India accepts modified version of DRS

Hong Kong, (AFP): India said Monday that it had agreed to a modified version of the controversial Umpire Decision Review System, bringing to an end a damaging row which threatened to tear apart international cricket.

The International Cricket Council's chief executives' committee unanimously agreed at its Hong Kong conference to make DRS mandatory in all international Tests and one-day matches, India's cricket authorities announced.

"The BCCI has always expressed its willingness to embrace technology, for the betterment of the game," said Narayanaswami Srinivasan, the president-elect of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, in a statement posted on its website.

The ground-breaking deal means that India will, for the first time, agree to using the DRS in a Test series when they tour England from July. But Srinivasan added: "However, the current (Hawkeye) ball-tracking technology, on which the DRS system is based, is not acceptable to the board.

"The BCCI is agreeable to the use of technology in decision-making, which will include infra-red cameras and audio-tracking devices. "The BCCI's view was supported at the ongoing ICC CEC meeting in Hong Kong."

Hot Spot, the "thermal imaging" technology now available and made mandatory in the DRS, will mostly be used for close catches and edges. But the committee decided that the use of Hawkeye, which tracks the trajectory of the delivery, would continue to depend on agreement between both teams in any match. Lbw decisions will continue to be governed by the on-field umpires.

Under the agreement, teams will be allowed to make one incorrect challenge to an on-field umpire's decision before all their referrals for that innings are used up.

A two-challenge system, broadly accepted by most of cricket's leading nations, was in use at the recent World Cup in the subcontinent, which India won.

The BCCI had questioned the accuracy of the technology involved in the DRS and Monday's deal marks a significant concession from the world champions, who have been opposed almost from the moment of the system's inception in 2009.

India had been adamant they wanted no part of DRS in their four-Test tour of England and a controversial lbw decision during the rivals' tied World Cup match, where England's Ian Bell was given not out even though replays suggested he was in fact lbw, seemed to have hardened their stance.

But Dave Richardson, the ICC's general manager for cricket, had said following a two-day meeting of the ICC's cricket committee at Lord's in May he was confident of changing India's mind.

India, whose financial clout in world cricket gives them huge bargaining power among the Test-playing nations, have often drawn criticism for what has been seen as their unhealthy influence on the global game.

The mandatory terms and conditions for the DRS have been recommended to the executive board for approval on Tuesday, seen as a formality now that India's crucial backing has been secured.

Isha, Zaheer to get engaged

A few days ago, reports did the rounds that Indian fast bowler Zaheer Khan had secretly married his longtime love interest Isha Sharvani. Both Zaheer and Isha were quick to quash the reports as unfounded gossip, and also denied rumours that they had started living together.Now, reports coming in seem to suggest that Zaheer and Isha are planning to get engaged. The couple has been insisting that they are "close friends" for quite a while now, although a section of the press some time ago reported that they were headed for a split.The subsequent buzz was that they had patched up. The latest on the couple is that they could be engaged by the end of this year. However, sources close to the actress said the couple's marriage was not immediately on the cards. Well, only time will tell whether or not the two will marry this year.

The End of Unwanted Phone Calls and Spam?

Mensxp - Friday 24 June 2011 4:13 PM IST

The end of unwanted texts and calls from marketing 'executives' might be near.

Last year, TRAI had announced that calling phone numbers registered in the Do-Not-Call Registry (over a 100 million mobile phone users) would invoke a first fine of Rs and up to Rs 2.5 lakh for the sixth offense, after which any failure to comply would lead to a 2 year blacklist.

Previously, penalties stood at Rs 500 and Rs 1000

This powerful measure had not been legislated, even after 4 (missed) deadlines. Now, according to an official's statement to the Economic Times, this measure might be formally passed by end June.

The new rules will let you screen out all telemarketing calls, while opting to receive SMSs, which can also be filtered by your area of choice, ranging from banking and financial products to real estate, education, health, consumer goods, automobiles, communication, entertainment, tourism nd leisure.

Further, you won't be receiving this text messages at odd hours - the 9PM to 9 AM telemarketing text window will be closed. This will also be applicable to unregistered customers.

The TRAI recently sent a new communication to the Indian Department of Telecom, asking for completion of registering telemarketers with the '140' number series, an easy way to spot unsolicited commercial calls.

