Tech N Comp

I recently discovered that you can add gadgets to your gmail account. Gadgets are added by url, and allow you to greatly customize gmail.

To add a gmail gadget, you first need to install the “Add any Gadget by URL” feature in google labs.

1. Enter Gmail
2. In the top right, click the Settings wheel
3. Click “Labs”
4. Search for “Add any gadget by url”
5. Enable the lab

Now to add gadgets, you first need to find the url of the gadget that you wish to include in gmail.  Some gadgets that I have, and find useful are listed below:

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A couple of days ago my Gmail account was hacked.  I was actually lucky though, as I caught it rather quickly.  The person who hacked my account promptly began to send out mass emails to my entire contact list.  The emails being sent out were to 5 or 6 of my contacts per email.

Luckily, I was on Gmail at the time and the first email that the hacker sent was returned with a Mail Delivery Error.  I promptly changed my password.  I checked my “Sent Mail” folder and nothing was there.  It turns out, the hacker also deleted the emails from the sent mail.  But when I looked in the Trash folder, I noticed that only about 10 emails were sent out.  So out of the 1500 or so contacts I have in gmail, only about 50 of those contacts were spammed.

Now you might be thinking to yourself, “well you probably had a weak password.  I don’t have to worry about getting hacked because I have a really strong password.”  I can assure you, my password was not weak.  It was 14 characters long with UPPERCASE letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.  It definitely wasn’t my strongest password, but it was far from weak.

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