Cameron's Thoughts

Here's a random ad I found on Gmail. I feel for the people that thing this is a dream job.

Google always seems to impress me and the chat client in Gmail is just the newest thing they have impressed me with. But, it's hard to know when you get new messages. Saw this the other day and thought I would pass it along.

http://ftp.rz.tu-bs.de/pub/mirror/downloads.mozdev.org/click2tab/gchatalert.xpi

This adds a new message sound that alerts you of new mail. It's the same sound AIM uses for new messages. Very, very useful.

Finally! You can export Gmail contacts. If you go into the contacts menu, in the top right corner, there is an export option next to import. This is very nice as I have been using Gmail for over a year and all my new contacts since then are all in there. I was looking around for some other hack to do this, but then I noticed the feature was there. It wasn't there two days ago as I needed to import the contacts into Eudora that I am using at work now. Awesome, a feature that was really needed, finally done. Maybe Gmail will be out of beta soon. :D

If anyone somehow still doesn't have a GMail account, and would like one, just feel free to leave a comment on this post or use my contact form to get ahold of me and I'll send one your way. Just make sure to give me a real email address. Google just gave most users 50 invites today, so, I have more than enough.

I was starting to make something like this as a part of learning PHP, but it looks like someone else already has. It's an automatic Gmail inviter. Simply go to http://isnoop.net/gmailomatic.php and fill in your email address to receive a Gmail invite. And if you have extra invites and don't have anyone to give them out to, you can send them to gmail@isnoop.net to be added to their system.

Never mind on the Gmail invites. Last time I was given two and it took a couple weeks before I got rid of them, I got six this time, and traded one yesterday. Then, this morning, there were five requests in my inbox for invites, so apparently the demand is a little greater now. So I have handed out all my current invites.

Have a ton more Gmail invites now, so if anyone is lacking one, just click the Contact Me link on the right side of the page.

I have been using GTray for a while now and it has been a very useful app for keeping me informed on new Gmail messages. It looks like Google is also aware of the need for such a program, and now Google has a beta of their own notification app, Gmail Notifier. Just downloaded, and while it seems to offer the same types of features, such as setting up mailto: links in websites to redirect to Gmail, it's nice to have an offical app. I will have to keep an eye on GTray and see what kind of new features they come up with, but since Google now has there own app, I will probably trust that a little more. For instance, a week or so ago, GTray stopped working. This was due to Google changing the authentication method of Gmail. A new update to GTray came out shortly and everything started to work again, but who knows when this will happen in the future. Seems that Google's own software would be updated ahead of time for any such issue.

I was just browsing through whois records of domains (I had nothing better to do ), and I noticed that Gmail.com was originally registered back in 1995. So, I wondered what was originally on that domain. I went over to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and saw a copy of Gmail.com from December of 1996. Just a basic site offering an e-mail forwarding service. But, I have seen this a lot, "get a lifetime e-mail address". So, I wonder if anyone who signed up for that is trying to get their old address back now on Google's Gmail service.

Not sure if Gmail is the best choice for your web-based e-mail? Flexbeta has a review that asks the question, Gmail, Is It Worth The Wait?
The review goes over other newer mail systems that offer lot's of storage similar to Gmail, and details what each system has to offer. It's a good read for anyone wondering what's so special about Gmail. So, if you haven't got an invite yet, and want to know if you should wait, now you will know. And if you don't want to wait for the Gmail public release, I might have an invite to give out if you ask nicely.

Now that GMail has support for importing your contact list, it's now time to upload your address book to GMail from Opera.
But, GMail currently only imports CSV (comma separated values) format files. Not a big deal as most programs work with this format, but Opera doesn't export to CSV.
Fortunately, there is a web-based tool that will convert Opera's format to CSV format. Address book conversion: ADR to TAB or CSV-separated will convert the .ADR Opera address book format to CSV or tab separated files. What you need to do is either locate where your address book is located on your hard drive, like the site mentions, or even easier, just go to the File Menu and choose File-->Export-->Opera contacts. Then save the contact list somewhere (probably not a bad idea to have a backup anyway). Then upload the file to that site, choose 'Comma seperated' then click 'Send File'. You will be prompted to save a .php file. Save that, then rename it to something.csv.
But, GMail won't take this file exactly as it comes. One little edit needs to be made. If you view GMail's info on how to import contacts, you will see that the CSV file needs to have a header, which isn't included when you convert using the website above. Don't worry, this step is simple. Just open the CSV file in your favorite spreadsheet app, like Excel, or my favorite, OpenOffice.org. Then add a row to the beginning of the file. The first column should say 'Name' and the second column should say 'Email Address'.
Then simply save, go to GMail, open your contacts, then click 'Import Contacts' and upload this CSV file. Much easier than adding all those by hand, unless you only know two or three people.

