The 10 Important URLs That Every Google User Should Know

What does Google know about the places you’ve visited recently? What are your interests as determined by Google? Where does Google keep a list of every word that you’ve ever typed in the search box? Where can you get a list of Google ads that were of interest to you?

The 10 Important Google Links

Google stores everything privately and here are the 10 important links (URLs) that will unlock everything Google knows about you. They are hidden somewhere deep inside your Google Account dashboard and they may reveal interesting details about you that are otherwise only known to Google. Let’s dive in.

1. Google stores a list of usernames and passwords that you have typed in Google Chrome or Android for logging into various websites. They even have a website too where you can view all these passwords in plain text.

passwords.google.com

2. Google creates a profile of yourself based on the sites you visit, guessing your age, gender and interests and then use this data to serve you more relevant ads. Use this URL to know how Google sees you on the web.

www.google.com/settings/ads

3. You can easily export all your data out of the Google ecosystem. You can download your Google Photos, contacts, Gmail messages and even your YouTube videos. Head over the the Takeout page to grab the download links.

www.google.com/takeout

4. If you ever find your content appearing on another website, you can raise a DMCA complaint with Google against that site to get the content removed. Google has a simple wizard to help you claim content and the tool can also be used to remove websites from Google search results that are scraping your content.

support.google.com/legal

5. Your Android phone or the Google Maps app on your iPhone is silently reporting your location and velocity (are you moving and if yes, how fast are you moving) back to Google servers. You can find the entire location history on the Google Maps website and you also have the option to export this data as KML files that can be viewed inside Google Earth or even Google Drive.

google.com/maps/timeline

6. Create a new Google Account using your existing email address. The regular sign-up process uses your @gmail.com address as your Google account username but with this special URL, you can use any other email address as your username.

accounts.google.com/SignUpWithoutGmail

7. Google and YouTube record every search term that you’ve ever typed or spoken into their search boxes. They keep a log of every Google ad that you have clicked on various websites, every YouTube video you’ve watched and, if you are a Google Now user, you can also see a log of all your audio search queries. OK Google.

history.google.com (Google searches)
history.google.com/history/audio (Voice searches)
youtube.com/feed/history (YouTube searches and watched videos)

8. You need to login to your Gmail account at least once every 9 months else Google may terminate your account according to their program policies. This can be an issue if you have multiple Gmail accounts so as a workaround, you can setup your main Gmail account as the trusted contact for your secondary accounts. Thus Google will keep sending you reminders every few months to login to your other accounts.

www.google.com/settings/account/inactive

9. Worried that someone else is using your Google account or it could behacked? Open the activity report to see a log of every device that has recently connected into your Google account. You’ll also get to know the I.P. Addresses and the approximate geographic location. Unfortunately, you can’t remotely log out of a Google session.

myaccount.google.com/security

10. Can’t locate your mobile phone? You can use the Google Device Manager to find your phone provided it is switched on and connected to the Internet. You can ring the device, see the location or even erase the phone content remotely. You can even find the IMEI Number of the lost phone from your Google Account.
google.com/android/devicemanager

How to Print Multiple Gmail Messages in one go

John Q. Public is an attorney at a law firm and, as part of an ongoing litigation, the court has asked their clients to produce hundreds of email conversations associated with a case as hard copies. They are using Gmail with Google Apps and all the emails are safely stored in the mailbox but how to automatically print them all on paper?

Gmail doesn’t offer an option to print multiple email threads in a batch but that feature is available in Microsoft Outlook, the desktop program. You can import Gmail emails into Outlook, select several messages and then hit the Print button. Outlook will group all the selected email messages into a single PDF file or you can send them directly to any connected printer.

There’s an alternate approach as well. You can select multiple emails in Gmail and apply a common label. Next use an add-on to save these emails as neatly-formatted PDF files into your Google Drive. Once the PDFs are ready, you can either print them through Google Cloud Print or download the PDF files to the desktop and print to the local printer.

Here’s a step by step guide on how to print email messages and attachments in Gmail in bulk:

1. Go to Gmail, select one or more email threads and apply a common label (like To Print) to all the selected email threads.
2. Go to Google Drive and create a folder, say Gmail Files, where the selected Gmail messages would be stored as PDFs.
3. Download and install the Save Emails add-on for Google Sheets.
4. Inside the Google Sheet, go to Add-ons > Save Emails and Attachments > Create New Rule. Here select the Print Gmail label from the dropdown and then select your Google Drive folder.

Click the Create Rule button button and the add-on will save your marked Gmail emails into Google Drive every hour. Or you can go to the Manage Rulesmenu and run a rule manually to immediately save the marked email threads (including attachments) into Drive.

Once all the emails have been saved, right-click the “Gmail Files” folder in Google Drive, and choose Download to save all emails to your desktop. And now you can send them all the emails to the printer with the simple Ctrl+P or (Cmd+P on Mac) keyboard shortcut.