However, BSNL is asking for more time (till the end of the calendar year)to upgrade to the new ten-digit numbers starting with 140.

'The delay is due to BSNL - most of their switching infrastructure is old and it will be challenge for them to get it ready to handle the new numbering series on landlines. On the mobile side, the infrastructure is largely in place across all operators," explained Rajan Mathews, who heads the Cellular Operators Association of India, the industry lobby representing all GSM players.

There have also been reports of more powers in curbing erring telemarketers.

Action on spam SMS and telemarketing scenario was held up due to the legal issues between regulators and the Department of Telecom.  (MensXP.com)

China's 300 kmph Beijing-Shanghai bullet train!

BEIJING (AP) -- Builders of China's fast-growing bullet train network conducted a test run of its showcase Beijing-to-Shanghai line Monday amid controversy over the prestige project's high cost.

A train carrying government officials, managers of the companies that built the line and reporters left Beijing for the 1,318-kilometer (824-mile) trip. It was due to take about five hours, or half the time of conventional rail.

The communist government is building thousands of miles (kilometers) of high-speed rail to link together China's far-flung regions and show off its rising wealth and technological prowess.

China's luxury fast train debutsChina's 300km-an-hour train makes its public debut amid questions about whether the $34-billion locomotive will ever make a profit. Andrew Raven reports.

The multibillion-dollar plan has provoked complaints that it is too expensive for a country where millions of people still live in poverty. The government announced in April the top speed of the fastest lines would be reduced from 350 kph (220 mph) to 300 kph (190 mph) and ticket prices would be cut.

Official plans call for the network to expand to 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) of track this year and 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) by 2020.

China's trains are based on Japanese, French and German technology but its manufacturers are trying to sell to Latin America and the Middle East. That has prompted complaints Beijing is violating the spirit of licenses with foreign providers by reselling technology that was meant to be used only inChina.

Monday's test run comes ahead of celebrations of the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party on July 1.

In a statement, the Ministry of Railways said it made extensive preparations for safety and security. They include plans for daily inspections of tracks and other facilities and an earthquake monitoring system.

The Beijing-Shanghai line crosses seven provinces that include some of China's most densely populated and economically developed areas.

The railway ministry says the line will run 63 pairs of trains a day at 300 kph (190 mph) and 27 at 250 kph (155 mph). Ticket prices range from 1,750 yuan ($269) for a business class seat on the fastest train to 410 yuan ($63) for second-class on slower trains.

China unveils super fast trainChina has showed off its new high speed rail line.

Government plans call for spending 700 billion yuan ($106 billion) on railway building this year. The railway ministry says the Beijing-Shanghai line cost 215 billion yuan ($32.5 billion).

Critics say railway officials have diverted too much money to high-speed rail and should be expanding lower-cost traditional rail.

During the Lunar New Year holiday in February, working class travelers complained they couldn't afford high-speed tickets and regular trains were sold out. A migrant worker became an Internet sensation when he stripped to his underwear to protest outside a ticket office after he waited 14 hours in line but couldn't get tickets for his family.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection said earlier this year that construction of one line and operation of another already completed, both in China's east, must stop until they receive environmental approval.

Best engineering colleges in North India

by Team Careers360 - 24 Jun, 2011

Top Engineering colleges survey - Methodology

IITs & NITs undoubtedly offer you the best engineering degree but entry is tough. The challenge is to find amongst the other 3200+ colleges, the ones that offer a decent quality of education. Here is some help...

by Team Careers360 - 23 Jun, 2011

Booming from 5 lakh seats and 1,500 engineering colleges in 2005-06 to more than 13 lakh seats across 3,200 colleges in 2010-11, technical education in India is witnessing an unprecedented growth. The number of seats has been increasing by more than 25% in the last three years consistently. Even the number of IITs, the premium national varsities, has swelled to 15 across the country.

Note: Last year we ranked the top 117 colleges although the scantily available information in the public domain prevented us from spreading our wings further. To compensate, we had provided not only the state-based rating, but also a research-output based rating for the top-notch colleges and an all-India rating for institutions admitting students through the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE). This year, we go two steps further not only by including top 550+ colleges in the rating process but also providing a single unified rating by amalgamating all different rankings into a balanced scorecard (please read the methodology for details). We hope this will help you, the reader, substantially in making an informed choice in the engineering education space.