I just located this great free app that will help transfer all of your existing e-mail on your PC to your GMail account. If you use a Mozilla based e-mail program, you are in luck as it will easily work with this app. It's called GMail Loader. There is a number of e-mail formats supported, but the only common one is the mBox format used by Mozilla, Netscape and any other good app. Oddly, I always thought Opera used that format for exporting e-mail, but Opera e-mails are in an .MBS file, not a .MBX file like mBox. Good news for Opera users though, there is an MBS-to-MBX utility.
If you are using Outlook or Outlook Express like many people do, check out this page for some info on how to convert mail formats to mBox. I have only tried the Opera conversion, so I can't say if converting from other apps works fine, but it's worth a shot.
Doing this in Opera was a cinch since it already has mail sorted by different categories. It was as simple as exporting each folder I wanted, then having each convert separately in the MBS-toMBX app. Then I uploaded each MBX file one at a time and applied labels to each group of messages and then archived them. Then I would simply upload the next group and do the same thing. I also made sure and try and set up as many filters as possible ahead of time so mail would automatically be organized.
One thing about GMail, it has some features that are similar to Opera's M2 client. Like having multiple labels per message. Opera also allows messages to have multiple labels, and is very useful for some messages.
What is the main feature that GMail needs to get soon? Learning filters. Opera supposedly has this feature now in it's latest version, but I haven't tried it since I have been using an app POPFile. The main reason I started to use POPFile was for it's spam blocking. It learns what messages are spam, and is able to adapt in the future. At first this does require a training period where you have to classify messages and spam or not, but it learns very quickly. And the longer you use it, the better it gets. This is why I never switched to Opera's learning feature since POPFile was 99.6% accurate. But, it doesn't just work with spam. It's good for just organizing your email. For instance, I read a lot of forums. I like receiving e-mails when posts I have posted in are responded to. So, I have a folder in my email for those messages. Before, everytime I would join a forum, I would set up a new filter for messages from that forum. But, with POPFile, it would just know that it was a forum response message and always classify it as such, even if it was the first message from that forum.
If Google was able to add a learning feature like that to labels, I would be a happy person.

Since I have had the GMail service for about a week or so now, I now have one invite to give out. If anybody is wanting to try out this service, just post a reply here, or e-mail me. If I don't know who you are, please leave a good reason why you think you need one.

Easy desktop access of GMail accounts with GTray. I had just come across this app and it's a pretty cool idea. I might actually get some use out of my GMail account now.
I had seen the other day a program Pop Goes the Gmail that allows you to access your GMail account from any POP3 mail client. An okay idea I guess, but seems like the great thing about GMail is the storage space on the server, and it's great organizing and search ability. If you just access your e-mail from your mail client, what's the point.
So, GTray seems like the perfect medium point. It just sit's in the system tray and tells you if you have any new messages. If you do, you can simply open a broswer tab right into your account.

GMail, here I come!

Just got a GMail account a couple days ago. The great people over at the Daily Gadget had a contest giving away ten invites to try out the service. I happened to have one of those invites. So I now have an address, cbulock(at)gmail.com. I'm not so worried about the spam I will get by posting that here since the spam filtering is supposed to be great. I'm not sure exactly how I will use this address since I am used to getting my e-mail in my Opera e-mail client. Going to a website to retrieve my mail seems like extra steps I wouldn't want to take. Maybe I will figure out some use for this account though. I mean, it does have a gig of storage. I was thinking, it would be great if I could upload all of my currently archived e-mail from my PC to the GMail service. I have all my e-mail back to 2000 stored in my Opera browser right now. If I could upload all that (it's certainly not a gigabyte of e-mail even though it's been accumulating over a number of years), I could then use the nice search and organizing features that GMail offers. If I could start now and be able to use that will all of my current e-mail, maybe then I would find that GMail has a lot to offer for e-mail organization.

Google has announced a new service called GMail. I have to wonder if this is some strange April Fools joke, or if this is a serious service they are offering. I remember reading not too long ago that Google had registered some domain names such as googlemail.com. I think I saw that at Slashdot. But that lead some people to believe that Google had some kind of mail service up their sleeve. But, if what they are offering is true, it could eliminate Hotmail and Yahoo as mail providers. It would also make me question how Google is able to provide this with only text ads.
The main thing that is shocking, is that GMail is a 1GB e-mail account. 1GB of storage space. They estimate it will store about 500,000 pages of messages. The idea is, instead of trying to constantly delete messages to stay within the smaller limitations of other services, you save all your e-mail and never even need to organize it. Then use Google's search technology to find messages that have info that you need.
So far, this is still in limited beta testing, you can't sign up for an account yet. But once this gets up and going, Google is going to shake up yet another web industry. First, they showed up that searching could actually produce results that we wanted without all the junk and deadlinks, and now they will show us a new understanding of webmail.