No, not because Microsoft didn’t buy them. I just don’t like gmail. You can’t create folders in which to store your mail. Instead you have to label it. Then, to *start* finding it you have to click on the All mail link. Then you have to find one of the mails labeled with the subject. After that you do a More actions and click of filter more messages like these. What a mess. What a waste of time.

You can’t highlight mail that you want to delete by holding down the control key. Oh no, that would be too easy. You see, gmail has single click like a web link. I despise that in Windows and the Linux KDE desktop and I don’t like it here either. At least in Windows and on the KDE desktop you have the option to turn it off. So with gmail you have to click select all and then go through and deselect the mail that you don’t want to delete.

Yes I still have mail going into my gmail account. I did change some of it for my RHEL and Sun accounts. Maybe a few others. But, at the end of the day, I still prefer Yahoo mail over gmail.

And yes, the new Yahoo has it’s share of problems as well. I don’t know what is with the Yahoo developers that they can’t seem to develop something that at least either works on Firefox or Opera. Or maybe it’s the Firefox and Opera developers. The chicken and egg thing. But that’s a rant for another day.

-j

From an end user perspective the process is quite simple. Go to Clipperz and register. After registering you can then start adding the sites that you visit that require a password.

Once you are on the logged into Clipperz click on the Tools link on the orange tool bar on the right hand side. Once on that page scroll down and drag and drop the Add to Clipperz widget to you book marks bar.

Now browse to a web site that requires that you login. While at the login page click on the Add to Clipperz link in the bookmarks toolbar. A small pop-up window will open with some code inside. Copy this code and click on the tab (you are using tabbed browsing aren’t you?) where you are logged into Clipperz. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the radio button next to Direct login. Now paste the copied code from the pop-up window into the box title Direct login configuration and then click the create button.

After clicking the create button a new text box will show. This is where you put in your login and password information for the web site that you are adding to Clipperz. After you put this in and create it the web site will show on the middle and left hand side of your screen.

Click on the web site link listed on the left hand side of your screen. This will open up a new tab and automatically log you into the site. If you want to edit the title or change the pasword (or if you got it wrong when creating the link) click on the link in the middle of the page. This will allow you to edit your login information. It even has a facility to decrypt your password if you want to see what it is or just make sure that your are typing it correctly.

For the more technical or paranoid among us Clipperz uses Ajax and JavaScript technologies built into your browser to encrypt your passwords. The encryption takes place locally on your computer before being sent to the Clipperz servers. Thus the only thing sent over the internet or stored on their servers are the scrambled bits of your password.

With the advent of SaaS and Cloud Computing you need a secure single signon solution for your web based sites where you store photos, financial data and other electronic data. Clippez fills this need as well as working as a password manager and a vault for confidential data. Give it a spin today!

Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with Clipperz other than being a satisfied user.

-j