People have been talking about the death of email for a while now. Every time there’s a new, communications-focused technology, most notably Google Wave — and we all know how that went — email eulogies pop up all over the internet. It seems likely to me that email is here to stay, at least for a while longer, but if other companies follow the example of Atos, a 74,000 employee French tech company spanning 42 countries, email may actually begin its prophesied decline.

Atos has banned email. At least, they’ve banned it internally. That’s right, those 74,000 employees can no longer send each other minutiae-filled email chains that may or may not ever get fully read. They will no longer be able to forward jokes and silly messages throughout the company or the office. They will no longer be able to send on-line emails to avoid the potential perspiration of actually getting up from their desk and walking over to their friend and asking in person. I say good riddance.

Atos announced the no-email policy in February of 2011, but have now officially implemented it. CEO Thierry Breton, who was also the French finance minister from 2005-2007, said that employee emails are only 10 percent useful, and are 18 percent spam — which seems about right to me, considering the emails I’ve received in companies I’ve worked for. All to often, the emails would be useless time-wasters — especially the ones that involved questions from co-workers that didn’t actually read the email in the first place.

Atos isn’t leaving their employees without a digital option for communication, though. They are using tools such as the Atos Wiki and their Office Communicator chat program to allow employees to collaborate on documents and projects, as well as chat, video  conference, and share applications and files.

I think the Atos approach is the only way for a company to successfully achieve adoption of internal social media tools and, so far, the only possible negative fallout I can see would be dependent on the tools they use and how user-friendly they are.  They seem to be doing okay in that department, however, as Atos has reported to ABC News that employee response “has been positive with strong take up of alternative tools.”

What do you think of the Atos no-email policy? Is it the beginning of a massive “kill email” movement? Will it lead to better outside-company communications as well? Discuss in the comments.

Tech Firm Implements Employee ‘Zero Email’ Policy [ABC News on Yahoo.com]

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• Rizzoma May (Soon) Be the Wave Alternative You’re Looking For
• Summify Acquired by Twitter (and Going Bye Bye)
• What’s The Deal With Pinterest? Even My Wife Likes (Obsesses Over) It!
• Kicksend – An Easy Way to Send Large Files
• Social Media Overload: How Has Your Social Media Usage Changed Since the Release of Google+? [Reader Feedback]

Most email services place a limit on the size of attachments, which can make sending larger files a bit difficult. File sending services abound to get around this limit. One of the easier ones we’ve seen – as long as you don’t mind registering for an account – is Kicksend. Kicksend allows you to send large files for free, although the limitations are different depending on whether you use the web client or the desktop client. While you have to register for an account to use Kicksend, your recipients do not.

With the Kicksend web client, you can send files up to 150 MB in size. The desktop client has no file size limit. There is however, a limit on the total size of files you can send in a one month period, depending on the plan you have. If you have the Basic (free) plan, that limit is 5 GB per month, and your file is accessible for 10 days. The Plus plan ($10/month) has a 10 GB limit, with your file being stored for 90 days. Finally, the Pro plan ($20/month) has a 30 GB per month limit, with you files accessible for 120 days. The web client uploader does seem to suggest a 1.69 GB monthly sending limit, so Kicksend could do a better job of explaining the pricing options and sending limits.

One other difference between the free and paid plans is that the paid plans provide for private URLs, although I couldn’t find any description explaining the difference between a normal URL and a private one. I assume that it means that a shared file on a paid plan can only be accessed by the intended recipient, while anyone who knows the URL can access the file on the free plan. That’s just a guess, though.

With Kicksend, your recipients aren’t actually sent the file (because they probably have file size limits on their end, too). Instead, they receive an email message with a link. Clicking that link will take them to a page with a prominent download button on it.

The web client is simple, and uses a straightforward, uncluttered interface.

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The desktop client isn’t quite as simple, but still looks nice. (Note that the screenshot below is from the Mac client, but there is a Windows client as well).

