Here’s another great service I need to add to the ever-growing list of disposable e-mail address services, an it’s called Mail Filter. The service comes with all the features we’ve come to expect from such services including the ability to create fake e-mail addresses, access the account from anywhere, and RSS feeds for your inbox, but also offers some great features not available in all services including the ability to filter your real inbox through its servers, customizing the sensitivity levels of your filters, adding custom mail filters, and sending auto-replies while you’re on vacation. The service is free for up to 20MB of messages, with more filtering capacity coming at a cost (starting at around $5 USD).

One of the big no-no’s if you run a blog or website is posting your e-mail address is plain English (err…any language) right on the site. There are different ways to get around this; for example, we hide our e-mail address by encoding it into a contact form. Others may use image banners of their e-mail address so spam spiders can’t catalog them. Yet another way would be to use a site like SpamFreeze.

I regularly get e-mails from readers asking for ways to send large files via e-mail without having to break it up into little pieces, and I usually have a few recommendations, but today I found MailBigFile which is one of those services which really requires no explanation. Look at the name, and you’ll easily be able to tell what it does. MailBigFile requires no registration (unlike most similar services) and still lets you send files up to 1GB in size. I haven’t seen any limitations yet on what file types can be sent which is kind of a good thing (for normal folks at least). As a big plus, all files are scanned for viruses so you never have to worry about them when using the services, and best of all, you’ll get a nice little progress bar window when you send a file so you’ll know exactly how long it will take to send a particular file. MailBigFile is totally free, and definitely tops the list in services of its kind.

There are many different services available nowadays which help you keep track of news items on RSS feeds through your e-mail account (for those of you who still refuse to use an RSS aggregator). Even here at TipMonkies we use Blogarithm if you’d like news items in your inbox. If you’re already using Bloglines as your aggregator of choice, as I am, you might be happy to know that you can now subscribe to mailing lists that don’t provide RSS feeds directly from your account Bloglines account by creating a special e-mail account with the service. You can find the details over at the Manage E-mail page on Bloglines.

More and more, people are become a little overwhelmed by the size of their inboxes. Even just a year or two ago, an inbox could only hold a couple of megs of messages, but since the introduction of GMail, more and more services are offering gigs (or even terabytes!) of storage space for e-mail, which isn’t necessarily good. If you’re looking for a nice (and currently free) tool to help you organize your e-mail, then check out SpeedFiler.

In case you ever doubted it, Google is constantly working on improving their services, and today, they’ve released a couple of pretty cool new features to GMail.
First up is contact groups, which has been requested by probably nearly every GMail user, and like the name implies, contact groups let you put quick and easily e-mail groups of people. Next up is the new vacation auto-responder so anyone who e-mails you while you’re taking some time off will be notified automatically. Finally is the new GMail Mobile which I’ve been waiting for since the inception of the service and lets you access your GMail account from any mobile phone with web access. Go Google go!

We’ve discussed a few methods of using a GMail account for online file storage before, and like before I will warn you that this usage of the service goes against the Terms of Service (TOS) and Google may remove your account if you use it. Regardless, I came upon an interesting service called G2G which lets you upload files into your GMail account through its fairly clean interface. Unlike other similar services like XMail Hard Drive, by using G2G, your files are not kept private. This is because G2G is intended as a P2P application of sorts, letting you share your files with friends and family easily. Because any stranger can look at your files, they recommend that you create a second GMail account simply for the purpose of using it with G2G (and I’d say that’s a good idea, considering the TOS). Because it uses GMail’s servers, the service is pretty fast, but I wouldn’t count on it being up too long because of it.

I originally learned about Viamatic from their Foxspose extension, but became so in love with the other extensions offered that I figured I’d write about all of them. First up, is the aforementioned Foxspose, which is basically a clone of the Expose functionality of Mac OS X for Firefox and gives users preview thumbnails of all open tabs. You can then select the approproate tab by simply clicking on the thumbnail.

I used GMail for quite some time, and still do as my second e-mail account (Goowy being my primary nowadays), and never really noticed that it did not have virus checking, but as of today, Google has added virus checking capabilities to its popular e-mail service! There’s no mention on whether they’re using third party software to do it or if it’s proprietary software (Google Antivirus coming soon?), but the antivirus will not only for viruses in your inbox, but also destroy any viruses which may make it into your sent messages as well. Great news from a great company for sure, and you can read full details at the GMail Help Center.

If a virus is found in an attachment you’ve received, our system will attempt to remove it, or clean the file, so you can still access the information it contains. If the virus can’t be removed from the file, you won’t be able to download it.