Unwanted emails purged easily in Gmail

Just making a simple note tonight that Gmail gives users a simple way to purge unwanted emails.

Gmail automatically sorts social media related notifications, and promotional emails into separate folders. A user can delete all of the emails in either category simply by clicking on the tab for each at the top of the Gmail inbox and then choosing all in the drop-down menu for the selection box at the upper left.

Hotmail doesn't allow these types of unwanted messages to be removed as easily. Something to keep in mind when freeing up space in your own web-based email account, and when considering email collection from personal accounts.

Forensic Review of Gmail Message to Find What Time It Was Sent

In his blog post of June 17, 2020, the great Craig Ball discussed how to determine the precise time that a gmail message was sent by reviewing the original code of the message. This can help clear up confusion caused by email threads between people in different time zones. Here's a rundown of how to do this.

1. In an email message sent from a gmail account, select the drop-down menu by clicking on the three dots to the right of the message's header, and then select 'Show original'.

2. This will open the raw code for the message. Review the code for references to a timestamp. You should be able to find these by searching for the tag, "t=". The value following this tag measures the number of 100 nanosecond intervals between the precise time the message was sent and midnight on January 1, 1601. Windows uses this arbitrary date (or the date of the first full century since the adoption of the Gregorian calendar) as a yardstick. In this example we find the number, '1594755105' used as a time code.

3. On the site of Dan's Tools, there is an epoch timestamp converter. When the number 1594755105 is entered it gives the precise time of July 14, 2020, 19:31:45 UTC.

Bit Recover Email Conversion Tools

Bit Recover has a number of different tools to assist with data recovery, and email conversion. Be sure to check out the 39 free tools Bit Recover makes available here. The tools allow you to review .pst archives, .ost files, .mbox email files (used by Eudora, Thunderbird, and other emails clients); convert Word documents to PDF (& vice versa); and count the number of emails in .mbox and .pst archives. They have limited functionality unless you purchase a license, but you can use them for projects with small data sets.

I tested two of these tools tonight.

The MBOX wizard easily accessed an .mbox archive file with multiple emails.

The tool also allows you to export the emails as PDFs; .msg files; a .pst archive and other common formats.

The DOC to PDF Wizard will convert multiple Word documents to PDF format.