Methodology
On our quest to identify and rate the top engineering colleges in the country, we began by collating and analysing the publicly available rankings of the last 5 years in leading and reliable publications. A second list was prepared by talking to leading IT recruiters and their opinion on the leading engineering colleges. Thus emerged the initial list of top 700 colleges and we set upon the arduous task of collecting authentic data on them. The college websites were scanned, their mandatory disclosures were downloaded, data was collected via questionnaires from colleges willing to participate in our national survey, and RTIs were filed with AICTE, the apex regulating agency.

India's Top 50 Engineering Colleges

All the collected data was cross-checked and verified from multiple sources to ensure their reliability and validity, namely the reports from National Board of Accreditation for accreditation details, Annual Reports of institutions etc. The data was then processed through our unique Input-Process-Output methodology, adapted for Engineering Colleges and fine-tuned on the basis of our last year’s experience.

The component parameters were given weights in proportion of 35:25:40. (See table for detailed break-up). The resulting scores had to be normalised to account for the unevenness in the availability of data. A national ranking of all the colleges admitting students through AIEEE was drawn up using the opening and closing ranks of AIEEE 2010 counselling and amalgamated into the existing ranking. The result was a unified, composite state-wise ranking giving us a single list comprising the IITs, NITs, IIITs, deemed universities, AIEEE colleges and institutes based on State entrance tests. In addition to the rating, we also produced a list of top 50 colleges.

State-wise engineering colleges rating
As we moved from a weight based cluster analysis, to a cut-off based discrimination, reputations began to take a tumble. IIT Khargpur which has been an undisputed leader last year, suddenly moved down five places to 5th rank, amongst top 50, showing clearly that, student preferences are an outcome of complex considerations and hence institutes need to keep in mind how to keep their students happy by offering value. Being a good research institute is just not enough.

How to use the ranking
Among the national exams, IIT-JEE, AIEEE and ENAT, only ENAT does not publish cut-offs. IIT-JEE cut-offs this year could be assessed too. Thus, ratings for colleges associated with the first two sets are comparable.

At the state level, it is impossible to compare colleges belonging to different states. In other words, a AAA college in one state may not give the same opportunities or education vis-à-vis AAA college in another. Factors such as larger concentration of colleges, age of the college, alumni network and competition, all form a part of the experience.

So use our rating to assess colleges within your state. To enable ease of use, we have also listed AIEEE colleges and IITs under the state list. And, based on their performance in JEE or AIEEE, they have been awarded a national ranking. Alternativley a poll of select academics was also used to assess their national standing. So each college gets a state level rank and a national level rank. For a student a state level rank is more appropriate.

Deemed and private universities are a major area of concern. Barring a few of them, most colleges have very little usable information on their websites and they do not even publish the minimum disclosure norms mandated by the University Grants Commission (UGC). We have rated them using past rankings as well as publicly available information. So consider our rating only as a broad guideline in these cases.

And finally, here’s wishing you a fruitful four years at the college of your choice!

(With inputs from Shahid Nawaz,Tanmay Perti, Pooja Mishra, Nirmesh Shrivastav and Nimesh Chandra)

Best engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu

India's Top 50 Engineering Colleges 2011

Ranking the top colleges is a very difficult task. While it is relatively easy to create clusters of colleges, it is differentiating within clusters that became the most difficult exercise. So for the first time in the country we have used balanced scorecard methodology to arrive at the ranking of the top 50 colleges. Ranking methodology: We scanned the last five year rankings of about 241 colleges and normalised their ranks, by assigning differential weights to subjective and objective ranking. Such a process is used to develop clusters of institutions. The research standing of individual institutions were further used to refine the clusters and remove the odd men out. Individual clusters were ranked serially. In each of these clusters the differences in cut-off marks, wherever possible (like in case of IITs and AIEEE institutes and some States) were used to arrive at individual ranks. Heavily dominated by public institutions, the top-50 listing is a roll call of excellence India’s top 50 engineering institutions 2011

Apple re-launching iPhone 3GS in India for Rs 19,990

Yes, you read that right. According to cellphone dealers, Apple is "re-launching" its two-year-old iPhone at a price of Rs 19,990 in India. The move is likely to counter cheap Android smartphones that have flooded the market recently. This particular version of iPhone will come with 8GB internal storage. 

