photo credit: rustybrick

Yahoo’s “Unlimited” Email Hits Its Limit

It seems that Yahoo’s “unlimited storage” claim was bogus.    The Wall Street Journal discovered that when you get to 55,000 messages, the system starts to seize up and go all wobbly on you.

Kudos to the WSJ for its investigative journalism (some real Watergate-style stuff there!) but let’s face it - who in their right mind stores 55,000 emails in their email account?   I am struggling to get past 2000 and I have 4 years worth in my account!     What is the WSJ storing?    Spam mails?   Pizza delivery confirmations?

Nevertheless, it’s still good to see Yahoo getting Yahooed by one of their own products again.

Technorati Tags email, Wall Street Journal, Yahoo

Posted in E-Mail, Yahoo No Comments »

Google’s 2008 April Fool’s joke - send emails into the past.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags april fool, email, Gmail, Google, humor, Humour, joke

Posted in Digg stories, E-Mail, Gmail, Google, Humour, humor No Comments »

photo credit: melodrama.ca

Do you spend hours each day reading email but don’t find the time to read books? Sometimes it hards carrying around those big, clunky things. Well, now you can read in bite-sized chunks. DailyLit sends books right to you inbox in small messages that take less than a few minutes to read.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags books, email

Posted in E-Mail, books No Comments »

Accessing your e-mail in a web browser is all the rage, but rage is all you’ll be feeling when your net access goes down and you don’t have a local backup of your messages. Here are some tips for backing up your inbox. It requires a bit of work to set up, but once you do, you’ll be able to enjoy the goodness of Gmail’s web interface worry-free.

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for ages but I don’t want all my thousands of messages, only some of them downloaded to the desktop. I’ve yet to work out if that is possible.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags backup, Digg, email, Gmail, Google, Mozilla, Thunderbird

Posted in Digg stories, E-Mail, Gmail, Google, Mozilla, Thunderbird, backup No Comments »

photo credit: Lynchburg College Archives

Looking for another alternative to Microsoft Outlook? While Mozilla Thunderbird offers many of the same features as Microsoft’s email client, you need to install plugins to add calendar and task management features. eM Client, on the other hand, comes equipped with a full featured email client and contact, task, and calendar managers.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags desktop, Digg, em client, email

Posted in Digg stories, E-Mail, desktop No Comments »

A story I wrote for Make Use Of. Much has already been said on Make Use Of about keyboard shortcuts but I want to focus specifically on the ones I use most often. I’ve often found that it’s easy to be totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of shortcuts out there (who can remember them all?) so I’m going to boil it down for you to the absolute essentials and ignore the rest.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags Digg, email, Gmail, Google, keyboard, Productivity, shortcuts

Posted in Digg stories, E-Mail, Gmail, Google, Published Work, shortcuts No Comments »

photo credit: Artletic

It seems that a few days after the German Google went down for a period of 90 minutes, the site is still experiencing the lingering after-effects.

Gmail is one casualty. For the past couple of days, the site has generally been sluggish and I have also been unable to change photos or details in my contact book :

(more…)

Technorati Tags dns, email, German, germany, Gmail, Google, t-com, telecom, telekom

Posted in E-Mail, Gmail, Google, germany No Comments »

Google Operating System has an excellent piece on a subject which has been baffling me for ages - getting your Gmail messages to show up in a RSS reader. I’ve never been able to get it to work but it actually turns out that it doesn’t work in Google Reader! In fact the only online reader that it works in is Netvibes! How’s that for weirdness?

Google doesn’t trust their own RSS reader to handle Gmail?

(more…)

Technorati Tags email, Gmail, Google, netvibes, RSS

Posted in E-Mail, Gmail, Google, RSS 2 Comments »

The Google Email Uploader is a desktop utility for Microsoft Windows that uploads email from other desktop email programs (like Microsoft Outlook) into your Google Apps mailbox. The Email Uploader preserves information such as sent dates and sender/recipient data, as well as the folder structure used by the other email program. The Google Email Uploader requires a Google Apps Premier, Education, or Partner Edition account.

http://code.google.com/p/google-email-uploader/

Technorati Tags email, Gmail, Google, import, uploader

Posted in E-Mail, Gmail, Google, Software No Comments »

