Archive for February 29, 2012

Deactivating “restore messages” function

Deactivating “restore messages” function

Hotmail has great advantages for those users who want to be fully organized, those who love to have everything in place and be able to recover every single bit of information they may have lost. For a single user, this is especially great, but for those who share their hotmail’s account with many other users, there are some cares you must have, like be able to secure your password, or you may even don’t want them to read certain mails.

Of course, you can always delete those mails you don’t want other users to see, but they real problem is this: they can always restore those messages if they want to. Fortunately, Hotmail has some special options now for those who have to share a single account for many other users, and is the ability to deactivate the “restore messages” function. To do this, the first step is to log-in to your hotmail account. Once you’ve successfully logged-in, look for the “options” label on your inbox, click on it and then click on “more options”. A new page will load, and you’ll now have to click on the link named “Advanced privacy settings”, under the “Customizing Hotmail” title.

A new page will load again, and now you must pay attention to the second option, the “deleted messages” one. By clicking on the bottom option you’ll disable the “restore messages” function, and be letting the first option marked, you can restore your messages whenever you want. Once you’ve clicked on the second option, click on “save” button and you’re more than ready.

The best thing about this option is that, if you’ve marked the second option and then saved, all the deleted messages up to that point will be permanently deleted and you won’t be able to restore any of them, even if you select the first option back. Now you can be sure that nobody will check those messages they shouldn’t read, or at least that is not necessary for them to know the content of that mail.

Exporting Hotmail contacts

Exporting Hotmail contacts

Computers are delicate tools, if you don’t know how to use them properly you can end up downloading a virus that may erase all of your important files in your computer, like family pictures, video, movies, songs you rightfully own, and even legal programs. This is way that if you have important files you cannot lose, you may want to back-up them by burning them in DVDs, CDs or even copy them to Hard Drive Disks or Flash memories.

But there is something maybe harder to back-up, and this is a contact list. If you delete the whole list by yourself you are able to get it back, but if someone else has stolen your account, you may have lost your entire contact list forever and ever, you won’t be able to get it back… or that was in the past. Now Hotmail has many services for you to take advantage, and once of those is to be able to back-up your contact list by exporting it in a special format. Doing this will take seconds, but will save lot of time incase you lose your account, and the first step to back-up your contact list is to log-in to your Hotmail account and head to your Inbox. Now you’ll find a link called “Options” in the right corner, click on it and then click on “more options” in the pop-up menu. A new page will load, showing lots of titles and options below those titles, but you’ll click on “exporting contacts” option under the “customize your contacts” title. Now you can save your back-up, since it’ll automatically start downloading your back-up contact list in .CSV format.

Once the file has finished downloading, you can now be sure that you have a back-up from your contact list in case your hotmail account gets stolen or a virus deletes all of your contacts. Remember to save this file in a safe place to avoid losing or deleting it.