A service like Kicksend isn’t something most people would use every day, but it is good for the occasional time where you need to send a large file, and don’t want your recipients to have to jump through hoops.

How do you send large files?

Kicksend [via Tony Hue Twitter stream]

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• The Death of Email — At Least Internally — At A Large Multi-national Company
• How to Create a Linked Toodledo Task From An Apple Mail Message [Mac]
• What to Do If Your Email Account Gets Hacked
• 3 Ways to Safely Share Your Email Address (and Beat Spam Scrapers)
• How Destroying a Botnet Reduced Worldwide Spam By 90% (Have You Seen a Difference?)

Some Mac task management apps allow you to use a keystroke to create a task from an Apple Mail message, and then have that task link back to the Mail message. This is particularly handy if, like me, many of your tasks originate from Mail messages. If you’re a Toodledo user, you can do this as well, although it will require you to purchase a third-party Mail plugin.

To get started, you need 3 things:

• A Mac with Mail installed;
• MailActOn, a Mail plugin; and
• A particular AppleScript. Find it in a post on the Smoove Operator site, a blog by Mike Hardy (there are several good tidbits on this blog, so it’s worth checking out even if you’re not using it for this script).

Once you have those items, here’s what you need to do:

1) You’ll first need to make one change to the AppleScript that you downloaded. Double-click the script file to open it for editing, then find the “example@example.com” email address within the script. Replace that address with your Toodledo email address (you can find your Toodledo email address in your Email Import/Export settings).

2) Place the AppleScript somewhere on your Mac that will be easy for you to find later.

3) Install MailActOn (there is a free trial, with the normal version costing $24.95 at the time of this writing).

4) Go into your Mail preferences, to the Rules tab, and select “Act-On Rules.” Click the “Add Rule” button, and fill out the input boxes as shown in the screenshot below:

In the box that is cut off in the image above (the one to the right of “Run AppleScript”) input the location of the AppleScript that you saved in Step 2. Do this by clicking on the “Choose . . .” button and navigating to the location of the script on your Mac. When you’re done, click the “OK” button.

What will this do? When you select a message and hit CTRL-T, it will move the message out of your inbox and into your Archive folder, change the background color of the message to green, and then open a new mail message pre-populated with your Toodledo email address, the same subject as the original message, and a link. If you hit send, the message will be sent into Toodledo and automatically turned into a task. That task in Toodledo will contain the link which, when clicked, will open the archived Mail message. Keep in mind that Toodledo pays attention to certain types of syntax in the subject line of a message, so you may need to alter the subject line of the Toodledo email message if it is going to cause a conflict or other problem.

One other tweak I’ve made is to set up a couple of TextExpander snippets to help pre-populate the subject line of the email. For example, I have one snippet that sets the task context to “Work” and the folder to “Action.”

If you know of any other ways to integrate Toodledo with Mail, let us know in the comments.

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• Toodledo Gets an Official Makeover
• How to Give Toodledo a Visual Makeover, and Turn It Into a Standalone App, With User Styles
• GTD With 2Do and Toodledo [Reader Workflow]
• Got To Do vs. Ultimate To Do List: Comparison of Toodledo Apps on Android
• Task Manager Comparison: Toodledo vs. Remember the Milk

Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but I’ve had a couple of people that I know who have had their email accounts hacked recently. Given all of the personal information we send and receive in email messages, that can be a traumatic experience. One victim wondered if she should take a scorched earth policy, and move completely to a new email account. That’s normally not necessary. If you still have access to your account, you can take some steps to secure it, and keep the slimy criminal out.

original photo by Don Hankins

First of all, make sure that you’ve really been hacked. Just because someone gets an email that looks like it came from you, doesn’t mean that you’ve been hacked. It is very easy to spoof an email address, and send a message so that it appears to come from someone else. Spammers do this all the time, and it doesn’t mean that they have access to your account (think of a spammer putting your return mailing address on a bunch of envelopes that he mails out, and you have the idea). But if you’ve learned that a few of your contacts have been getting messages from you that you didn’t send, then you probably have been hacked. Here’s what you need to do to secure your account.