Manish Khatri, a mobile dealer in Mumbai, tweeted on Friday evening that shops had already received stock and the phone will be available from Saturday at the said price with one year official warranty. In Delhi too, several dealers said they had received stock of iPhone 3GS (8GB) on Thursday evening. 

iPhone 3GS was originally released in June 2009. It has a 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen (320 x 480 pixels) and is powered by a 600Mhz processor. However, as it happens in the case of Apple products, the hardware specifications can be misleading when it comes to performance and usability. 

Apple's latest iOS version 4.3 supports iPhone 3GS and that makes the phone a worthy opponent to similarly-priced Android devices that have better hardware. Apple has also said that iOS 5 will work on iPhone 3GS though it is likely that not all features will be supported. 

At the price of Rs 19,990, iPhone 3GS will directly compete with Samsung Nexus S , a phone that saw its price fall by over Rs 6,000 to touch Rs 19,999 a few weeks ago. Nexus S, which runs on Android 2.3 aka Gingerbread, has a 4-inch capacitive screen. It is powered by a 1Ghz processor, packs 512MB RAM and comes with 16GB internal storage.

Apple files patent suit against Samsung in S.Korea

The litigation comes as Samsung filed patent suits in South Korea, Japan and Germany in April over the U.S. company's iPhone and iPad after Apple claimed Samsung's Galaxy line "slavishly" copied its products. 

Global technology companies are locked in a web of litigation as they try to defend their shares of the booming tablet and smartphone market. Last week, a lawyer for Apple said in a US court that executives "at the highest levels" of both companies are in talks about patent litigation. 

This was after the judge referenced the close business relationship between the two companies to resolve the case through alternative dispute resolution outside the court. Apple, which was Samsung's second-biggest client after Japan's Sony Corp last year, became the South Korean firm's biggest customer in the first quarter, mainly by purchasing semiconductors, according to Samsung's quarterly report. Samsung is one of the fastestgrowing smartphone makers on the back of a boom in Android operating system and has emerged as Apple's strongest competitor in the tablet market. 

A spokesman for Apple Korea declined to comment on the patent law suit and reiterated the company's previous stance. "It is no coincidence that Samsung's latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging," the spokesman said. In the previous filing against Apple, Samsung said it was seeking compensation for patent infringements. Samsung shares closed up 2.5% ahead of news of the lawsuit.

Bharti Airtel to cut 2,000 jobs

Bharti Airtel has embarked on a restructuring exercise that will merge three separate businesses, triggering a large-scale job cull for the first time in the services sector since the 2008 economic slowdown.

Under this exercise, Bharti Airtel plans to merge its mobile, satellite TV ( DTH), and fixed-line & broadband telemedia business, which jointly account for about 90% of the company's revenues and the vast majority of its workforce, into a single entity. 

The merger, ostensibly aimed at cutting costs and boosting efficiency at the country's biggest telecom operator at a time of falling profits, is expected to lead to big job losses, with estimates putting the number at more than 2,000. 

Bharti's move could provide the trigger for similar action at rivals, many of whom are battling identical issues-debt burden, slowing growth and high marketing spends amid cut-price tariffs. Several Bharti executives and others familiar with the company's plans told ET that managers had been told to cut positions in their teams and that the merger would create large-scale redundancies. 

"The estimate is that up to 25% of the 11,500 or so positions in the three verticals will be axed. The process has already started," said one company executive who has been asked to bring down the number of his direct reports. Another executive based out of Airtel's Delhi office said "the brunt of the merger will be felt across all levels", noting that each of the three business verticals has separate teams for sales, product, strategy, human resources and finance, all led by separate CEOs. 

A third employee said: "Employees were being sounded out about the restructuring, which on completion could impact 20-30% of Airtel's 16,830 employees in the country, including in its enterprise business." The enterprise arm is Bharti Airtel's fourth business division, serving corporates and small & medium businesses and also responsible for its undersea cable offerings. 

Bharti, in its response to specific queries sent by ET, confirmed the restructuring, but said it would have "minimal impact on people". "As and when any change is planned, the same will be done in the interest of all stakeholders and shared in an open and transparent manner." 

Co unlikely to go for mass sackings.

PCs in India may get cheaper by 5%

Computers in India may become cheaper as a result of a row between global chip manufacturers, such as Intel and AMD, over standards.

