Scammers are sending fake sextortion emails claiming they hacked your camera and contacts. It’s all a bluff. Here’s how to spot the scam and why the best response is to do nothing.
Microsoft squeeze: If your email ends in @onmicrosoft(dot)com, heads up, Microsoft is putting strict new limits on you. Why? Because spammers abused the system. Starting Dec. 1, you’re capped at 100 external emails per day. If that’s you, it’s time to buy a real domain, or risk your messages bouncing.
700+
How many emails Mark Cuban reads and replies to every single day. No assistant. No Slack. Just three phones and an email trail stretching back to the ’90s. Meetings? Pass. He’d rather crush his inbox than lose an hour to a “quick sync.” Bonus: Gmail’s auto-replies do 20% of the heavy lifting.
📧 Let Gmail give you nudges: Go to Settings > See all settings > General > Nudges. Toggle on Suggest emails to reply to, so unanswered questions resurface at the top of your inbox. Then toggle on Suggest emails to follow up on to remind you when someone hasn’t replied to your message.
Turn AI into your personal assistant
Imagine a 24/7 digital assistant that never sleeps. AI can break down contracts, create presentations, summarize data, draft posts, and write Zoom follow-up emails. Here’s how to make AI your ultimate work sidekick.
Log in or lose everything
Old accounts can vanish faster than you think. Gmail, Shutterfly, Dropbox, Yahoo, and more may delete your photos, emails, and memories if you haven’t signed in. Here’s how long you really have to log in before it’s all gone.
⚡️ 3-second tech genius: In Gmail on desktop, you can change how closely emails are spaced in your inbox. Go to Settings > Density and choose Default, Comfortable or Compact.
✍️ Add a signature in Gmail: Go to Settings > See all settings > General > Signature. Click Create new, give it a name and type in details like your contact info and job title. You can also insert an image of your real signature. Then choose whether it appears on new emails, replies or both. Scroll down and hit Save Changes.
⚡️ 3-second tech genius: In Gmail, type “older_than:6m” in the search bar to find emails over 6 months old. Want to go deeper? Try “older_than:1y” to get stuff from a year ago. Wicked smart.
🚨 Watch out for this clever phishing scam that hooks you: Hackers are slipping the Japanese character “ん” (pronounced like a soft “n” and called a hiragana) into legitimate website URLs, replacing a normal slash “/.” To the naked eye, it looks normal, but click, and you’re headed straight to a malware buffet. This works because “ん” is part of Unicode, so browsers treat it as a valid web address character. Even pros can miss it at first glance. Bonus scam: fake “Intuit” emails where the “i” is swapped for a lowercase “L.” Your eyesight is the target, so always hover over links and check the real domain before you click.
She ran a spy ring for North Korea
An Arizona woman helped North Korean IT agents land fake remote jobs at 309 U.S. companies. Plus: you can now pay down national debt with Venmo, Microsoft reveals jobs AI is coming for, and why Mark Cuban reads 700 emails a day.
Find big files in Gmail: You can clear up space by searching for bulky emails. In the Gmail search bar, type filename:mp4 or filename:png to find large attachments. You can also search by size with larger:10mb. Select what you don’t need, and hit Delete to clean up your inbox.
Hackers trick Gmail’s AI summaries
Gmail’s Gemini AI shows quick bullet-point summaries at the top of your emails, but scammers can slip in fake warnings using hidden text.
📩 Swap Gmail icons for text: You know those little icons above your emails? You can change them to plain text. Go to Settings > See all settings, scroll down to Button labels, switch to Text, and click Save Changes. Now you’ll see clear labels like Archive, Spam and Delete. Yay, no more mystery buttons.
ChatGPT gets a PC now: OpenAI just gave ChatGPT a full-on virtual computer. It can now browse the web, run code, download and edit files, even log into your apps to draft emails or pull info. Basically, it does the annoying computer stuff for you. Available now for $200/month for Pro users. Coming soon to Plus and Team. I’m gonna try it out, so I can let you know how it works, or not.
📅 Schedule emails in Gmail: Most people don’t know this, but you can write an email now and send it later. In the compose window, click the arrow next to the blue Send button and choose Schedule send. Select Pick date & time, fill in the deets, then click Schedule send again. Easy.
🧠 Fight bots with bots: Getting fake iPhone charge alerts? Sketchy emails pretending to be PayPal? You’re not alone. The good news: PayPal’s new fraud-detecting AI is watching for this stuff in real time, and it’s getting freakishly good at it. Remember, it won’t catch all the scams though.
Don’t miss important emails: Gmail sorts your inbox into Primary, Promotions, Social and Updates tabs. If you always want to see emails from a specific sender (like me, hehe), just drag one of their messages into the Primary tab. When Gmail asks to do this for future messages, click Yes and you’re all set.
🍟 McHack at McHire: McDonald’s AI job portal leaked data from 64 million applications. Why? Because the login was basically “admin / 123456.” Hackers didn’t need skills (paywall link), just fingers. Names, emails, phone numbers … all up for grabs. The site was built by Paradox.ai, which now has a new definition of “paradox.”
💬 Mark texts as unread: It’s not just for emails. On iPhone, swipe right on a conversation and tap Mark as Unread (it looks like a speech bubble). On Android, press and hold the convo, tap the three-dot menu in the top-right corner, then choose Mark as unread, so you won’t forget to reply later.