How Can You Create Fake Screenshots

Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet because screenshots can be easily faked. Sometimes these fake images are for pure fun – like you putting your picture on the cover of TIME magazine, sometimes they may be deceptive.

My favorite is Wall Machine – a service that lets you you create fake screenshots of Facebook walls and other Facebook related activity – like X is now a friend of Y or Z changed their relation status on Facebook. Every part of that screenshot can be customized including the conversation text, the profile images and you can have as many comments on a Facebook post as you like.

Another service – iFakeText – lets you make screenshot images of text messages exchanged on an iPhone. Just enter the text of the SMS conversation in a proper format and generate the screenshot.

I also like Fake Tweet Builder for creating screenshot images of Twitter conversations that may or may not have happened. The screenshots of individual tweets look extremely real and you may also use customize the profile pictures, the name of the Twitter client and how many times a particular tweet has been retweeted.

Ticket-o-Matic lets you print boarding passes of any popular airline, Fodey generates newspaper clippings while Expense Steak creates PDF receipts of restaurant bills and office supplies for a given amount. When you print these receipts on paper, they’ll look real but there’s little potential for misuse as they carry old dates.

Finally, if a web form makes it mandatory to fill the street address or the phone number, usethis website to generate random data for putting into that form.

How often Outlook checks Gmail for New Mail?

If you have connected your Gmail account to Outlook over POP3, you may have noticed that emails arriving in your Gmail mailbox are delivered to your Outlook mailbox after a little wait.

The support pages do not say how often Outlook.com checks your Gmail.com account for new emails but you can easily find a clue in your Gmail mailbox itself.

How frequently Outlook connects to Gmail?

Open Gmail and click the link at the bottom that says “Account Activity” – look for entries that read POP3 with location set as United States and IP addresses in the 66.55.41.1 – 66.55.41.255 range. The time difference between any two consecutive connection attempts in the activity log is the rate at which the Mail Fetcher program of Outlook is connecting to your Gmail account.

In my case, this gap in fetching emails is always 30 minutes.

Bonus Tip: You cannot force Outlook to check your Gmail account on-demand but there’s a workaround. Go to your Outlook Mail Settings -> Send Receive from other Email Accounts, Edit the connected Gmail account and save without making any changes. Outlook will then attempt to connect your Gmail account again for new messages.

Alternatively, instead of using POP3, you can setup auto-forward in Gmail and in that case, the Gmail message will instantly get delivered to your Outlook mailbox.