Tausi Insider

Photo : Jarretera ( Shutterstock ) One Gmail, one address. That seems right. After all, you have one phone number, and one home address. The same should be true for your email addresses, Gmail included. As it happens, though, your Gmail account has an unlimited number of addresses you can use whenever you want, fooling everyone from Netflix to spammers alike. There are actually a couple of methods here. The first is what allows you to turn your single gmail address into infinite addresses, through a tactic called “plus addressing” (a fitting name). In order to take advantage of plus addressing, you simply type a plus (+) after the local-part (the name before the @), then type whatever you want. For example, if my Gmail address were jake@gmail.com, I could type jake+lifehacker@gmail.com, or jake+gomedia@gmail.com. The service you’re using that email with will think it’s an entirely new address, but any emails to that address will still be sent to your inbox. This works for any Gmai...

Photo : Respiro ( Shutterstock ) A to-do list is probably one of the most common strategies for keeping track of tasks and goals. But the problem with long and overly ambitious to-do lists is that they can overwhelm us with how much there is to accomplish, leaving us struggling to prioritize or even knowing where to start. A long list can also increase our desire to multitask, ultimately making us less productive . Here’s how to make a short, sweet— and effective— to-do list. How long should a to-do list be? A good to-do list (or set of lists) has anywhere from five to ten tasks on it—and no more than a dozen in total. While there is no magic number, research suggests that we may struggle to make decisions when presented with more options than that. One strategy is to make a list of five to eight work-related (or school- or family-) tasks to accomplish for the day with a separate list of two to three chores or personal tasks. Categorizing separately can reduce confusion and help...

Photo : svastika ( Shutterstock ) For those of us with iPhones, sharing our location with friends and family is simple. The Find My app (formally Find My Friends) is your one- stop shop for tracking the contacts, devices, and items in your life. But on Android, there’s not an obvious equivalent. You won’t find a “Share Location” option when texting your friends on Pixel, Galaxy, or OnePlus. But a s it turns out, Android’s Find My alternative might be more useful than Apple’s app. When you want to share your location on Android with a friend, don’t turn to a third-party app. Use one of Google’s instead: Google Maps. Everyone’s favorite navigation app is the perfect solution to keep tabs on your friends. The best part? It isn’t platform-specific, so you can track your friends on Android and iPhone. You can even use Google Maps location sharing on a computer, since it’s tied to your Google Account. The feature requires you to have your friend’s Gmail address in your Google contacts...

Photo : nikkimeel ( Shutterstock ) Apple prides itself on being a privacy-first company, and when it comes to devices like iPhone and Mac, that’s true. But Apple’s iCloud backups were tangled in a mess of different encryption standards. Some things on iCloud, like your health data and passwords, are end-to-end encrypted. But a lot of stuff, like your notes, your photos, and your iMessages (when backing up to iCloud), aren’t. Apple now is starting to right this wrong, introducing a way to manually enable end-to-end encryption on many new data types. What is Advanced Data Protection, and how does it work? These changes come in the form of a new umbrella feature called Advanced Data Protection. Before Advanced Data Protection, only certain data types were encrypted end-to-end. Others were encrypted in transit to iCloud and when living on the iCloud server, but Apple always had the encryption key on hand should you need it. That’s c onvenient if you lose your password and need Apple t...

Photo : Shutterstock ( Shutterstock ) L ike many veteran internet users, I have had my Google Account for a long time. More than a decade in, I’m running out of my free 15GB of storage, and most of that space is t aken up by Gmail. While the majority of those messages are junk and spam, some are important to me, so I don’t want to delete things haphazardly—but sorting through them would take forever . If you find yourself in similar straits,   do what I did: download your Gmail emails to your computer as an easy backup. There are two steps to dealing with a Gmail backup . The first, of course, is downloading the messages from Google, but it doesn’t end there. Google will send you the files in .mbox format, a file format none of the apps on your computer can likely read. But, that’s okay. We’ll fix that. How to download your Gmail emails (gmails?) Google makes it easy to save your Gmail messages. H ead to Google, click your profile icon, and choose “Manage your Google Account....

Photo : oasisamuel ( Shutterstock ) I recently picked up a new iPhone, and for the most part, I love it. What I didn’t love was not having my iMessages on my new iPhone synced up with my other Apple devices. Sure, my new phone had my most recent messages, but from there, things got weird. For example, most of the messages I saw when I first opened many of my chats were from 2017 , which isn’t ideal. Luckily, I have managed to fix  this problem, and so can you. iMessages sometimes fall out of sync across your Apple devices For some reason when you set up a new iPhone or Apple device and try to sync it with Messages stored in iCloud, your new device might not download all of the available messages. You’ll see messages you sent that day, but then run into messages from years ago, with nothing in between. It’s possible your phone is still be downloading your iMessage library, which, depending on how large it is, might take a long time. However, if you don’t see any indication that yo...