Yahoo Mail Filters Your Inbox by Contacts and Connections

Yahoo's email service rolled out an interesting new feature today that filters your inbox to show only emails from contacts or "connections" to help you get to your most important emails first.

The new filtering features appear in a View From bar right above your inbox. When you view messages from contacts,

Yahoo Mail will display emails only from people you've manually added to your contact list. The slightly broader filter, called Connections, denotes people you've conversed with frequently but never manually added as a contact. You can still see your standard inbox that includes every email, but if you've got an inbox full of email and you want to get to the email you care about most first, filtering by either contacts or connections is a smart way to quickly get there.

Good on Yahoo Mail with this one; it's a feature we'd love to see rolled into other email apps out there. (You listening, Gmail?) If you don't immediately see the update in your Yahoo Mail account, take note: This feature will roll out in the next few weeks to both Classic and the new Yahoo! Mail users who have the Smarter Inbox features enabled. To get these new features, first create a Profile at profiles.yahoo.com and then log back into Yahoo! Mail. Only users in the US and Australia can get it now, but users from many more countries will be eligible soon.

Format a USB Drive as NTFS in Windows XP

Windows XP only: Today's USB flash drives are huge, but they come formatted with the FAT32 limit of 4GB files—if you want to format them as NTFS under Windows XP you'll need a little trick.

Windows XP does have the ability to format drives with the NTFS file system, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the format dialog—normally the option is disabled. To enable it, open up Device Manager and find your USB drive, go to the Properties -> Policies tab and then choose "Optimize for performance". Once you've done this, you'll see the NTFS option in the format dialog.

Readers should be warned, however, that once you've enabled write caching you will need to use the Safely Remove Hardware dialog to avoid losing data—though once you format the drive as NTFS you can switch the write caching back off.

The choice between NTFS and FAT32 isn't cut-and-dry—while NTFS does allow larger file sizes, encryption, compression, and permissions, there's a lot more overhead to using it—and more importantly it won't really work on non-Windows systems. Hit the link for the full walk-through and more information about the pros and cons.

Gmail Search Autocomplete Makes Searching Your Inbox a Breeze

Gmail Labs has released a great new Search Autocomplete feature today that offers search suggestions for all kinds of Gmail searches, from simple search-by-contacts to more advanced search queries—like for specific attachments.

The autocomplete is very smart, too, so when you want to search for a specific attachment type—like photos—you can just choose the has photos autocomplete, and

Gmail will generate the much more complicated filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR png) search operators. Handy, huh?

Likewise, it'll autogenerate the before and after date operators for you (before:yyyy/mm/dd), which have always been too complicated to remember all that well. As always, to enable this feature, just point your browser to Gmail Labs, enable Search Autocomplete, save your changes, and enjoy.

MindRaider Organizes and Visualizes Any Note Style

Windows/Mac/Linux: MindRaider wants to be the place you stash all your sudden thoughts, organizational notes, and inter-connected ideas. That's because it offers links, visualizations, and other tools to help you make sense of it all.

From the outset, MindRaider, a Java app that can run on any system that supports Java, looks like a kind of multi-window outlining program. And it is, in a way, but the idea is to use it as an uber-outline. You can attach files to

notes, or create symbolic links to local files. You can inter-link notes, documents, and outlines, use contextual tagging for an extra layer of finding something later, and use any of the pre-defined categories to segment out your ideas into broad containers. It supports a huge range of note formats, from simple text file to TWiki exports, and has a number of visualizations that help you kinetically wheel your thoughts around and pick what to fill out next.

Honestly? It's an application that would take more than just a glance and quick twiddle with to get comfortable and productive in. That sounds like a deal-breaker to most idealistic productivity minds, of course, but it looks like MindRaider can be pretty powerful, once you get your system rolling with it.

MindRaider is a free download, works wherever Java does.

Download Link : http://mindraider.sourceforge.net/

Skype 4 Beta 3 Adds Outlook Support, Bandwidth Manager

Skype has released a third beta of Skype 4 for Windows, which keeps the focus on large-screen video chat and adds a few new (and returning) tools.

Namely, support for Outlook contact importing, abuse reporting, and a "bandwidth manager" that aims to improve call quality are present in the Windows-only beta. The missing button to report call quality to Skype also makes a comeback.

Remote Desktop: TEAM VIEWER

Windows only: Joining the ranks of Crossloop, iRemotePC and LogMeIn, TeamViewer lets you connect to other PCs for remote access, tech support, file sharing and more.

The tiny setup program gives you the option of configuring your PC in host or client mode, or skipping installation altogether (in which case TeamViewer runs without installing anything). I chose the latter option on two PCs: one running XP, the other, Vista. From there I simply entered a numeric ID and password generated by the software, and presto: Instant remote access. In addition to controlling the other PC, I could transfer files and chat with the other user (myself, in this case). By enabling server mode, I was able to switch directions and share my desktop with the other PC—neat for showing presentations, demonstrations, etc.

TeamViewer works around firewalls and promises 1024-bit RSA private/public key exchange and 128-bit RC4 session encoding. In other words, it's pretty secure. It also has at least one advantage over each of the three aforementioned remote-access programs, so if you're interested in connecting to another computer from afar, give TeamViewer a try. The program is free for personal, non-commercial use, and it requires Windows 98 or later.

Internet Explorer Exploit Temporary Fix Now Available

Microsoft will be pushing out an unscheduled security patch for Internet Explorer's recently-discovered vulnerability tomorrow, but you can get a temporary patch from British software security firm Prevx today.
Tech news site TechRadar reports that simply not using IE won't keep the vulnerability from affecting your PC; an estimated 2 million PCs have already been infected. The vulnerability affects IE 6 and above, including Internet Explorer 8. Chances are most users (not reading this) won't get to the Prevx temporary fix before tomorrow, but if anything make sure Windows' software updates are turned on so you get Microsoft's official fix then.