Gmail Podcast

Category: Gmail Podcast

  • Gmail Labs

    The people at Google have found a creative way to let you try various experimental features of Gmail and provide feedback. They call it Gmail Labs. You can access these new features by clicking on the Settings link in the upper right, and then clicking on the tab labeled “Labs”. Some of these features are cosmetic such as date formats or removing the number of new messages from the various locations where messages are stored; others provide improved capabilities or time saving features like customizable keyboard shortcuts. Have a look in the Labs tab of the settings screen from time to time and see if there is anything of interest that might improve your Gmail experience.

    You can choose to enable or disable any of them by using the appropriate radio button choice to the right of each option. When you’ve chosen which features to turn on or off, click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the screen.

    According to the help page, there are a few things to keep in mind when you try these features out. First, they may break at any time. Remember, this is experimental software. Second, they may be removed from the feature set at any time. And third, they may work so well, that they may be promoted to regular features in Gmail.

    If you use any of the Labs features and suspect you are having problems, you can temporarily disable them by modifying your web address, or URL, to https://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0.

    Feel free to provide feedback, report bugs, or suggest new features to Google by joining the Google group gmail-labs. Look under the “More” menu at the top of the screen for Groups, or follow the link in the show notes for this episode on the website.

    Here’s a comment from listener Douglas E. Welch over at Technology IQ. It seems he had a stuck key on his keyboard and as a result, inadvertantly locked out his Gmail account “up to 24 hours” due to invalid access attempts. As Douglas stated in his blog posting, “It is a little distressing that a rather simple computer malfunction can result in a day-long lockout and the fact that there is no appeal process for such a lockout.”. Hopefully Google will remedy the situation and provide some sort of support mechanism for accidental technical difficults such as this in the future.

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  • Contacts Sync with Mac Address Book

    Before I dig in to this I would like to thank my long time friend, co-worker, and mentor, Scott Reynolds for passing on this wonderful tip for Gmail. Those of you with iPhones, Macs and Gmail will find this very helpful.

    This is based on a recent article at googlemac.blogspot.com showing how you can sync your Mac address book with your Google contacts.

    Before you start, we strongly recommend that you back up your Mac Address Book. You can do that in the File menu by choosing Export, Addressbook Archive. That way if anything goes wrong, you’ll still have your original data.

    The key to syncing your Google contacts is in the Mac Address Book. Go to the Address Book menu, choose Preferences. Under the General heading, at the bottom of the screen check the box that says “Synchronize with Google”. It will ask you for your Google login and password – use the credentials you normally use to get access to your Gmail.

    Now start up iSync under the Mac Applications menu. Click “Sync Devices”. Depending on how many contacts you have, it may take a few minutes to synchronize all the changes. When it’s done, click on the Card menu and select “Look for duplicates”. You can resolve conflicts one at a time by choosing which card you want to take precedence, or you can merge the changes by highlighting one or more cards and click “Merge cards” or using the keyboard shortcut Cmd-Shift-| (that’s a verticle pipe character).

    Click “Sync Devices” one more time and your contacts in your Mac Address Book and Google contacts are now in sync. To keep things in sync in the future, just use iSync periodically. It’s a bit manual, but once setup, it’s only a couple mouse clicks away.

    Here’s today’s quick tip: Fiona King over at collegedegrees.com has posted an article titled “57 tips of highly effective Gmail users“. If you’re a long time listener to the Gmail Podcast you’ll recognize many of these and I encourage you to go over and take a look – there are some great nuggets of information like backing up your messages, cleaning out your contacts, or tricking out your labels.

    If you’ve got a great idea or heard about a new feature in Gmail, or something that works with or enhances Gmail, I’d love to hear from you. Visit the website at chuckchat.com or drop me an email at gpodcast@gmail.com.

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  • Speed Dialing

    Before I get started, I owe you an apology. I have been using this feature of Gmail so long I nearly forgot I was using it. It wasn’t until a few days ago that I was reading my email via a web browser on my cell phone that I thought “I don’t think I told the Gmail Podcast world about speed dialing on the phone.”

    OK, I made that term “speed dialing” up for this feature, but I think it’s a pretty accurate way to represent the ability to use numbers instead of scrolling down and pressing OK or ENTER on the link you want to use.