A post I wrote for Make Use Of. If someone has cracked your email password, it may not be apparent to you. A snooper can easily read an email then mark it as unread again. So the best thing to do would be to set up an “electronic tripwire” so if someone breaks into your account, you’ll know about it.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags Digg, email, hacker, hit, internet, online, Security, snooper, tripwire

Posted in Digg stories, E-Mail, Published Work, Security 3 Comments »

I don’t believe it! Gmail has made an addition to their filter options! Now when you are setting up a filter to divert email to a label, you can have Gmail automatically mark the email as read :

So what are the advantages of this?   Well for a start, I automate a lot of backups to be emailed to me each day.    This blog for example is backed up by a Wordpress plugin and emailed to me.    I also get backups of my Stumbleupon, Delicious and Digg accounts emailed to me.    These bypass the inbox, thanks to a filter, and sit in a label.

But before they would sit there unread and I had to go to each email and mark them as read.    This was irritating and tedious as you can imagine.    But now…..Gmail can automatically and quietly mark them as read when they come in and I need never know they are there.     This is excellent therefore for emails that arrive purely as backup and you don’t need to actually open the email unless you need the backup later.

Technorati Tags email, filter, Gmail, mark as read, organisation, read

Posted in E-Mail, Gmail, Productivity 7 Comments »

A friend of mine who owns a Gmail address asked me just now how to set up a filter in Gmail for emails with “FW” in the title. After walking her through it, I thought I would just expand on it a little here.    With the new Gmail expanding into 37 new languages, I thought it would be a good idea to go back to basics for a while.

Heavy Gmail users may have mastered how to set up filters and labels but the smaller users may not have worked it out yet. Since filters and labels are the backbone of how Gmail works (and by far its biggest strength), every Gmail user should learn how to set them up and use them. Not using the filters and labels is like going to visit a hooker and only asking for a hug (OK, a dodgy analogy there but I am not an analogy expert!).

I have my Gmail set up to the point where every known contact has their own label and emails from them go directly there. Only people I have never talked to before or rarely talk to end up in my actual inbox. Any emails with “FW” or “Fwd” in the title is assumed to be a joke or a photo and those are sent to their own folder so they don’t distract me. I then go back to them later when I am bored and I have some spare time on my hands.

Using this method, I have cut down on distractions where Google Talk notifies me of new emails and as a result, my productivity is much better.

So here’s how to do it :

If the email is already in your inbox and you want to filter future similar emails from that person or emails with the same subject title, then it is very easy. When the email is open, go to the top right hand corner of the email and drop down the little menu :

Choose “filter messages like these”. This then takes you to the filter page where everything from that email is pretty much filled in. But just to be sure, press “test search” to see what comes up.

On the next page after that (just follow the buttons), it will ask you what you want done with that email. You can automatically trash it, automatically archive it, label it, forward it to another email address, star it or mark it as read (this last one appears to be a new feature!). Choose the label option, choose what label you want and decide if you want the email to have something else. Want it to bypass the inbox? Then choose the archive option. Want a star on that email? Then the star option. You get the idea.

When everything is configured the way you want it, save it all and exit. All future emails with that criteria will now be handled the way you want them to.

But what if the email is not yet in the inbox? Then you are basically going to have to make the filter from scratch and guess what criteria you would need. As an example, let’s take my friend’s dilemma and say that we want all forwarded emails to be moved to their own folder. First make a label where you want the emails to go. You can make this by going to the green label box on the left hand side - at the bottom is a link that says “edit labels”. Click on that and at the bottom of the next page is a box where you can name new labels. Let’s say we name the label “forwards”.

Once you have your “forwards” label set up, go to “settings” (top right hand side of the page) then “filters” then “create a new filter”. In the next box that comes up, add “FW or FWD” in the subject line (this means that all emails with FW or FWD in the subject line will be filtered). If you want to only apply the filter to a certain person, add their email address in the “from” field. You can also specify other keywords and whether or not the email should have an attachment :

Don’t worry if you initially muck it up. You can always go back in later and refine it the way you want it. Everything is reversible.

On the next page, again choose what you want done with the email and save everything.

Setting up filters is like everything else in life - practice makes perfect. When you’ve done one, you’ll find the next one easier to do.    I’m off now to check out the new “mark as read” filter option.

Technorati Tags email, filter, filters, Gmail, Google, label, organization, Productivity

Posted in E-Mail, Gmail, Productivity, Tutorials No Comments »

When it comes to email, are you a piler or a filer? That’s the question posed by Download Squad and I think it’s a good topic to discuss as email is now a big part of our everyday lives. I am also interested in the psychological aspects of it all.