How to Setup a Whitelist in Gmail

Have you ever come across a situation where you were expecting an important email from a known sender but the mail never made it to your Inbox? Instead, Gmail had incorrectly classified that mail as spam and thus moved it to the junk mail folder.

Gmail filters are pretty awesome at detecting spam but they do sometimes make mistakes. So how can you prevent Gmail from marking mails from certain legitimate senders as spam?

How to Whitelist an Email Sender in Gmail

There are two ways to whitelist email addresses, or even web domains, in Gmail.

One, you should add the email addresses of all the known contacts to yourGoogle Contacts list. Google will almost always deliver messages to your Inbox when the ‘From:’ address of the message is listed in your Google Contacts database.

The other thing you can do is create a manual whitelist in Gmail to ensure that email messages from certain senders are never ever marked as Spam. You can in fact whitelist entire domains so that messages from your colleagues reach your Inbox irrespective of whether you have added them to your Google Contacts or not.

Here’s how you can whitelist email addresses and domains in Gmail:

Step 1: In Gmail, click the “Create a Filter” link which is placed just next to the search box.

Step 2: In the From: field, enter the email addresses, domain names or even actual names of people who you would like to whitelist. You can separate multiple entries using OR (in Caps) or with the bar (|) sign.

Step 3: Once your filter is ready, click Next and select “Never Send it to Spam.”

That’s it! Now messages that match the above criteria will always get delivered to your Inbox and won’t ever be marked as spam.

Trivia: Did you know that Windows Live Hotmail offers a safe senders list where you can put email addresses and domains of known contacts and Hotmail will never mark messages originating from these addresses as spam. That’s much easier than setting up a whitelist filter in Gmail.

Make GMail the Default EMail Client in Firefox

Vamsi Kiran is using Firefox as his default web browser but when he clicks some email hyperlink (mailto:) on the web, IE opens up with the Yahoo! Mail homepage.

Vamsi would like to see the GMail compose window open up inside Firefox (not Internet Explorer) when he clicks any email hyperlink on web pages.

Download the free Google Talk chat application and open the options dialog. You'll see a general setting that says "Open GMail When I click on Email Links" - select that and exit.

This will set Gmail as your default mailto: handler. This means that when you click on any hyperlinked email address, a Gmail compose window will open in your default web browser. The To: address field will be prepopulated with email address.

This trick works if you are in IE - the GMail compose window would open inside Firefox. To make this work inside Firfox, implement this small change:


1. Type about:config in the address bar.
2. Type mailto: and hit enter.
3. You'll see a setting called network.protocol-handler.external.mailto that is set to false. Double click it to toggle the value to true.

How to Bring your Gmail Emails into Microsoft Outlook

John’s organization was earlier using Gmail for Google Apps but not that they have migrated to Microsoft Office, he would like to make the switch from Gmail to Microsoft Outlook. He is also looking to transfer all the old email messages from Gmail to Outlook on the desktop.

Microsoft Outlook is available for both Windows PC & Mac OS X and both versions can connect to your Gmail account and fetch your emails. You can either use POP3 or IMAP to access Gmail from Outlook though the latter is recommended as it allows 2-way sync.

Fetch your Gmail into Microsoft Outlook

Here’s how you can import email from Gmail to Microsoft Outlook. The technique works @gmail.com addresses and also Google Apps email accounts that use a custom domain like @example.com.

To get started, go to your Gmail Settings, click the Forwarding and POP / IMAP tab and Enable IMAP. Save your changes.

Next open Microsoft Outlook on your computer and go to Tools, Account Settings. Click the plus (+) symbol to add a new IMAP account to your Outlook. Here enter your Gmail account details as shown in the screenshot:

Put your full email address in the Username, enter the password, set the incoming Mail (IMAP) Server as imap.gmail.com and enable “Use SSL to connect.” The incoming server port should be set to 993.

For the outgoing email server, set the address as smtp.gmail.com, set the port as 465 and enable “Use SSL to connect.” Go to More options and choose Use Incoming Server Info for authentication.

That’s it. Outlook will begin downloading all emails from your Gmail account though this process may take a while to complete depending on the size of your Gmail mailbox.

Gmail uses labels while Outlook works around folders. During import, your Gmail labels will automatically be mapped to corresponding folders inside Outlook. Also, you have enabled 2-factor authentication inside your Google Account, you need to create an app-specific password and your regular Gmail password will not work.

How to Mute Individual Browser Tabs in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox

Web pages can automatically play audio thanks to HTML5, even if you’ve set Flash and other browser plug-ins to click-to-play. Most modern web browsers include an audio indicator that will show you which tab is playing sound. Most modern browsers also let you mute individual tabs.

This feature was available behind a hidden flag in Chrome for a while, and is now stable. Apple’s Safari was the first web browser that actually enabled it by default, and Mozilla is working on adding it to Firefox.