Step 1 – Regain Access to Your Account

This step might not apply to you, but if a hacker has taken over your account and locked you out by changing your password, the first step will be to regain access to it. Twitter has a nice list of how to recover access to accounts for various providers. If you’re on Gmail, hopefully you followed our suggestion to take down the information that will help you recover a compromised Gmail account. If you use Gmail and have set up the ability to recover your account via text message, and the hacker hasn’t already changed the mobile number associated with your account, you can recover your account using that method.

Step 2 – Shut Down the Hacker’s Ability to Reset Your Password

Before you do anything, you should check your email settings and determine the address that your account uses for lost passwords (i.e. the backup email address most providers ask for, to which they send the “reset your password” link). The hacker could have snuck his address in there, which would enable him to retake your account, even if you change your password. You should remove the hacker’s address and add yours if that happened. If you don’t, all of the steps that follow could be rendered moot. If you use Gmail, you should also check the mobile number associated with your account, as mentioned in step 1, and make sure that the hacker hasn’t changed that, too.

Step 3 – Remove Bogus Forwarding Addresses

If your provider allows you to add forwarding addresses, you should check your settings to make sure that all of the forwarding addresses in your account are yours. In Gmail, check your filters, too, to make sure that you don’t see any addresses that you don’t recognize. You want to make sure that a hacker isn’t getting a copy of all incoming mail forwarded to him or her at some external address.



Step 4 – Revoke Access From Other Accounts

If you had set up your account so that you could access your email account from another provider (for example, I can have my Gmail account pull down my Yahoo mail), you should go to those other accounts and revoke permission to check your main email. This will protect you if the hacker was actually accessing your main email via the secondary account. Step 5, below, will usually serve to revoke this access on its own, but it is best to be thorough. If you don’t use a secondary account to access your main account, you don’t need to worry about this step.

Step 5 – Change Your Password and Secret Questions

You should change your password on your account, and then very quickly go and change the “secret questions” on your account. “Secret questions” are the questions that most providers have you set up so that you can recover your account if you lose your password, such as “what was the model of your first car?” You should change this to something that isn’t obvious, because if the hacker knows the answer to your secret question, he could regain access even after you change your password.

Step 6 – Assess the Damage That Was Done

One of the reasons that having your email hacked is so bad, is because we often can reset passwords on other sites by having reset information sent to us via email. So it is possible that a hacker could gain access to your email, and then use that to gain access to other sites. It is important, therefore, that you check out other important sites, reset your passwords there, and make sure that no bogus contact info is in your account settings on those sites. You probably also want to search your messages for the word “password” in order to find any messages containing password information for other accounts. Get the passwords on those accounts changed right away. Finally, check your Sent and Deleted messages folders, to possibly get a glimpse at what the hacker was up to. If he tried to swindle some of your friends via your email account, get in touch with them and let them know you were hacked.

Step 7 – Protect Your Account From Getting Hacked Again

That sure was a hassle, wasn’t it? To make sure that it doesn’t happen again, take some steps to protect yourself. We previously wrote about some tips to follow to protect your account.

Beyond those tips, use long, complex passwords, and make sure that the answer to your password recovery question isn’t easy to guess or figure out. If you use Gmail, you should think about setting up two-factor authentication, which will protect your account even if someone gets your password. You also should make sure that you use unique passwords for all your accounts, including your email account. LastPass and 1Password are two good choices for this. And, as we mentioned earlier in this post, record the info now that you’ll need to use to recover a compromised Gmail account, and make sure you’ve configured Gmail so that you can recover your password via text message.

These are some ideas about how to secure a hacked account. If you have any suggestions to add, let us know in the comments.

