Q I receive a lot of spam in my in gmail account and find deleting them very irritating. Is there a way to stop these emails?

Madhu Sudan Muskara

You do not have to delete emails in the spam folder. They are deleted automatically after 30 days. The same is true for messages in the trash folder. Gmail is pretty good at spam detection whereby fraudulent and useless emails are flagged and put into the spam folder.

You too can help gmail understand dodgy emails better by marking them as spam when they land in your inbox. Select the email and click on the exclamation mark at the top of the page. This is the button for reporting an email as spam.

Newsletters and promotions are not all spam, but they end up crowding your inbox. Look for the unsubscribe link at the end of these emails. Once you opt out, your email address will be removed from the mailing list. Taking the time to do it once is better than deleting messages every day.

Most emails land in your inbox because you shared your address while booking a hotel, buying air tickets or ordering a product online. Sometimes, these entities share your email address with an advertiser and you end up getting updates that you do not need.

The trick is to create an alias while signing up for these sites while ordering a product. You don’t have to make a new email account. Suppose your email address is hillybilly@gmail.com. Whenever you sign up for anything, write your address as hillybilly+buys@gmail.com. Messages sent to hillybilly@gmail.com and hillybilly+buys@gmail.com will both arrive in your inbox. You can then set up a filter to move all messages to hillybilly+buys@gmail.com to a folder of your choice directly.

Gmail addresses also ignore dots. So emails sent to hillybilly@gmail.com and hi.ll.ybi.lly@gmail.com will both arrive in your inbox. You own all the dotted versions of your username. Next time you sign up for anything, use these tricks.

Filters are created very easily. Click the Gmail options button on the top right, and select Settings. Choose Filters and Blocked Addresses. Click on Create a new filter, enter your new address with the plus sign or with dots in the To: field, and then decide whether you want to mark them as read immediately, archive them, put a label or delete them.

Windows upgrade

Q I have Windows 7 Ultimate running on my computer. How do I upgrade to Windows 10?

Nikhil Ranjan Chaudhuri

The newer your computer is, the easier it is to upgrade. Windows 10 requires your computer to have a:

• 1 GHz or faster compatible processor
• 1GB RAM for 32-bit; 2GB for 64-bit
• Up to 20GB available hard disk space
• 800 x 600 screen resolution or higher. DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM driver
• Internet access.

First, you will have to upgrade your computer to Windows 7 Service Pack 1. The best way to keep Windows 7 up to date is to turn on automatic updates. Click on the Start button and type Update in the search box, and select Windows Update from the list of results.

On the left pane, select “Change settings”, and then under “Important updates”, select “Install updates automatically (recommended)”. Under “Recommended updates”, turn on “Give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates”.

Once you instal all the updates, you will see an icon for the “Get Windows 10” app. Right-click on the “Get Windows 10” icon (on the right side of the taskbar) and then click on “Check your upgrade status”. In the next step, click on the hamburger menu depicted by three horizontal lines and click on “Check your PC”. This will tell you if your computer can run Windows 10 or not.

If everything is fine, go to the Microsoft site and buy Windows 10. The Home version costs Rs 9,299 and the Pro variant comes for Rs 14,799. You should do all this before January 14, 2020.