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The holiday season is near and you want to send personalized email greetings to all your friends, family members and customers using the standard Gmail (or Google Apps with Gmail) service.

How to Send Bulk Emails using Gmail

Since the web interface of Gmail doesn’t support personalized emails, you should connect your Gmail account with Microsoft Outlook (via POP3 or IMAP) and also import the Gmail address book into your Outlook Contacts.

Now you can use the mail merge feature of Outlook to send personalized messages to every single Gmail contact from the desktop.

This may sound like an easy plan but there’re strict sending limits and, if you aren’t careful, Google may even block your Gmail account temporarily for up to 24 hours and you’ll neither be able to send nor receive any emails during that lock-out period.

Email Sending Limits in Google Apps

If you are using Gmail with Google Apps, you cannot send messages to more than 500 unique email addresses per day.

For instance, if you send one email to Person A and another one is addressed to Person B and C, you have already exhausted three slots (out of 500) even though only two messages left your Inbox.

Email Sending Limits for Gmail users

If you want to send bulk mails using a regular Gmail account, the rules are similar.

You can only send out emails to a maximum of 500 recipients during a 24 hour* period but if you are using a desktop client (like Outlook), that limit is reduced to 100 messages in a day.

[*] The Gmail help site mentions this limit as 500 recipients per message but a Google employee on the Gmail support site has confirmed that this cap is not just per message but per day.

Workarounds for sending mass emails
With all these limitations in place, Gmail is obviously not the best option for reaching out to a very large customer base. However, if you have no other option, it may be a good idea to plan well in advance.

For Gmail: Distribute the mail merge process over 2-3 days so that you never exceed that 100 messages per day quota.

For Google Apps:  You can either upgrade to a Premier edition or create multiple accounts in Google Apps as each will have its own 500-recipients limit.

If your computer is running a fairly new operating systems, such as Windows XP, Vista or even Mac OS X, chances are that it won’t be able to play any of the old DOS games that were originally designed for 16-bit systems.
There are however simple workarounds that will help you play your favorite DOS games on any modern computer just the way they worked on old 486 machines of the 90’s. The other good part is that you can download most popular DOS games from the web for free and legally.

Play Old DOS Games on your Computer

The easiest way to run DOS games on your computer is through DOSBox.

DOSBox, in simple English, is a free program that emulates an X86 based DOS environment on your new computer including speaker sounds, video graphics and other hardware. DOSBox is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X so you can practically use it to run DOS games on practically every computer.

You can simply install DOSBox via the command line but if that sounds too technical, there are graphical frontends for DOSBox that will let you run DOS programs through a simple GUI.

One of the most popular GUI frontends for DOSBox is D-Fend Reloaded. You can install this program like any other Windows application and it is ready for use immediately after the installation. To install a DOS game, simply use the import wizard or drag-and-drop the zip archive file (that contains the DOS program) into the D-Fend Reloaded window.

D-Fend Reloaded also offers game packages, containing both freeware and shareware DOS games, that you may install on your computer at once using a simple installer. You can play these classic games using DOSBox without having to configure anything.

Build an MS-DOS Virtual Machine for Playing Games

If the requirements are such that DOSBox emulators are unable to run your favorite DOS game, you can try running DOS inside a virtual machine using virtualization software like Windows Virtual PC, VMWare Player, or VirtualBox from Sun – they are all free solutions.

Microsoft offers a free copy of MS-DOS operating system that you may convert into a virtual machine or you can download the FreeDOS program from the Internet which is just like MS-DOS and completely free.

Once you have a virtual machine running DOS, you need a way to install DOS programs into the virtual machine. This can be done by burning a CD image of the DOS games and then attaching that CD image to the virtual machine.

Play DOS Games Online in the Browser

The installers for DOS games were initially distributed on floppy disks and the game authors may have never envisioned that people would be playing these games though the Internet without installation but that is exactly what you can do today.

JPC is a Java-based x86 emulator that can run some DOS programs on any modern browser with the Java plugin.  The JPC site hosts a couple of popular DOS games including DOOM and Mario Brothers but for a more extensive collection, you should check out Classic DOS Games. The sites currently has 169 different games that you can play directly in any web browser that has the Java plugin installed.

JPC based DOS games may not run as fast as their DOSBox counterparts but there’s one advantage – you can try a game online before deciding if you want to download a copy to your hard drive.