    Let me explain with an example of what I’m talking about…

    I’ve got a Samsung Blackjack SmartPhone running Windows Mobile 6, but this tip should work fine from any mobile device with a browser. From time to time I use Internet Explorer to read my Gmail when I’m on the go. When reading messages, especially long ones with lots of included text, it can be cumbersome to scroll ot the bottom of the screen to click on “Archive”. Instead, think of those options with numbers 1-7 next to them. If you like, write them down until you’ve got a few key ones memorized. Like:

    1: Reply
    2: Reply to all
    3: Forward
    4: Archive
    5: Mark unread
    6: Add Star
    7: Delete

    So… you’re reading your message and want to archive it. Don’t bother scrolling down past links in the messages, past lots of text, through the options at the bottom until your highlight lands on “Archive”, just press “4”. Done. Next message. You want to delete it, press 7.

    Keep in mind that the numbered options here do not correspond to those on the Java applet, except 7 – by coincidence only.

    Now, go out and read, archive, reply, and delete your email quickly from your phone’s web browser.

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  • Gmail Assistant – and more

    If you use Gmail half as much as I do, then I’ll bet you have more than one Gmail Account. We’ve covered the Gmail Notifier on this podcast in the past as a way to monitor your Gmail, but that only monitors one accountat a time. GmailAssistant is a notifier for multiple Gmail accounts. It accesses your Gmail accounts securely using IMAP over SSL.

    You can choose from different notification options, such as unread mails in your inbox, all mails, or notification on messages with specific labels. Gmail Assistant also lets you choose from different alert methods like popup messages, a chime, and evening a keyboard LED blink.

    Gmail Assistant runs on any OS with the Java Runtime Environment 6 or greater. You can get the JRE at http://java.sun.com/j2se. It’s free and open source, written in Java and released under GNU Public License version 2.

    —-

    Just a couple things for you iPhone users of Gmail via the Mail app. Apple recently changed thew ay the “delete” key works. If you tap the delete key, messages will be moved to the Trash folder and removed after 30 days. Also, after upgrading to version 1.1.3, your Gmail access will convert from POP access to IMAP, meaning actions you take on your iPhone will sync with actions taken on the Gmail web interface – for example, messages you read on your iPhone will show up as read in the web interface.

    —-

    Here’s a handy little tip I picked up in the past few weeks, the GoogleTalk instant messenger supports a status labeled “invisible”. It allows you to remain logged in to GTalk, but appear to others as if you are not online. This is often handy if you are having a private chat or voice conversation and don’t want to be interrupted. I have used this when conducting voice interviews for one of my other podcasts, Technorama.

    —-

    There has been some buzz around the net recently about the domain googlemail.com and it’s comparison to gmail.com. For all intents and purposes, you can use your same address @gmail.com with the domain @googlemail.com as a second account with the same delivery destination. Some people have chosen to give out their “@googlemail.com” to sites they suspect may pass it on to spam lists, thus they have a way of identifying where their email address went. Another way to do this is to add a plus sign (+) and some word after your name. For example: chuck.tomasi+pizza@gmail.com to indicate that you gave your Gmail address to a pizza place to enter a contest. You will still get your email, but the “+pizza” affords you the opportunity to filter it and label it. It’s worth noting that some sites will reject an email address with a plus sign as a valid email address, so be aware that this tip may not always work.

    And since we’re on the topic of Gmail address modifiers, you can add dots anywhere in your email address. I usually tell people my address is chuck.tomasi@gmail.com, however chucktomasi (no dots) is also valid, as is c.h.u.c.k.t.o.m.a.s.i@gmail.com, but who wants to say that every time?

    Updated: March 11, 2008: I thought I had a link to the Gmail Assistant. Sorry. Here it is: http://gmailassistant.sourceforge.net/

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  • Hosted Mail (updated)

    A while back I did an episode of the Gmail Podcast where I showed you how to switch your internet domain to be hosted by Google’s mail servers. This gives you the freedom of managing your own mail accounts, distribution lists, and other aspects of your mail environment, while providing all the benefits of Gmail like unmatched spam filtering, a large mailbox, and all the other wonderful features Gmail has to offer.

    Consider this show an update to the previous one. I noticed that the procedure has changed a bit since the last show and rather than have you frustrated at icons and links that weren’t where they were supposed to be, I figured it was time to provide you with some updated information in case you’ve been thinking of making the switch.

