before sending
 

1)  Open Gmail and compose a new email message. Put the recipient’s email address in the “To” field, add a subject (this won’t be encrypted) and put your message in the email body. DO NOT hit the send button, let the message stay in your Gmail drafts folder.

2) Click here to make a copy of the “Encrypt Gmail” sheet in your Google Drive. Choose Gmail->Initialize and allow the sheet to access your Gmail account.
 

3)  Pick your Gmail draft from the drop-down, enter a password and hit “Send Mail.”

The Google Sheet will now encrypt your email message using AES and it gets delivered to the recipient via your Gmail account. Let’s now switch to the recipient’s machine and see how they can decrypt the message.
Recipient’s Computer – Decrypt the encrypted Gmail Message

1) Open the encrypted Gmail message that just landed in your mailbox, select the body of the email and copy it to your clipboard.
2) Go to Decrypt Gmail, enter the secret password (that the sender shared with you over a phone call) and paste the encrypted email message. Hit the “Decrypt” button to see the original message.

Encrypting email with Google Docs is easy and the other advantage is that recipients can decrypt the encrypted message using any browser without requiring apps or browser add-ons.


One more thing. When you write a draft message inside Gmail, it is automatically stored on Google’s servers. If you would like to keep Google out of the loop, you can write the message outside Gmail (say inside Notepad) and encrypt it offline before sending the message via Gmail.

You can also use these encrypt and decrypt tools to send confidential messages on other channels like Facebook, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, etc. These tools encrypt & decrypt text inside your browser and none of your data ever leaves the local computer. ↓

How To Get Extra Dropbox Space For Free

As we have seen Dropbox is a free service that gives you 2 GB of free cloud storage space to store your important data online and sync it with all your devices having Dropbox installed, be it a PC, Laptop, Tablet or a Smartphone. Dropbox also allows you to share files and folders with friends. But 2 GB seems to exhaust very fast once you start adding files to your Dropbox account. But there are many ways you could increase your Dropbox storage and that too without spending any extra penny.

How To Get Extra Dropbox Space For Free :

1. By Referring Others

Dropbox referrals earn free Dropbox space1The more people you bring to Dropbox, the more free space you get. For every single person who joins and installs the Dropbox application with your referral link, you will both be given 500 MB for free. You will get this free space until you have 16 GB of free space from referrals. This means you will have a total of 18 GB (16 GB from referrals + 2 GB initial free storage) cloud storage for whole life at absolutely no cost.

TIP You can create as many accounts as you want with any email service. Now make Dropbox accounts with these IDs using the referral link from your primary ID (in which you want the free space to be added).

Link : Refer your friends

2. Dropbox Space Race

Dropbox space race1Dropbox is giving away extra free space to students by making their classmates use Dropbox. The free space is directly proportional to the number of students of your school using Dropbox. Not only you, but all the students in your school gets the extra free space. You will get 3 GB initially plus the space your School earns. The free space will be with you for the next two years. Dropbox requires a certain number of people from your school to allot you the free space. So run the race and invite as many people as you can from your school.

Link : Run the space race

3. Connecting Social Media accounts

Dropbox provides 500 MB of free space just for connecting your social media accounts. If you have an account on Facebook and Twitter, then you just need to authenticate them with Dropbox and you will instantly receive 125 MB for each connected account. Not just this, you are awarded 125 MB just for following Dropbox on Twitter, and telling them why you love Dropbox earns you additional 125 MB. In total you can have another 500 MB for free.

Link : Connecting Social Media accounts

4. Get Started Guide :

Dropbox gives you a set of 7 easy steps which when completed gives you 250MB of space. The steps are quite simple and easy, some of which are taking the Dropbox tour, installing Dropbox on any of your device, installing Dropbox on your mobile device and many others. You would have completed most of the steps already and completing others won’t take enough time.

dropbox earn space using get started1

Link : Get Started With Dropbox

5. Camera Upload Feature

Dropbox gives 3 GB of free storage for uploading your camera photos directly from your camera, tablets or your mobile devices to Dropbox. Once you upload your first photo you straight away get 500MB of free space, and the leftover is earned gradually when you consume more and more space using the camera upload feature. The Android and the iOS app and the desktop and the Mac applications of Dropbox comes inbuilt with the Camera Upload feature.

Link : How to set up camera upload

6. Using Dropbox App On Mobile Devices

Most of the big mobile making companies like HTC, Samsung, and many others are giving a lot of free space if you install Dropbox on your mobile or tablet. I got 50 GB of free space when I used my email with the Dropbox app on my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 2. Each of which gave me a 50 GB of free space for the next two years. One of my friend got 25 GB of space using his HTC phone with Dropbox.

7. Watch for Dropbox Events

Dropbox comes up with some nice ways to earn extra free space every now and then. Last time they had a Dropquest called “magical scavenger hunt”. See this for the results. You can participate in these quests and earn free space for yourself. All you need to do is play some games and do some treasure hunting. That’s all and you become a contender to win up to 100 GB of free space.

