Peter's Blog - Nodes for gmail

Someone trying it on

I received an email from google asking me to confirm I wanted to reset the password on one of my gmail accounts. It's as if some swine is after one of my three gmail addresses. The one in question is my main personal account and has 6136 messages in it, consuming 388Mb of my 6440Mb allowance (I only delete spam). My two other gmail accounts (petersblog and one with a sensible name for 'business') feed into this account.

I love gmail and don't want to mess around with any desktop email applications. That was until now. Do I trust google security? Do I want to have to archive it myself? Another job for my slice?

Gmail Imap

Whee google have enabled imap in my gmail account. Maybe I will do something about the 2016 messages in my inbox. Or maybe not.

I've got 5260 messages in all, taking up 347Mb of my 4536M of space.

I only delete spam.

Spam

What is it about Barclays Bank customers that makes the phishers target them more than any other bank (according to my gmail spam list)?

Are they particularly gullible?
particularly rich and worth swindling?
is the barclays web site easy to copy?
are there more than enough profits from barclays that it's not worth copying more sites?
do the other banks (including mine) hire hit men?

What could it be?

Spam on gmail is definitely getting worse, 30-50 messages a day. I've given up checking the list for false positives beyond a quick scan for subjects that make sense (why would I open an email with the subject 'Re: ceiling banana'?).

Gmail broke

Today gmail has changed such that when looking at the list of messages I cannot middle-click and open a message in a new firefox tab, I have to open it in the same window. This means I cannot look at multiple messages in multiple tabs.

If I right click on a message there is no option in the context menu to open in a new tab, the only link on the page I have found where this works is the 'help' link.

Hope there is a good technical reason for this and it's not just a stupid dropoff by someone who carelessly breaks features that they don't use. Who are google to redesign web ui standards? Are they going to lower themselves to childish 'disable the context menu because my html is so full of great ideas I don't want anyone to view the source' javascript tricks?

Damn google and damn the free services that I expect perfection from.

I'm having a bout of insomnia and it doesn't make me cheerful and tolerant.

Gmail address

Since Gmail have given me 100 invites I have decided to give my site it's own gmail account:

. I don't quite have enough faith in gmails spam filters to put the raw email address here yet. prattboy@gmail.com would agree.

I realised today that I can just set up the auto-forwarding in gmail to forward this email to my main gmail account so I don't have to go through the tedious process of logging out of one gmail account and logging into another.

I haven't tried Gmails new POP service yet. I only see that as a way to create my own email archive. Gmail's user interface is good enough, it's main shortcoming for me is not being able to simply paste pictures into emails, you have to mess around attaching them.

My Site5 account gives me unlimited email accounts or something but this is a simpler option. If I do decide to put up the raw mailto then it's gmail that will have to handle the spam.

If anyone reading this wants a gmail invite then just ask. I think they are so common these days that I doubt I'll get any takers.

A nod to this site for the email icon generator.

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GMail spam

Looks like the spammers have worked out that only the first 6 characters in gmail email addresses are significant and are bombarding gmail with spam. Both my accounts are getting it, none of the email has the exact correct email address. Looks like combinations of words are being used to invent addresses. Gmail is recognising and filtering the spam but I still have to vet the spam list.

Email usage

The gmail way of working is a good model. Mail is received in the inbox, you read it and when you have digested it you press an 'Archive' button to move it from the inbox to the archive directory. I like this, it keeps the inbox clean of everything except email that needs dealing with. The old messages are out of the way, in a place where they can be ignored until 2 years later when you need to prove someone wrong.

I have started working like this on my dovecat IMAP/squirrelmail setup: I deal with stuff in the inbox and move it to one of the following:

a project related folder
an archive folder for general stuff.
a 'spam.categorically' folder

This has another advantage because the archive folder will be full of 'ham' messages (not spam) and makes a good input to the spamassassin bayes filter. Messages in the inbox can go from 'unread' to 'deleted' very quickly, in which case the bayes filter does not get a chance to look at them as it learns on a cron job every night (hoping it will learn the new keyword 'rolex' real soon).

