[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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Our mobile phones have become the center of our digital lives. We carry them with us everywhere we go. Let’s learn how to keep them physically secure. Physical Device Security We use smartphones for everything. I prefer using a computer, but if I had to, I could do just about everything online that I needed
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It’s time for another quick and easy ‘dragon hack’. Today I’ll tell you how to stop people from snooping on your communications. Meet Your Foe: Spying Message Apps Since the dawn of the World Wide Web, we’ve had proprietary messaging apps: AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger were probably the most popular.
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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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Convenience is often at odds with security and privacy. In other words, we often need to add some friction to our lives in order to be more secure and private. There are many inconveniences we’ve all learned to live with in the physical world. We lock our houses when we leave. We hide valuables in
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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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