The world's second-largest PC chipmaker AMDsays processors in India are likely to become cheaper by 5% due to its exit from the global chip benchmark body, this week. AMD declined to support the newly-launched chip standard Sysmark 2012 and quit the benchmark body, Business Applications Performance Corporation (Bapco) benchmark, this week. 

Sysmark2012 is being supported by Intel. "It's an outdated chip benchmark. It means costlier chips and a loss of $8 billion globally to users. Now, we will be free to produce chips without subscribing to Bapco's Sysmark benchmark," Ravi Swaminathan, AMD India head, told ET. "It has the potential to make chips cheaper by at least 5% in India," he added. 

The Sysmark benchmark, AMD says, was used to produce chips with very high scores but many unnecessary components, often not required by a general consumer, were a drawback. This led to higher chip prices. Bapco has members such as Toshiba , Dell , Lenovo, HP, Sony , Samsung and Hitachi. Intel is the only large chipmaker in the body now. 

Taiwanese chipset manufacturer Via and USbased graphics card maker Nvidia also quit Bapco on the issue. Bapco provides chip standards that other chip manufacturers used to subscribe to. Intel, the largest chipmaker, on the other hand, applauds Bapco's controversial Sysmark 2012. 

Surat businessman buys Sachin's red Ferrari

Surat, June 23 (PTI) The ''360 Modena Ferrari'', which once occupied pride of place in batting icon Sachin Tendulkar's fleet of premium cars, is now a prized possession of a city businessman.

Jayesh Desai, Chairman of Raj Hans group, said he purchased the car a fortnight ago.

"I have bought the 360 Modena Ferrari car directly from Sachin Tendulkar with all legal documents," Desai told PTI, but declined to reveal the price.

"It was my dream to drive a Ferrari and now my dream has come true," Desai, who has a passion for driving luxury cars, said.

The Ferrari, which was presented to Tendulkar by racing legend Michael Schumacher, will be the first racing car in his fleet of luxury vehicles, Desai said, adding that his latest acquisition was a prized possession as it was owned by the batting great.

"Kindly ask me only about the car and nothing about Sachin," he said when asked if he and Tendulkar were friends or had known each other.

The Ferrari had got mired in a controversy in 2003 after it was reported that Tendulkar had requested for a customs duty waiver despite getting it as a gift and not winning it as a prize in a tournament.

In August 2003, the finance ministry had exempted Tendulkar from paying around Rs 1.13 crore (approximately USD 245,000) towards import duty for the vehicle, valued at Rs 75 lakh (approximately USD 162,600).

The car was gifted to him by FIAT, which manufactures the premium Ferrari cars and endorsed by Tendulkar, after the Indian batting legend equalled Don Bradman''s tally of 29 Test centuries.

Ferrari''s Formula One driver Schumacher presented the car on behalf of the company to Tendulkar when the two met in 2002 at Silverstone, England.

Tendulkar has taken a break from cricket after playing in IPL and is away on a vacation in Englandwith family.

Infosys, Tata Group ahead of Google & Facebook in thought leadership

India's homegrown firms Infosys and Tata Group rank higher than global giants like Google and Facebook, when it comes to thought leadership, according to a report by a UK-based consultancy firm. 

TLG Communications' BRIC Index of Thought Leaders 2011 highlights the most successful thought leaders, according to Indian opinion formers. Respondents to the research included company directors, newspaper editors, senior politicians and charity leaders. 

While the country's second largest IT services provider Infosys took the top slot in the list, that defines thought leaders as organisations or individuals that change attitudes and behaviours, Tata Group made it to second spot. Some of the other top ten thought leaders included L&T, Maruti-Suzuki and State Bank of India . 

Amongst the global firms, Google made it to third spot, while Nokia came in sixth and Facebook took the eighth spot. In the US and UK, Apple took the top slot while Google came in second.

Bangalore cops tell Google to pull out Street View cars

Just three weeks after Google's Street View cars started driving around Bangalore, the company has grounded the fleet after an objection from the city police.

According to Google, it received a letter from the Commissioner of Police of Bangalore asking it to stop the cars. The cars were taking pictures and mapping streets of Bangalore. The data was supposed to be used for Google's Street View service . 

"We can confirm that we have received a letter from the commissioner of police regarding Street View. We are currently reviewing it and have stopped our cars until we have a chance to answer any questions or concerns the police have," said a Google spokesperson. 