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• Record This Info Now, Thank Us Later If Your Gmail Account Is Ever Compromised
• 7 Tips to Protect Your Email from Hackers
• Secure Your Gmail Account With Two-Factor Authentication
• 3 Ways to Safely Share Your Email Address (and Beat Spam Scrapers)
• How Destroying a Botnet Reduced Worldwide Spam By 90% (Have You Seen a Difference?)

Posting your email on a website, or in a blog, social media, or forum comment, opens you up to a world of messages about making money online, viagra, the enlargement of specific body parts, and a host of other fun solicitations and potential virus links. We all know this, and we all know that the safest way to post an email link is this: don’t. If you absolutely have to, you can always try to beat the bots by posting it as an image (time consuming), or by killing the link and adding some brackets and such like this: myemail (at) adomain (dot) com. The trouble with this approach is that you are also making trying to contact you annoying for the people you want to connect with.

Here are three ways you can share your email safely and easily:

scr.im

Scr.im is a convenient and brand-efficient way to post a link to an email address. It provides you with a simple vanity url that is easy to share and doesn’t require any specific code in the link. When the link is clicked, the person — or spam-bot — is directed to a captcha page that shows an image of an alpha-numeric code and a game of match the code with one of the nine buttons on the right. If there is, for some reason, a problem with this method, you can simply click the link at the bottom to go to the tried and true “failsafe” captcha method of typing in the code from the image and clicking the “I’m a real human, honest!” button.

To get set up with scr.im, head to their site, enter your email address, click “Protect my email” and go, share, be merry. They will generate a url for you, but if you want some extra awesome, then type in your own vanity url tail in the provided field. Scr.im will automatically let you know if the url is available or not.

reCAPTCHA Mailhide

You are probably familiar with reCAPTCHA, especially if you own a blog. They have put together one of the easiest and most powerful (and best looking) captcha protections out there. They are also owned by Google, now, which I only recently became aware of. Whether that makes you feel more or less comfortable will be determined by how many Google services you already use , and how evil you feel Google is, but the reCAPTCHA Mailhide solution is a great way to safely post an email link to a website.

If you want to try it out, head to the reCAPTCHA Email Protection page and enter your email address in the given field and click “Protect It!” You will be taken to a page that provides the URL of the reCAPTCHA that will need to be solved before anyone can send you an email — which you can then share anyway you like. You can even take the (crazy, long) URL and plug it into your shortener of choice to create an nice and easy to share link. Once the captcha — which can only be solved by humans — is correctly entered, people will be presented with a page that contains an untrackable link to your actual email address.

Web security is important to the people clicking your fancy email link, as well, so if you want to assure them that they are heading toward an email address, you may want to use the customizable HTML code that is also provided by Mailhide. This code will display your email with the first four letters of your address, followed by a clickable “…” and @yourdomain.com. This code can be customized to your liking — which was especially handy in my case, as I used an address with “butter” in the beginning. Posting an email link to butt…@gmail.com is not likely to gain me more than a few laughs. (Note: the clickable … previous is for aesthetics only. It is not an active link to my email address)

If you want to know the technical protocols used by Mailhide, check out this API link.

Google+ Profile Link

If you aren’t using Google+ yet, you should be. Yeah, I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid — and it’s sweet, refreshing, beautiful, and I hope it lasts. Aside from the Picasa integration, circles and other neat network and privacy controls, and the fact that social games are finally done right, Google+ also makes one hell of a way to share your email without getting attacked by spam.

The first step is to make sure your Google+ Profile (okay, okay, if you really can’t stomach using Google+ yet, you can always just use a regular old Google Profile) has a visible “Send an email” button just below your picture. To do this, you go to the settings gear in the top right, then click on “Profile and privacy,” and then the “Edit visibility on profile” button beside “Public profile information.”