    A little warning, of all the things I’ve covered on the Gmail Podcast, this is probably one of the more complex. Not to worry, I’ll walk you through every step. Where specialized steps are needed, depending on your configuration, I will defer to Google’s excellent step-by-step documentation.

    Let me first start by explaining the basics. First, we’re going to setup a hosting account on Google for your mail. Next, we’ll tell the Internet that mail for your domain is no longer with your old hosting system, but rather, all your email should now be sent to Google’s servers where it can be transparently delivered and received by you, or anyone in your domain.

    • Start by going to http://www.google.com/a
    • Click “Get Started”
    • Next, click on “Standard Edition” (Sign Up button)
    • If you already have a domain, choose “I want to use an existing domain”, otherwise choose “Create a domain”. For this example, we’ll assume you already have a domain.
    • Enter your domain name – then click “Use my domain”
    • Fill in the fields for your name, a current valid email address, and other required information to sign up
    • When you’ve completed the necessary fields, click “Continue” button
    • On the next page, enter the email address on your domain (ex: chuck@chuckchat.com)
    • Review the terms and conditions, then click “I accept, continue with sign up”
    • Note the message at the top of the screen that reads: To activate Google Apps services you must verify that you own your domain – “yourdomain”, click on the link that says “Verify domain ownership”
    • You can either upload an HTML file or change the CNAME record. I chose to upload the HTML file. Simply follow the instructions on the page. That takes care of part of setting up the email hosting.
    • Next, you need to update your MX, or mail exchange records to have the internet know that mail to your domain should be directed to Google’s servers. After setting up the mail hosting, you should be at the dashboard. If not, go to http://www.google.com/a/yourdomainname and login. From the Dashboard, click on “Activate Email” in the Email section. Select the hosting plan you have and follow the instructions.
    • Replication of your changes may take up to 48 hours to be sent around the internet so be patient.
    • Once that is done, your email to your new domain will be delivered to a nice big, managed, Gmail mailbox.
    • If you already have one or more mailboxes hosted by Google, I might recommend your review the instructions to either get mail from your other mailbox via POP or IMAP, or Forward your domain to a central Gmail account using forwarding and Send Mail As, all of which are explained in other episodes of the Gmail Podcast.
    • I’m guilty of always assuming people use the Gmail web interface, and for that I apologize. If you are using a third party client like Outlook, Thunderbird, Mail on the Mac, or something else, you may need to go back to the DNS servers and update the POP and SMTP records as well.


    There you go. Mail for your domain is now being sent to Google’s servers. Now that you’ve got the framework setup out of the way, you can use the management console on Google’s hosted site to create more users and mail lists in your new domain.

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  • My Gmail Story

    I couldn’t resist a chance to share my unique story with the rest of the Gmail community.

  • Odds and Ends

    Google has been very busy lately adding some very nice features to their version 2.0 interface. As a reminder, the ver 2.0 interface requires IE 6 or later or FireFox 2.0 or later.

    if you haven’t been following the blog on the Gmail Podcast website I’ll bring you up to date on a few announcements from Gmail in the past few weeks.

    At first glance, the feature of colored labels doesn’t seem like a big deal, but the most I use it, the more I like it. If you look at your labels on the left, you should see very light squares next to each of the labels. By clicking one of these squares you can set a color for that label. Now when you glance at your conversation index, the colors really stand out to help identify groupings of messages.

    As a side note, I also noticed while reading a conversation, the labels at the top of the message have a little “x” next to them. If you click on the “x” you remove that label from the conversation. If you click on the “x” next to the Inbox label, you archive the message. That’s a lot quicker than pulling down the “More Actions” list and going to the bottom to remove a label.

    Another new feature that will make you GoogleTalk users happy is that Gmail now allows you to import your AOL IM buddies directly in to GTalk. And yes, the chat transcripts from AIM conversations are saved to your email archive like the native GTalk conversations.

    The final addition in the past few weeks is the use of a very useful keyboard shortcuts help screen. Besides the cool factor of transparency, being able to reference the help screen at any point. There is a lot of information on that screen so I suggest picking one or two keyboard shortcuts, get used to using them and then go get a couple more. One of my recent favorites is the “.” key that triggers the “More Actions” drop list. Now I can label messages with just a few keystrokes.