Download DOS Games from the Internet

Now that you have everything in place to run DOS games on the computer, you are most definitely looking for some great games to play with.

Here are some popular sites where you can find and download most of your favorite DOS games, but since too many choices can be confusing, check this search engine that will help you search all the popular PC games’ websites from one place.

1. DOS Games – With over 500 classic titles, DOSGames.com is a great place to look for your favorite DOS games. You can run these games using the free DOSBox emulator discussed above. The site is actively updated so it is likely that more games will be added over time.

2. DOS Games Archive – DOS Games Archive is another useful site with a very large collection of DOS games. The sites provides screenshots of the DOS games, user ratings, violence ratings, cheat codes and you can also find out if a particular game is supported on DOSBox. Many of the games listed on the site were commercial games that were later released for free by the game publisher.

3. D-Fend Game Packages – If you chose to install D-Fend Reloaded with DOSBox, then you can easily access hundreds of classic DOS games using this easy installer. Each game package contains a collection of about a dozen or so games of the same category and you can have them all on your machine with a click.

4. Classic DOS Games – This site also contains a wide range of DOS games categorized by their Genre, Company, Year Released, etc.  All DOS games listed on this site are freely distributable because they are shareware, freeware, or because the copyright holder has officially and legally released all rights to the public domain.

5. Good Old Games – This site specializes at re-releasing classic commercial games for modern PCs at reasonable prices.  Their selection includes many popular DOS-based games that are packaged with DOSBox for a seamless game experience on Windows Vista and XP.  If your looking for a commercial game that has not been released as freeware, this may be the best place to look for it.

6. Abandonia – As the title suggests, this site has a very collection of games that are under the category of “abandonware” or titles that are no longer sold /developed by the authors.

7. Home of the Underdogs – One of the most popular abandonware sites with reviews of over 5,300 games for DOS and Windows. Other than game binaries, the sites also offers manuals for a number of games that are no longer commercially available.

For offline reference, you may download this catalog of DOS games from Wikipedia that possibly includes every DOS title that has been released till date.

If you are curious to know the average CPM rates for online advertising across verticals, this graph from Adify should give you a good idea.

CPM trends across verticals



Except Food, Entertainment and Real Estate, the CPM rates for display ads have declined across industries in the last three quarters which is quite good news for online advertisers but not so good news for web publishers and bloggers.

For some unknown reason, this Adify Report excludes the Technology sector which also commands high CPM rates (the CPM rates for tech industry were around $15 in Q2 2009).

CPM = cost per thousand ad impressions.

If you have not logged into your Facebook account for some time, I suggest that you do so now. Once you are logged-in, click the "Photos" tab on your Facebook profile and what you see there might surprise you.

It’s your own personal photo album on Facebook but none of these pictures of odd-looking cartoon characters, horoscope charts, photo collages, friend graphs, etc. have been uploaded by you.

What photo tagging applications can do to your Facebook profile

The culprit, as you may have guessed, are these Facebook applications that tag random images with your name and the tagged image therefore shows up in your Facebook profile page without you doing anything.

What’s the problem?
These "collages" not only make your Facebook profile look very unprofessional but there’s something else to worry about as well.

Some photo tagging applications on Facebook (as the one below) add links to bad sites in "your" photos and your innocent Facebook friends, who are just randomly browsing your pictures, might fall in the trap.

What can you do?
The simple way is that you remove your name tag from the tagged photo and it will be instantly removed from your Facebook photo album as well.

Next you should find the Facebook application that you friend used to create that photo collage in the first place and block that application forever so that your other friends are unable to use that application to spam your Facebook profile page.

Also make sure that you get notifications each time someone tags you in a photo. You can control this setting from the "Notifications" tab on the Account Settings page.

Photo tagging is the one of the most popular features on Facebook and, probably for this reason, Facebook doesn’t offer a simple setting that will prevent other users and applications from tagging you in photographs. You can however hide "photos tagged of you" from the privacy page so that the images don’t appear in your public photo albums and are visible only to you.

And as a precautionary measure, visit the authorized apps pages to make sure that you haven’t authorized any Facebook app to tag images of other people on your behalf. If you find one, just click the cross to remove that Facebook app from your profile permanently.

What can Facebook do?
When you are tagged in a photo by your friends (or a Facebook application), the tag is automatically approved and the picture appears in your profile. All we therefore need is an extra privacy setting that would let us to approve tags before a tagged photo appears on our profile page.