Step two is click on the “Send and email” area below your profile picture, click the check-box that is next to “Allow people to email you from a link on your profile,” and then click on the dropdown that sets your visibility preferences. For the broadest case, you will want to choose “Anyone on the web” as it will allow you to safely share a link to your email with anyone. Save, and then click the “Finished editing” button at the top of the page. People can now send you email right from your Google/Google+ Profile page.

The final thing to do is to share your Profile link with others. There are a number of ways to do this, including the secure (long) Google Profile URL, using a general URL shortener or a vanity URL, or even by using your profiles.google.com/username — though that may defeat the purpose a bit if you don’t want people to know your email address (seeing as the username + @gmail.com = is your email address).

Bonus – Bugmenot

If you are after a way to sign up for services without getting spammed, none of the above methods will work for you — so check out Bugmenot, instead. Bugmenot is the perfect way to check out for a multitude of “sign up first” services using dummy emails and passwords set up by other people. It’s a great way to avoid spam and solicitations, and it saves time. You could also just use your own dummy email address.

There you have it! Three easy ways to share a link to your email address without painting yourself as a target for spam bots. If you know of any others or have had experiences with any of these methods, please share them in the comments!

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• Make Your LastPass Account Uncrackable: LastPass Adds Support for Google Authenticator
• What to Do If Your Email Account Gets Hacked
• Quickly Check a Site for Safety – And Malware History – With Google’s Safe Browsing Diagnostic Tool
• How Destroying a Botnet Reduced Worldwide Spam By 90% (Have You Seen a Difference?)
• Record This Info Now, Thank Us Later If Your Gmail Account Is Ever Compromised

Have you noticed a decrease in spam in your email inbox recently? I haven’t, but that may be due to Gmail’s excellent spam filters. According to Symantec, though, worldwide spam has decreased 90% in the last year. How? Two of the world’s largest botnets were knocked offline, accounting for much of the reduction. Those botnets controlled millions of infected computers, sending out billions of spam email messages a day. With the botnets out of the picture, spam has fallen dramatically. Here’s how the botnets were taken offline.

ExtremeTech recently posted a story summarizing how Microsoft and its allies worked to take down the world’s largest botnet, Rustock. A Microsoft blog detailed how Microsoft, working with law enforcement, actually seized the command and control servers that controlled the zombie army. Microsoft then worked with ISPs and a Chineese domain registrar to blacklist the addresses from which the command servers were operating, basically severing the command and control structure from the botnet. Microsoft and some allies are now working with ISPs to clean the Rustock malware from millions of infected machines.

A couple of interesting points taken from the article. The seizures don’t appear to have been done under the auspices of any sort of anti-spam law, but instead were carried out under the guise of copyright enforcement, since the spammers were sending out fake email using the trademarks of Microsoft and other companies. Those “other companies” were some of the allies working with Microsoft, and explain what might seem odd at first blush – Pfizer working with Microsoft. Pfizer was working to protect its own brand.

Have you seen any change in the amount of spam you receive?

Botnet takedowns reduce spam by 90%, but more action needed [ExtremeTech]

Taking Down Botnets: Microsoft and the Rustock Botnet [Microsoft on the Issues blog]

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• What to Do If Your Email Account Gets Hacked
• 3 Ways to Safely Share Your Email Address (and Beat Spam Scrapers)
• Record This Info Now, Thank Us Later If Your Gmail Account Is Ever Compromised
• 7 Tips to Protect Your Email from Hackers

We’ve written a good bit about email overload, and given a few tips on how to deal with it. These tips include using Gmail to manage all of your accounts (and even how to avoid Gmail’s infamous delay in checking external accounts), and how to turn the managing of your inbox into a game. When it gets down to the nuts and bolts, how do you manage your account?

There are a few schools of thought out there:

• Use labels, such as those offered by Gmail, to tag every message with one or more labels;
• Use folders, as offered by traditional email clients and providers, to place each message into a single, distinct folder;
• Archive all of your messages into one place, and just use the search functionality of your email client to find your messages; or
• A combination of the above methods.