    Something tells me we can look for plenty more new little features like this in the future. Google has proven that it continues to innovate and add to their product. Keep your eyes on the Gmail Podcast website and listening to the Gmail Podcast for more information.

    Quick Tip: How to unmute a conversation. If you mute a conversation and then later decide you want to unmute it, you can use the “Unmute” link at the top. However, you may decide days or weeks later that you want to follow that subject again. This is a simple matter of finding the conversation and moving it back to the inbox. You can find all muted messages by searching using the keyword “is:muted”. Click on the conversation you want, then use the “More Actions” pull down – the first option is “Move to inbox”. This effectively, un-archives the message and continues to present it in your inbox and track it like any other conversation.

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  • GSpace

    Gspace is an add-on to the Firefox browser that allows you to use your 5+GB of Gmail storage as drive space.

    Start by downloading GSpace from http://addons.mozilla.org. If you enter GSpace in the search box at the top of the screen, you shouldn’t have any trouble finding it.

    The download process is straightforward and requires Firefox to restart. Once that is done you’ll notice that the Tools menu now has an option labeled “GSpace”. When you select that option, Firefox will open a new tab that looks and works like a file transfer client. There is also a little icon on the Firefox status bar to bring up an embedded browser window to manage your files.

    The first time you use GSpace, you will want to click on “Manage Accounts”. Enter your Gmail credentials and you’re ready to go. Don’t forget, if you host your own domain with Google you can use that account as additional, but separate space.

    You should find GSpace very easy to use. It operates much like any other graphical file transfer program with the files from your computer on the left and the remote files on Google on the right. Transferring data is done by highlighting files or folders then using the arrows to move items back and forth. Status windows at the bottom of the screen show which items are being transferred and which are done. You can create a folder hierarchy in GSpace just like any other filesystem on your computer or network.

    What’s really happening behind the scenes is Gmail is mailing you a message with your files as attachements. If you check your inbox you will see that you have received a message from yourself. You can retrieve the files from any computer, even if it does not have the GSpace add-on installed, by using the web browser and downloading the file via the Gmail web interface. Once you delete the files in Gmail, they no longer show up in Gspace, however I found deleting files from GSpace appeared to delete the files and associated email messages, but they came right back moments later.

    Here’s today’s quick tip:

    Create a filter that looks for messages from you, or with the subject that starts with GSPACE, then labels it with something like GSPACE and skips the inbox. Now the files you sent to Gmail with GSpace are automatically processed and stored out of the way.

    And as a final note, Google’s chat feature now supports group chats and graphical emoticons. To start a group chat, just click “Group Chat” from the options menu when chatting.

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  • Comparison

    Listener, and fellow Friends In Tech member, Steve Holden sent in an audio clip comparing Gmail to several other popular online mail services. Listen to find out the results.

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  • IMAP 101

    Gmail now supports IMAP. What’s IMAP you say? IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. This is just another way for your Outlook, Outlook Express, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, or even your iPhone, to communicate with Google’s mail server.

    So what are the advantages of IMAP? For users with many, or large messages, IMAP can result in faster response times. Unlike POP3, You can have multiple clients connect to the same mailbox. That means you can leave your computer connected at work and any changes you make at home are reflected at work, or any other client that is talking to the server.
    IMAP also allows you to access parts of a message independently. This is really done in the background without your knowledge. What this means is that messages with large file attachments don’t retrieve the large attachment unless told to do so. You can retrieve and read a series of messages much quicker with IMAP.

    In short, IMAP is a more modern and bandwidth-friendly protocol.

    You can enable IMAP by logging in to your Gmail account on the web, going to the Settings link in the upper right and select the tab that now reads “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”. A new section has been added labeled “IMAP Access”. Click on the radio button that says “Enable IMAP” and then the button labeled “Save Changes”. It’s that simple. There you will also find a link to help you configure any number of popular applications.

    If you haven’t noticed, storage space has increased. After gradually going up from the original 1GB to 2 and then nearly stopping at 2.8GB, a sudden surge starting in October 2007 has seen significant growth in the Gmail mailbox. As of this recording I’m over 4.5GB. Sadly, the storage increase happened right after I archived all my mail to a local Thunderbird application and cleaned out Gmail entirely. It seems funny to only be using 5% of my storage space again.

    Keep listening to the Gmail Podcast. News sources have it that more exciting improvements to Gmail are coming out soon.

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