According to Google, it received the letter last week. Sources said the commissioner has asked the search engine giant to stop photographing streets of Bangalore. The commissioner has also called Google officials for further discussions on the matter. Before Street View cars started operating, Google claims it took permission from the traffic department of Bangalore police 

According to MediaNama, the police have reservations regarding legality of Google's Street View in India. An anonymous source reportedly told the website that the police acted because there were several restrictions on photography by foreigners or foreign firms in India. 

The police also reportedly consider Street View and the data presented through it as a form of new media, putting it under the ambit of foreign direct investment policy that governs investment and participation by foreign companies in Indian media. 

Even though Google Street View has proven immensely popular with users, the service has faced resistance in several parts of the world. The data in Street View is not shown to users in real-time but there have been privacy concerns over its use. 

MIT to set up institute in Russia

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Russia's Skolkovo Foundation have signed an agreement to set up an institute at the 'silicon valley' near Moscow. The Skolkovo hi-tech centre outside Moscow, created on the initiative of President Dmitry Medvedev, aims to focus on research in energy, information technology, communication and biomedical research. 

The agreement plans a three-year collaboration between the two sides to build the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (SIST), said Skolkovo president Viktor Vekselberg. 

The MIT website said the university will assist the Skolkovo Foundation in building the SIST as a "unique, world-class" graduate research institute. 

The Skolkovo Foundation also signed a deal with US software firm IBM on opening an IBM research and development centre in the Russian silicon valley, Vekselberg said.

Tutorial: How to back up Gmail

Your state of the art RAID device is no good if you don't use it properly to back up your data. Even if you fire up your backup software routinely and make a copy of everything from the boot loader up to your music, you're leaving a huge gap in your backup policy.

You might not realise what you're missing yet, but the 150,000 people who temporarily lost the contents of their Gmail inboxes earlier this year will know exactly what we're taking about.

There's something about big-name web apps that make us trust their remote servers, which are just as fallible as our own kit and are located halfway across the world. Whether it's Gmail, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, your website or your blog, we've all got data out there.

If you don't want to wake up to an empty account or the realisation that a service you've come to rely on has been discontinued, it's time to get your act (and your data) together.

Back up Gmail

Gmail is the most popular free, web-based email service. It offers over 7GB of storage capacity, and people used it as an online storage repository to store their files long before purpose-built storage on the cloud became affordable.

The best way to create a local backup of your emails is to use an offline IMAP client like Mozilla Thunderbird. IMAP (internet message application protocol) is the most popular protocol for retrieving emails. Most popular email clients support the IMAP protocol, but the advantage of Thunderbird (besides being free) is that it offers a consistent environment across Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, so you should be able to reproduce these steps no matter which OS you use.

Log into your Gmail account to enable IMAP access. Click the 'Options' icon, followed by 'Mail settings', then head to the 'Forwarding and POP/IMAP' tab. Make sure POP is disabled and IMAP access is enabled.

Head to Thunderbird's website, where you can grab and install the latest version for your platform. When you launch it for the first time, Thunderbird will prompt you for your account information. Give it your name, your Gmail username (including '@gmail. com') and password. When you click 'Continue', Thunderbird will fetch settings to let you send and receive email via Gmail. Accept the settings by clicking the 'Create account' button.

If you already use Thunderbird to manage another account, you can add your Gmail to your setup. Launch the client, head over to 'Tools | Account Settings' and select 'Add mail account' from the dropdown list on the left.

Once set up, Thunderbird will authenticate your Gmail account and grab all your emails – received and sent. Depending on the size of your account (scroll down to the bottom of your Gmail account to find out how large it is), fetching all the emails might take some time, from a couple of hours to a couple of days.

You can fire up Thunderbird on a regular schedule and let it grab your new messages. To make sure the messages are available while you're offline, head to 'File | Offline | Download/sync now'. You can use Thunderbird as your regular email client, and switch between it and the web interface.

Once set up, Thunderbird will recreate all your labels on Gmail as folders, and messages with multiple labels will be displayed in both folders. Folders created in Thunderbird will be created as labels in the online version of Gmail.

In Thunderbird, use either 'Move to' or 'Copy to' to apply or change labels to messages. When you write and send a message from Thunderbird, it will show up in the 'Sent mail' folder in the web interface.

