Gmail Podcast

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.

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.

For those who use Twitter for your social networking, they have added a nice feature under the “Find & Invite” section to allow you to invite people from your Gmail address book quickly and easily. As a quick side note, Twitter is similar to instant messaging on a web page. You login with an account then answer the simple question “What are you doing now?” with a short text phrase such as “listening to the Gmail Podcast”. There two types of people, those you follow, and those who follow you. When you post something, the people who follow you will see it. When someone you follow updates their twitter status, you’ll see that update. It’s a simple concept that is catching on quickly.

To use your Gmail address book, login to Twitter at twitter.com. If you don’t have an account, simply register. It’s free and quick. Next, click on the link near the top that says “”Find & Invite”. There you will see an option to use your Gmail address book. You will be offered a secure login for your Gmail credentials and then the screen will go to your contacts. Once Twitter imports the information you can simply click on names to follow and whether to turn on or off the notifications. It’s that simple.

When you’re done, click “Next” and another page will come up suggesting to invite people you email the most. A pretty neat idea for inviting a lot of your friends to join Twitter without a lot of effort from you.

I don’t know when the Filter Assistant feature first appeared, but I have found it very useful.

You’ll find the link to the filter assistant in the upper right of any message. When you click on this link, an orange section appears that looks a lot like the content when you are creating filters via the Settings screen or the “Create a filter” link near the search box at the top.

By default the From and To boxes are filled in, but you are free to remove that content and filter any other way you like. The bottom part of the orange box is to tell what actions to take on the filters you have created. Again, similar to doing the same thing from the settings tab.

Let’s walk through a quick example… Let’s say you spot a message on your index from a mail list you got on and cannot seem to get removed from. Go ahead and open the conversation from the index by clicking on it. Now locate the Filter Assistant link in the upper right of the conversation – it will be the same distance down the screen as the sender’s name. For this example, you’re really only concerned with who the message is to, not necessarily who it is from. That sender may send you valid information later. It’s your choice, but for this example I’ll remove the information in the From box. Once that is done, I go to the second half and check the box next to “Delete it”. Finally, I click on the “Create Filter” button.

If I ever need to remove or modify that filter, I can do it via the “Settings” link in the upper right of the screen and click on the “Filter” tab the same as any other filter.

Quick Tip: Here’s a quick tip for all you Mac users who are also using Firefox; if you right click (or Ctrl-Click) on a message in the conversation index you will get a pop-up, or call-out, with the message content. Across the top of this you can Close the window, Archive it, Leave the message marked unread, or Trash it. I would love to see a Reply option, but since you cannot reply directly from the index normally, this kind of makes sense. I haven’t found this feature available in IE or FireFox on the Windows machines yet, but I’ll keep looking and let you know.

Gmail now recognizes Microsoft PowerPoint attachments. When you have a message with a PowerPoint attached, Gmail will present a link labeled “View as slideshow” near the attachment. When you click on that Gmail will open a new window and start displaying the slides. In theory, it’s pretty straight forward, but here’s what I found in reality.

First, Gmail does not yet support PowerPoint 2007 files. Also, when I sent a PowerPoint file from my Mac (one that was originally developed on a PC) it did not recognize the file and said it couldn’t convert it despite the fact that it opened up fine on the Windows and Mac machines.

I also noticed using the Gmail web interface with Firefox on Mac, that the file attachment icons on the right, next to the date on the message index, the icons showed up as file types, for example a little PowerPoint icon when a PPT was attached, not paperclips like on Windows (Firefox or Internet Explorer)

Finally, despite the fact that Google does not currently allow you to edit the PowerPoint file, they claim they will have a way to edit PPTs “this summer”. We can only hope.

Quick Tip: If you haven’t already noticed, Gmail increased the file size limit on attachments. You can now attach up to 20MB files, up from the former 10MB. A word of caution, that’s more storage than the typical ISP mailbox. Be careful who you are sending large attachments to, unless of course they are using Gmail.

Here’s a quick tip how to select multiple conversations with just two mouse clicks.

To check a range of conversations from the index, click the checkbox next to the first conversation then hold down the shift key while selecting the last conversation. If you are familiar with selecting a range of cells in a spreadsheet, this is very similar. Automatically, Gmail will highlight and select all the conversations from the first one to the last. Again, check the first conversation, hold down the shift key while selecting the last conversation. Instantly you’ll have 3, 12, or 20 conversations selected at once. You can do this repeatedly on the same screen if you have multiple ranges to select. Unfortunately I haven’t found a keyboard shortcut for this yet.

Once the conversations are selected you can label, archive, delete them, or any other regular action that you perform on one or more conversations.

Listener Steve Holden pointed out that while reading messages, he noticed that the Gmail web interface has a link on the right side of the screen to add the event to your Google calendar when a date appears in the body of the message. I tried doing little experimenting to see if I could trigger the link, but was unsuccessful. Once Steve sent me a sample, I found out the format.

If you have a line of text in your message, then on the next line a date followed by a semicolon and a time, the link will appear. Gmail is pretty good about recognizing a wide format of dates. I have used month/day/year digits as well as spelling out the month then digits a comma and a year. As long as the date and time are on their own line and a semicolon separates them, the link will appear. I will include some examples in the show notes on the web site.