I’m a filer without doubt. It’s greatly helped by the fact that Gmail has lots of storage space and an “archive” button. Without Gmail, I would be struggling. I get on average around 50 -75 emails a day, sometimes more and it is a combination of friends, family, a few newsletters, story tips sent in by people and work-related conversations. I have noticed a surge recently in PR agencies sending me news releases which I guess must be a side-product of working for Make Use Of, Google Tutor, Search Engine News and Geeks Are Sexy.

When an email comes in, my immediate focus is on getting that email dealt with and put away. Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts are extremely helpful in that regard. The filters are even better because then I can have certain mails re-directed to certain labels so only the most important stuff actually ends up in my inbox. Low level stuff like blog comments, trackbacks, website notifications, forwarded jokes and so on can be tucked away for later.

My girlfriend on the other hand is a BIG piler. She has over 100 emails in her inbox with many more scattered across multiple folders. She uses Outlook Express for her emails and it is the proverbial email battlefield. She keeps EVERYTHING including bills paid last year, pizza delivery confirmations, the whole lot. I wouldn’t dare to go near her inbox to find something as I would be there forever having a severe migraine! When she cleans out her inbox and goes from 100 emails to 90, she considers that a major achievement. I meanwhile am banging my head on the wall and muttering some Swahili death chant.

What are you? A filer or a piler?

Technorati Tags download squad, email, filer, Gmail, organisation, organization, Outlook, piler, Productivity

Posted in E-Mail, Gmail, Productivity 6 Comments »

I’ve been reading some interesting posts today on how Yahoo and Gmail are planning to shift people from social networks back to the email inbox by essentially making the inbox the next new social network. Dubbed by some as Inbox 2.0, this could be the next evolutionary stage of the email inbox.

To me, email is the backbone of the internet but to others, it’s “so Web 1.0!”. People who I try to get in contact with will only communicate through their Facebook profiles and won’t give out actual email addresses. I mean, come on! Some of them claim never to check their email or even have email at all (which is a bit of a fib as you need an email address to set up a Facebook account in the first place plus you need an email address for virtually every web service available).

So this attempt to break this “Facebook culture” is welcomed by me as I really don’t see what all the Facebook hype is about. Yes I have a Facebook account but I maybe check it and update it once or twice a week. Not like the guy recently reprimanded at work for spending 4 hours a day on Facebook or the student who declares he can’t be a student without Facebook. As the Techcrunch author points out, only hard drugs has the same kind of loyalty and hold over people.

So how will Yahoo and Gmail get people to come back to the inbox? Well Google, true to form, are keeping their mouths shut and Techcrunch opines that Yahoo’s “plans” are all over the place. In fact Yahoo’s plans remind me of a Japanese Kamikaze pilot - aim for the target and hope for the best.

The plans basically involve news feeds with status messages about your friends (very Twitter-ish), profile pages for you and your friends, and the third one actually made me laugh out loud - email algorithms will decide who your most-emailed contacts are and put them to the top of the inbox list. It made me laugh because Gmail already has a “most contacted” feature and most of my “most contacted” list are people I haven’t contacted in months while people I email every day don’t even make the list. So I hope this new algorithim they are working on is better than the current one.

I am personally very sceptical of anything that Yahoo does as they tend to rush stuff out without thinking long-term. They are also rather obsessed with seeing what Gmail does and then rush out their own version to keep up. Before starting anything new, Yahoo should improve their existing services, such as their email. They claim their email is vastly improved but to me, it is still bloated with “in your face” advertising and clunky page layouts. So how can they start integrating social networks into a product which still needs a lot of tweaks done to it?

I’ve just received an invite in my email inbox for the new invite-only Yahoo social network, Mash. I’ll give it a whirl and report back soon.

Technorati Tags email, Facebook, Gmail, Google, mash, social, techcrunch, Yahoo

Posted in E-Mail, Facebook, Gmail, Google, Twitter, Yahoo No Comments »

Today I did a long piece on the new Gmail which you can find at Google Tutor.

If you haven’t already subscribed to Google Tutor’s RSS feed, I highly recommend you do!

Technorati Tags email, Gmail, google tutor, new, RSS

Posted in E-Mail, Gmail, Google 1 Comment »