Restore deleted emails

For most situations, Thunderbird is an ideal backup strategy for Gmail. But there's safety in numbers, which is where Gmail-Backup comes into play. This program copies your emails, but unlike Thunderbird, it can also restore them back to your Gmail account.

If you accidentally delete a thread in Gmail, it will only exist in Thunderbird until you sync it up with your account. When it syncs, Thunderbird will also delete the copy of the thread from your hard disk. With Gmail-Backup, you can restore messages from a backed up copy.

First, grab Gmail-Backup from www.gmail-backup.com. Although the program hasn't been updated for some time, it still works well.

There isn't much setup involved. Fire it up and point it to your Gmail account by specifying the login name (with '@gmail. com') and password. You also need to point it to a folder where it can store the downloaded emails.

Your emails are stored in the standard EML format and can be viewed in any email client, including Thunderbird. As with Thunderbird, how long the initial download takes will depend on the size of your inbox.

With Gmail-Backup you also have the flexibility of downloading messages between specific dates by entering the date intervals. The program backs up the 'All mails' folder, which includes all received, sent and draft emails. It also keeps a record of all the labels (in a 'labels.txt' file), and lets you add labels manually before restoring the emails to Gmail.

To restore emails, either to the same email account or a different one, you need to specify its login details. If you want to restore all emails, select the 'Newest emails only' box; otherwise, specify a time period.

One inconvenience with Gmail-Backup is that when it restores messages, sent emails don't show up under 'Sent mail' in the web interface. You can see them in the 'All mail' view, though.

Back up address books

Almost all web mail services let you export your address book. In Gmail, head to the 'Contacts' tab, and select the 'Export' option from the 'More actions' dropdown list. You can now export your address book in Outlook CSV or vCard format to import into Thunderbird, or in Google's CSV format to import back into Gmail.

In Yahoo Mail, go to 'Contacts', click 'Tools' and select 'Export' from the dropdown menu. From the list, pick a format that's compatible with the into you want to import the addresses into. The Yahoo CSV format works best to import the contacts into Gmail.

You can also pull in contacts and emails from other web mail from within Gmail. Go to your Mail Settings page in Gmail, and click on the 'Accounts and import' tab. Now click the 'Import mail and contacts' button, and fill in details of the account you want to import the address book from. Once Gmail connects, you can select the type of data you want it to import.

Once all the addresses are in your Gmail address book, the Google-Contacts plugin can sync it with Thunderbird.

Store passwords

Juggling passwords for web services isn't much of an issue thanks to OpenID, but not all services use it. Then there are services you registered with before they supported OpenID.

That's where LastPass steps in. It's a password manager that works across browsers on all operating systems, and on several mobile devices. It encrypts all your passwords and keeps them on your machine. You can switch browsers or operating systems, and still have access to them.

LastPass is easy to download and install. It detects your system settings automatically and points you to the appropriate file. Once installed, it'll sit next to your browser's address bar. It's wise to back passwords up to your local disk periodically.

Click the LastPass icon next to the address bar, and head over to 'Tools | Export to'. From here you can download the passwords as a plain text LastPass CSV file, or an encrypted file.

Archive web services with Backupify

1. Register with Backupify

It might sound crazy to use a web-based service to back up data from another web-based service, but besides providing another copy of your data in case of an emergency, Backupify also rolls it into an easy to download form for some services.

2. Add online services

Once you've registered with the site, you're ready to log into your Backupify account and select the service you want to back up. Backupify currently supports Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn and Google Docs, among others.

3. Configure each service

Depending on the service you've selected, you might need to carry out some additional configuration before Backupify starts storing your data. Once you account has been configured successfully, Backupify will get to work.

4. Browse archives

All stored data is accessible via each service's 'Archives' section. If you use Backupify to back up your Twitter account, it will also generate a downloadable PDF of your tweets, which is easier to read than a document in XML format..

5. Restore email

In addition to backing up your Gmail mailbox, Backupify also lets you restore deleted messages. Some services offer more comprehensive support for backup restoration than others. The restored messages will appear under a 'Backupify restore' label.

6. Upgrade

The free Backupify account lets you store up to 2GB of data online. If you want the benefits of more storage space, nightly backups, technical support and other add-ons, there are upgrade options starting at $4.99 (about £3.10) a month.