[This part 4 of a multi-part series – start here.] Now that we’ve painstakingly archived our online email history, it’s time to carefully protect it before we delete the online copies. Locating Your Profile Folder Assuming you used Thunderbird, it’s pretty easy to back up all of your emails (and contacts and anything else you […]
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[This part 2 of a multi-part series – start here.] Before we purge our online email history, we should make a complete and searchable backup. Blazing Trails Email apps, or “clients”, are designed primarily to send and receive emails. They also have the ability to store older emails, including searching them, organizing them into folders,
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This is a multiple-part series – go here for the full list, Welcome to Part 5 of my De-Google series. If you haven’t done so already, I’d start with the first article (strategy), even if you want to read the other articles out of order. You’ll find nice jump links at the bottom of the
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I’m starting a new series of articles called Dragon Hacks. They’re short and to the point, with a fun, common format. The idea is to find one thing you can do right now that will make you more secure and/or private. In each article I will introduce a problem, give you a solution, and show
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Google’s Chrome browser is by far the most popular on the planet – it runs on 67% of desktop computers globally. But Chrome is also one of the worst for user privacy and it’s about to get even worse. We need to support private alternatives or they may not exist much longer. Google Chrome &
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Have you been getting a lot of annoying pop-ups lately asking you to “Sign in with Google”? Google used to actually wait for you to click the “Login” button before offering this option, but in recent months they’ve gotten a lot more pushy. This annoying message is now showing up every time you visit a
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[NOTE: See update at the end of this article. Some important new options are available.] Several years ago, I wrote a comprehensive article on choosing a secure and private browser. I called it Browser Safety: Choose Your Weapon. But I decided it was time to update this article and focus instead on privacy. Security is
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UPDATED Feb 2026 This is a multiple-part series – go here for the full list. Welcome to Part 4 of my De-Google series. If you haven’t done so already, I’d start with the first article (strategy), even if you want to read the other articles out of order. You’ll find nice jump links at the
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UPDATED Feb 2026 One of my personal goals was to “de-Google” my life. I’ve been a huge user of Google’s products for years, so this was not going to be easy. But Google is an ad company and they’ve hoovered up way too much of my data. So I wanted to reduce my dependency on
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UPDATED Feb 2026 This is a multiple-part series – go here for the full list. Welcome to my series on reducing my Google footprint, where I explain how to de-Google your life. So far, I’ve explained how to assess your Google privacy “damage” and staunch the “bleeding” of further information. Then I explained how to
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