Link : 2012′s Quest Results

8. Leave Shared Folders

If you ever joined a shared folder and you used it to share or receive files, but you don’t use it now, then you must leave it. These shared folders might be eating much of your Dropbox’s storage space.

VERDICT

Using all the tips and tricks above, I have 61.38 GB of free storage space in my Dropbox account. Dropbox is an ultimate solution for all your cloud storage needs and as we have seen, having a lot of free space in your Dropbox account is not a very difficult task to accomplish. So start stealing free space from Dropbox icon smile

How to Edit PDF Files without Adobe Acrobat

The PDF file format was originally created by Adobe in the early ’90s and there are now over 700+ million PDF documents on the Internet according to Google (search for filetype:pdf).
There are several reasons why the PDF file format is so popular for exchanging all sorts of documents including presentations, CAD Drawings, invoices and even legal forms.

• PDF files are generally more compact (smaller in size) than the source document and they preserve the original formatting.
• Unlike Word and other popular document formats, the content of a PDF file cannot be modified easily. You can also prevent other users from printing or copying text from PDF documents.
• You can open a PDF file on any computer or mobile device with free software like Adobe Acrobat Reader. Google Chrome can read PDFs without requiring plugins and it can create PDFs.

Edit PDF Files using Free Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat

While PDF Files are “read only” by default, there are ways by which you can edit certain elements* of a PDF document for free without requiring the source files or any of the commercial PDF editing tools like Adobe Acrobat.
We will primarily focus on tools that let you alter the actual contents of a PDF file>. If you are looking to manipulate the PDF file structure itself like rearranging pages or merging multiple PDFs into one

An Online PDF Editor for Basic Tasks

Sometimes you need to make minor changes to a PDF file. For instance, you may want to hide your personal phone number from a PDF file before uploading it online or may want to annotate a page with notes and freehand drawings.
You can perform such edits in a PDF easily with PDFEscape.com, an online PDF editor that is free and also lets you edit password-protected PDF documents in the browser.
With PDF Escape, you can hide* parts of a PDF file using the whiteout tool or add annotations with the help of custom shapes, arrows, text boxes and sticky notes. You can add hyperlinks to other PDF pages / web documents.

[*] Hiding is different from redaction because here we aren’t changing the associated metadata of a PDF file but just hiding certain visible parts of a PDF file by pasting an opaque rectangle over that region so that the stuff beneath the rectangle stays invisible.

Change Metadata of PDF Files

If you would like to edit the meta-data associated* with a PDF document, check out Becy PDFMetaEdit. This is a free utility that can help you edit properties of a PDF document including the title, author name, creation data, keywords, etc.
The tool can also be used for removing PDF passwords as well as for encrypting PDF documents such that only users who know the password can read the contents of your PDF files. And since this PDF metadata plus bookmarks editor can be executed from the command line, you can use it to update information in multiple PDF files in a batch.
[*] If you planning to post your PDF files on the web, you should consider adding proper metadata to all the files as that will help improve the organic rankings of your PDF files in Google search results.

Edit the Text of a PDF File

If you want to edit the text in a PDF file but don’t have access to the source documents, your best bet is that you convert the PDF file into an editable Word document or an Excel spreadsheet depending on the contents of the PDF.
Then edit these converted PDFs in Microsoft Office (or Google Docs) and export the modified files back into PDF format using any PDF writer.
If your PDF document is mostly text, you may use the desktop version of Stanza to convert that PDF into a Word document. If the document includes images, charts, tables and other complex formatting, try the online PDF to Word converter from BCL Research or the one from NitroPDF – the former offers instant conversion while the latter service can take up to a day though its yields more accurate results.

Advanced PDF Editing (Images, text, etc.)

Now that you know the basic PDF editing tools, let’s look at another set of PDF editors that are also free but can help you do some more advanced editing like replacing images on a PDF file, adding signatures, removing blocks of text without breaking the flow of the document, etc.
First there’s PDF XChange, a free PDF viewer and editor that you also may use for typing text directly on any PDF page. PDF XChange also supports image stamps so you may use the tool for signing PDF files or for inserting images anywhere on a PDF page.
Then you have Inkscape, a free vector drawing tool (like Adobe Illustrator) that can natively import and export PDF content.

Video: How to Edit PDF Files with Inkscape

With Inkscape, you can select any object on a PDF page (including text, graphics, tables, etc.) and move them to a different location or even remove them permanently from the PDF file. You can also annotate PDF files with Inkscape or draw freehand on a page using the built-in pencil tool.
The next tool in the category of advanced PDF editors is OpenOffice Draw with the PDFImport extension. OpenOffice Draw supports inline editing so you can easily fix typos in a PDF document or make formatting related changes like replacing color, increasing or decreasing the text size, replacing the default font-family, etc.
Like Inkscape, the OpenOffice toolbox also includes support for annotations, shapes, images, tables, charts, etc. but here you have more choices and the software also looks less complex.


The OpenOffice suite is a little bulky (they don’t provide a standalone installer for Draw) but if you have the bandwidth, OpenOffice is the best tool for manipulating PDF documents when you don’t have the budget for Adobe Acrobat.