My Special Event

Pay Taxes (US)

Why is this useful you ask? For the same reason Gmail presents a link when it recognizes package tracking IDs or a Google Map link when it recognizes an address – to be more helpful and save you time. When sending an email to a gmail user, you can include a date and time for an event and have it easily added to the calendar.

Quick Tip: If you have shortcut keys enabled, you can use the “#” key to delete messages. From the conversation index, begin by checking the messages, or using the “x” key, then clicking “#”. If you need more information on how to enable shortcut keys, have a listen to the podcast from January 2005.

You can use your Gmail account as a secure way of checking out of dozens of online stores. Many offer a discount! Learn more by listening!

In an earlier episode of the Gmail Podcast I described how to do HTML signatures using Google documents to copy and paste the content. Thanks to listener Bob, there is an easier way using Greasemonkey.

Step 1 involves installing Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that lets you manage other scripts. You can find it at www.greasespot.net. This is a pretty straight forward download and install to Firefox so I won’t get in to the details here.

Step 2 involves downloading and installing the actual HTML script for Greasemonkey which I have included in the text of this show available on the web site.

http://gootch2.googlepages.com/htmlsig.user.js

Once Greasemonkey and the script are installed, you are ready for step 3 – Editing the signature. Right click on the monkey icon on the bottom of your Firefox screen and select “manage user scripts”. You should see a selection on the left that reads “HTML Signatures for GMail”. Highlight that by clicking on it and then click on the “Edit” button.

Here is where things get a little technical. Stick with me and we’ll get through this together… The first time you click Edit, you may be asked to locate a text editor. On Windows you can navigate to C:\Windows\Notepad.exe. On a Mac I suggest using TextEdit in the Applications folder.

Once you have chosen your text editor, you will see the actual script that does all the hard work. You don’t need to be a fluent JavaScript programmer to modify this. Just find the line about half way down that says “var htmlsignature =. Change the text between the quotes. By default it reads Edit the script to change this signature, with some HTML tags. If you are comfortable with HTML, be creative and have fun. If you aren’t, start by just modifying the text and see what happens. When you are done, save your file and close the dialog box in Firefox for the Greasemonkey script.

Remember, good email etiquette suggests you keep your signatures short. Four to six lines of text is a good rule of thumb.

To test your creation, compose a new email in Gmail. You should see your signature pop in the message body automatically. If you want to change your signature at any time, go back and repeat step 3 of this process.

That’s it for using Greasemonkey to create HTML signatures in Gmail. I’ve installed it, confgured it, use it, and love it. Although, I have to admit that I did spend most of my time tweaking the HTML to get the styles just right.

Gmail now has a way to get email from other accounts with a feature called Mail Fetcher. This differs slightly from the existing technology available in the “Send Mail As” feature described in an earlier podcast. Send Mail As is a “push” technology meaning that your mail is pushed from the original source (say your ISP mailbox) to Gmail. The Mail Fetcher is a pull technology, meaning that Gmail will pull information from your Internet Server Provider, or ISP, mailbox.

While this may seem like semantics at first, the underlying technologies differ quite a bit and the use for one over the other is up to you.

Mail Fetcher is configured from same screen as Send Mail As. Begin by logging in to your Gmail account and clicking on “Settings” in the upper right corner of the screen.

Next click on the “Accounts” link.

Find the section labeled “get mail from other accounts”. Normally there won’t be anything configured yet so click on the link “Add another mail account”. At this point, you can add up to five accounts.

Now enter the email address of the account you plan to pull the information from. For example if I want all my mail that normally goes to [email protected] to arrive in my [email protected], I would enter [email protected] since that is where it will first be delivered according to the mail routing rules setup on the internet name servers. Sorry if this is a little too technical.

Now, click “Next Step”

You will then be prompted for credentials regarding the other account. you should have your login and password handy. It will also prompt you for the POP server. This is the system which provides access to your mail on that server. If you don’t have that information available you may need to contact your ISP or mail hosting provider. If you are unsure of the port, leave it as the default.

Further options are available to leave a copy of the retrieved message on the server. You may want to check this, but if your other mail host is like mine, the mailbox size limit is not anywhere near as generous as Gmail and it will fill up quickly.

You can also choose to use a secure, or encrypted connection, but make sure your other mail host supports this first.

The third option is to allow the automatic application of a Gmail label of your choosing to the messages from that provider. This may help to identify the originating source of the email or just provide you with a visual record.

Like the filters, you can have this message complete skip the mailbox and go straight to the archive. This is handy if you have an account you use for purely marketing and spam collection, but don’t want it to get filled up.

Once your options are chosen, click “Add Account”.

The final question asks if you would like to be able to send mail as that other account. this is similar to the Send Mail As and allow the recipient of a message to think it came from the other account transparently.

The main difference between Send Mail As and Mail Fetcher is that the former requires you to send a test message, enable forwarding on the first mail account, and allow email to be received by Gmail. Mail Fetcher requires you to enter your credentials and then pulls the mail directly from the other server.

Gmail’s mail fetcher also keeps a history of attempts and fetches from the other account. Once you have setup the account, the same Accounts screen under settings has a link for each account labeled “View History”. The fetches will be done at regular intervals, but you can force Gmail to retrieve email from our other account manually by clicking “Check mail now” for the respective account on the same screen.

Learn how to use Google Alerts as part of your Gmail account to know when your favorite topics are found on the web.