Google Chrome

This feature is now part of the stable version of Chrome and doesn’t require enabling any hidden flags to use. Just locate a tab playing audio — you’ll see a speaker indicator to the left of the “x” on the tab itself. Right-click the tab and select “Mute Tab.”

The audio indicator will turn to a crossed-out speaker icon, informing you that the tab isn’t allowed to play audio. Right-click it again and select “Unmute Tab” to change your choice.
This feature is now part of the stable version of Chrome and doesn’t require enabling any hidden flags to use. Just locate a tab playing audio — you’ll see a speaker indicator to the left of the “x” on the tab itself. Right-click the tab and select “Mute Tab.”

The audio indicator will turn to a crossed-out speaker icon, informing you that the tab isn’t allowed to play audio. Right-click it again and select “Unmute Tab” to change your choice.

Apple Safari

This is also possible in Safari — Safari was the first browser that made this feature available to all its users.

As in Chrome, you’ll see a speaker icon to the left of the “x” button on an individual browser tab when it’s playing audio. You can click the speaker icon to mute the tab, and click it again to unmute the tab. You can also right-click or Ctrl-click the tab and select “Mute Tab” to mute that individual tab.

Unlike in Chrome, there’s no way to preemptively mute a tab. This option is only available when a tab is already playing audio.

Mozilla Firefox


Firefox is on the verge of adding built-in audio indicators on its tabs and a way to mute them. According to the bug report, this feature should be part of Firefox 42. It’s part of the latest experimental “nightly” builds of Firefox, too.

It works similarly to Safari and Chrome. If a tab is playing audio, you’ll see an audio indicator to the left of the “x” button on the tab. You can click that little speaker icon to mute a tab or right-click the browser tab and select “Mute Tab.”

Like Chrome, Firefox also allows you to preemptively mute tabs before they start playing audio — just right-click a tab and select “Mute Tab.”

If you’re still using an old version of Firefox, you can do this by installing an extension like “Mute Tab.” However, this extension doesn’t work as well — it only works with HTML5 audio. Thankfully, it’s possible to prevent plug-ins from automatically playing by setting them to click-to-play in Firefox.

Microsoft Edge 

Microsoft Edge does at least include audio indicators on its tabs. Unlike all other browsers, however, those audio indicators are located at the left side of each tab.

Edge doesn’t yet offer a built-in way to mute tabs, and it doesn’t support browser extensions. Browser extensions — or Microsoft itself — may one day bring this feature to Edge. For now, Edge is still stuck playing catch-up to the features offered by established browsers.

You can always mute your entire browser to prevent all web pages from playing audio until you change your mind — assuming you’re using Windows or Linux. On Windows, right-click the volume icon in your system tray, select “Open Volume Mixer” and use the mixer to mute the browser or at least lower its volume. On Linux, you’ll usually find this option in your desktop’s sound settings, too — it’s offered by PulseAudio. Mac OS X doesn’t offer this feature.

Protect your Google Accounts with a USB Security Key

Most big-name web services like Gmail, Microsoft, Evernote, WordPress and Dropbox now support 2-step authentication to improve the security of your online accounts. Once you enable two-factor authentication, a malicious person will not be able to log into your online account even if they know the password – they’ll need access to your mobile phone as well to get in.

The verification codes required for logging into a 2-step enabled account can be generated either using a mobile app – like Authy or Google Authenticator – or you can have them sent to your mobile phone via a text message or a voice call. The latter option however will not work if the mobile phone associated with your account is outside the coverage area (like when you are in a foreign country).

There’s another option that makes the process of logging into a 2-factor enabled account Google less cumbersome. Instead of generating the verification codes on a mobile phone,  you can use a hardware based authenticator that can be inserted into a USB port on your computer and you’ll be signed-in automatically without having to hand-type the digits. 

The option works for both Google and Google Apps accounts and you don’t even need the mobile phone – watch video demo.

Google 2-factor Authentication Simplified

I am using the least-expensive Yubico key though there are more options to choose from. The first stop is to associate the USB security key with your Google Account. Go to myaccount.google.com, click on 2-step verification and then switch to the Security Keys tab. Here click the Register Device button and then insert the USB key into the computer to attach it to your account.

Once registered, you can use your USB security key to log into your Google Account from any other desktop or laptop computer without requiring the mobile phone. Simply open the Google login page, type in your username & password, click the Sign-in button and then insert the USB key. The lights will blink on the device, you need to tap it once and it will instantly log you into the account. Internally, the key generates the codes that are sent to Google servers and you are logged in.

The USB security keys require no software and they are compatible with Windows, Mac, Chrome OS and Linux computers. They need no batteries, they are tiny like a regular USB thumb drive but also rigid. You can also associate multiple Google Accounts with the same USB key which can be a huge timesaver for some users.

USB Security Keys make 2-factor authentication painless but you can only use them inside Google Chrome on desktop and laptop computers. You’ll still have to rely on SMS messages, or the authenticator app, for logging into Google on your mobile phones or in browsers like Firefox and Opera