I’ve used labels ever since switching to Gmail years ago, and have several filters set up to automatically label a large percentage of incoming messages. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering if it is really necessary. Gmail’s search capabilities are very powerful, and taking the time to label every message can be time consuming. At the very least, I think I can slim my labels down to a few broad categories.

What method do you use to organize your email? Is it one of the methods listed above, or do you have your own way of doing things?

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• What to Do If Your Email Account Gets Hacked
• Sparrow – Finally a Desktop Email Client That Nails Gmail (But Only On the Mac, Dangit)
• Record This Info Now, Thank Us Later If Your Gmail Account Is Ever Compromised
• 7 Tips to Protect Your Email from Hackers
• Clean Your Gmail Inbox by Playing a Game

A 40Tech reader recently observed that he counted 9 email addresses that go directly to him, plus two others that he monitored. That got me wondering, so I took a look at the Accounts tab in my Gmail settings, and my eyes popped out of my head. I had 17 email addresses there. I was funneling messages from all of those accounts into Gmail, and replying automatically from the correct address, using a method we’ve discussed earlier. 8 of these were addresses that I used with some regularity.

What about you? How many email addresses do you use? How many do you use regularly? How many do you access from one place?

Thanks to Bob from pcabling.com for the idea for this topic.

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• The Death of Email — At Least Internally — At A Large Multi-national Company
• Kicksend – An Easy Way to Send Large Files
• How to Create a Linked Toodledo Task From An Apple Mail Message [Mac]
• What to Do If Your Email Account Gets Hacked
• 3 Ways to Safely Share Your Email Address (and Beat Spam Scrapers)

Last week we conducted a survey, asking you whether you preferred your apps in the cloud, or on your desktop. I’ve been a big fan of the cloud, but lately I’ve gone retro, enjoying a few desktop apps. One of the apps that has fostered my growing love of desktop apps is Sparrow, a desktop email app for Mac OS X. The beauty of Sparrow is how well it integrates with Gmail, and how fast it operates.

Historically, desktop email apps haven’t played nicely with Gmail. They work, but features like labels work differently in most apps than they do from within Gmail itself. Most email apps use IMAP or POP to access Gmail, and use folders instead of labels. The use of folders means that you have to copy a message to two folders if you want the message to have two labels within Gmail.

Sparrow was designed specifically for Gmail. In fact, although support for other platforms via IMAP is coming soon, Sparrow works ONLY with Gmail and Google Apps email accounts at the present time. Sparrow’s Gmail-centric focus is apparent when you sit down to use it.

Overview

The sidebar on the left side of the screen lists your Gmail or Google Apps accounts, along with icons for your default Inbox, Sent Mail, Starred Messages, Drafts, Search, and Trash. Just to the right of the sidebar is a list of your messages. In this panel, the subject of each message is displayed, along with the first few lines of the message. Each message in that list has a number next to it representing the number of threads in the conversation (unless there are no replies, in which case no number is displayed). The corner of the message in the list also contains a triangle with the color of the first tag selected for the message. The message in the list will also display a date and time, and a solid or grayed out star (depending on whether the message was starred or not).

The far right panel in Sparrow displays the full message itself, along with a display of the tags, an information button (to display more information from the message header), and a dropdown button to reply, reply to all, forward, delete, mark as spam, and so forth.

Processing Messages

Sparrow allows you to quickly process your mail. While you can call up a full composition Window, you can, just like in Gmail, type a message into a quick reply box that comes up with one click of the reply button.

You can add attachments to a message by dragging the attachment into the message, or by using a standard “attach” button. If you have multiple accounts configured in Sparrow, you can select the account from which to send the message via a dropdown menu in the full composition window.

Labeling messages is easy, too. Click on the plus symbol at the top right of a message, and select your labels. Removing a label is as simply as clicking an “X” next to the label.