I still need to realise my dream of publishing the contents of the project related folders on a web server where they can be searched, linked to and ideally threaded. This needs some kind of mega mail tool. The closest I can find is mail list server stuff which I am not sure can deal with CC's etc. Mailman may be hackable, being python, but where I've seen it used the presentation is pretty poor, one of the things that puts me off subscribing to mailing lists.

Email clients

Today I realised that I could use mozex and vim to edit email. I tried this with gmail and it went into a weird endless loop until I killed firefox. So I had a more serious try at using squirrelmail on my local imap server. Using gmail as a client had been bothering me as it's more of a black hole than outlook: how could I ever get my email archives back?

Running through email client alternatives:

Outlook: Big slow lumbering, much loved by ignorant phb's. Message filtering rules randomly disable themselves and cannot be relied upon. Taskbar indicator says messages are waiting even if filters mark them as read.
Thunderbird: Feels like a poor clone of outlook express. Whenever it can't connect to the imap server it decides it is because the password is wrong and I have to enter it again. Getting on my nerves.
Eudora: it only seems to last for about 5 minutes whenever I install it. I think 'so what' and delete it.
mutt: user interface design from the 1970's.
gmail: insists on putting signatures at bottom of replies, annoying for a top-poster like me. No way to get at archives apart from forwarding them all to self. Taskbar notifier either flaky or very sensitive detector of flaky networks. Notifier prompts me for user name and password whenever the pc boots. Both are already filled in I only have to press OK so it's not a security feature just an annoyance.
Squirrelmail: web-based, a little simplistic but not as simplistic as horder or neomail.

I have yet to find a truly lovable email client.

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RSS Aggregation

I was thinking today how cool and hip I was using Bloglines as an RSS aggregator compared to people who just go through a list of favourite web sites every day. So 1995. Go RSS, join the 21st century.

Then I thought about it some more and this is essentially what I am doing with bloglines: I have a list of feeds that I go through one by one, looking through the articles. No real difference to going through a sidebar full of bookmarks, looking at websites.

If I am going to evangelise RSS aggregation, what am I going to say are the advantages? Why bother?

Uniform presentation
No adverts (for now: I cannot imagine this will forever be true)
Um

I'm going to continue with bloglines as the reasons above are enough for me, I just won't try to evangelise. As it happens I am not a good evangelist: I have yet to convert anyone to FireFox for example which should be pretty easy. Even after I removed the adware from my boss's PC he showed no interest in FireFox.

Maybe I should examine my RSSing habits and figure out if I am missing the point in some way.

The only people I know who are at all interested in gmail are those of a geeky persuasion.

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Gmail Again

Been playing with Gmail some more, looking at it's features.

Labels: Instead of putting email in folders you assign it labels. You can then click on the label name to get a list of all emails that have that label. This is functionally the same as having folders. One advantage is that more than one label can be assigned to an email so it can be categorised in different ways. I don't see any way to AND labels together, i.e list emails with label1 AND label2. I tried using the search box but that did not work. I would say this would be a useful geeky feature. The labels then approach the power of the taxonomy system in Drupal (although in a single vocabulary with no hierarchy: hey I sound like a computer scientist!!).

Filters: Easily used to apply labels to new email.

Archive: I had ignored this before but I think the intention is that instead of leaving everything in the 'Inbox', once you have read your mail you press the Archive button to put it in an archive. This leaves the Inbox uncluttered. You can get at your archive by searching, clicking on labels, etc.

Spam: Automatically filtered, and generally very well. Spam messages to not appear in the 'All Mail' list or search results. There is no way of knowing new spam is there except by looking in the folder (folders, not labels, mixed paradigms).

Conclusion: I love Gmail, it follows googles fast, simple and powerful approach.