As the first screenshot above indicates, Sparrow’s interface is simple and clean. The toolbar across the top contains only four buttons: New Message, Archive, Reply, and Delete. As fast as cloud apps have become, I still find it much quicker to blow through messages in Sparrow, using the Archive and Delete buttons in conjunction with the fast labeling of messages.

Sparrow also has search functionality. Once you perform a search, you can filter the results via sender, recipient, or subject.

The Verdict

Sparrow has a different feel to it than traditional email clients. I’ve seen other reviews compare it to the official Twitter app for Mac in its appearance. Regardless, I love the look and feel of it, and, most importantly, I’ve found it to be a great help in quickly processing my email. In fact, sometimes I’ll look at my Gmail inbox in my web browser, and defer responding to messages until I can fire up my MacBook Air and use Sparrow.

Sparrow’s main drawback is that it is Mac only. As a result, I need to find a way to convince my wife that we need a desktop Mac, so I can use Sparrow in more places than just on my Macbook Air. Better yet, maybe we can persuade the Sparrow developers to port it to Windows, where they’d probably make a killing.

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• What to Do If Your Email Account Gets Hacked
• Do You Organize Your Emails With Labels, Folders, or Search? [Reader Feedback]
• Record This Info Now, Thank Us Later If Your Gmail Account Is Ever Compromised
• 7 Tips to Protect Your Email from Hackers
• Clean Your Gmail Inbox by Playing a Game

Last week we wrote of an important step that you should take to secure your Gmail account – associating a cell phone number with your Gmail account, so that you can receive a recovery code via text message.  As we pointed out, that’s not foolproof – a savvy hacker could change the cell phone number associated with your account.  Then what?  Google does offer an account recovery process, but it requires you to know the answer to several questions.

The answers to these questions are not simple to locate.  The questions can be found on Google’s page for recovering a compromised account (you’ll need to select the “no” radio button to see the questions).  You should consider locating and recording these answers now, as they’ll be hard or impossible to obtain if you don’t have access to your account. These are the questions:

• Do you use Gmail with this account? (required field)
• Do you use orkut with this Google account?
• Do you use Blogger with this Google Account?
• Account creation date (month and year) (required field)
• Last successful login date (month, day, and year)
• Last password that you remember (required field)

You also will be asked to identify four Google products that you use with your account (such as Docs, Reader, etc.), and the date that you started using each one.  You can find a list of your accounts on the Google accounts page.  Figuring out these dates is perhaps the trickiest part of the process.  Here are a few tips for finding some of these dates:

• Search your Gmail messages with this phrase: congratulations google team.  Many of the Google services use those words in the welcome message that you receive when signing up, so searching for those words will return those welcome messages (and the date on which they were received).  Searching for just “Google” and “team” may help, too.  My Wave invitation had those words in it.

• You can try to find the origination date of your Google Docs account by looking for the date of your oldest documents.  Of course, if you delete old documents, then the date of your oldest current document won’t be much help.

• Do you have an Android phone?  If so, find your receipt so that you can pinpoint when you started with Android.

• If you use Analytics on a web site, a review of your Analytics stats should give you a good idea of your account start date, simply by looking for the first date on which visits to your site were recorded.

• If you have a Blogger account, you could check for the date of your first post.  Your blogger profile also has an “On Blogger Since” date, but that just lists a month.

• If you have a Picasa account, you could check the upload date of your first photo.  This isn’t foolproof, if you’ve deleted photos or didn’t start uploading photos right away.

• Finally, you could also pick a service that you don’t use, and start using it today.  Then, should your account ever get compromised, you’ll know the start date of that service.

If you write these dates down now, you may thank yourself later if your account is ever hacked.  If you know of other methods for determining the date on which you started using a Google service, let us know in the comments.

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

• What to Do If Your Email Account Gets Hacked
• 7 Tips to Protect Your Email from Hackers
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