If I were Mark Zuckerberg, the first thing I’d do is spend some money and buy a bunch of cool stuff. Next, I’d start offering free Facebook email accounts to users. How interested would you be in a Facebook email address?

Facebook continues to go strong. Everyone is getting used to and familiar with the interface changes for the most part and things seem to be settling down. There’s part of me though that still thinks Facebook is at risk of losing their totally cool status and being replaced by something else.
I think if Facebook offered email addresses to users it …read more

I loaded Gmail tonight and was welcomed with a notice that there’s been a little bit of an interface change. They’ve added some AJAXy ability to drag and drop messages onto your defined labels to label the messages.

You can see the little handles on each message line on the far left side of the message. You can then drag the message on top of the label you want to apply to the message. Not the major improvement from their perspective, but I really like the fact they moved the labels up to be positioned right under the standard groupings of …read more

Gmail seems to continue to be the webmail application to beat. If you’re using Gmail over the other popular webmail tools like Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail/Windows Live Mail, are you using it to its fullest potential?

You can go to the Gmail Help files and read through a variety of tips to make you a ninja of Gmail usage. The tips are divided into the four different levels.

White belt
Green belt
Black belt
Gmail master

Through each section they have pretty much covered just about any other tip I can think of for how I use it. Many of the tips involve using features that …read more

I’ve had some recent changes to my computer system that I had shared about recently in posts and thought I’d provide a little update on the matter. One of the issues was with Gmail not displaying images in messages, even though I’d told it to, and Xobni having a new release version available.

I wrote awhile back about Gmail not displaying images in my email messages, even though I’d told it to specifically always do so from specific senders. I had written this back in November of 2008 and up until now had continued to have issues. Recently I noticed that …read more

It wasn’t too long ago that I posted an article about having issues with Gmail’s image display settings. There’s a great function where you can tell Gmail to always display images from certain senders. At least it would be a great setting if it worked.

Reading through the comments from my earlier post on this Gmail image issue there are a number of other people experiencing the same challenge. I’m sad they’re going through this too, but it’s good to know it’s not something just unique to my system.
Reposting this to hopefully get a solution from someone out there if you …read more

It’s become one of the crucial components of the way business gets done for me on the computer. I use it to organize information and to communicate with clients, both by e-mail and by instant messaging and chat. It’s Gmail.
Recently while at a client where I could not get POP3 email to send or receive with my settings behind their firewall I decided to try Gmail’s hand at accessing and sending e-mail from my other business POP3 accounts with the Gmail interface.
Things were easy to setup and manage from within the interface. That was expected, as for the most part …read more

Cloud computing is up for hot debate among privacy groups these days – and Google is in the hot seat. The issue? Your privacy. It appears Google might not be doing all they could be to protect sensitive user data.
And one group is even suggesting that Gmail be shut down. You heard me right…shut down. Now before you start panicking and wondering were this is going…this was only one extreme suggestion if the FTC determined that Google was only “protecting” your data with one flimsy password like “search engine”. We’re not quite at that point yet.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center …read more

Gmail is a pretty good mail service provided by Google which strives towards accurately catching spam, and is very successful in catching the phish. One thing that empowers the people behind Gmail is the volumes that Google sees.
The Google Enterprise Mail is apparently a much-in-demand service too and it has a Google Enterprise “spam squad” who welcome spam so as to analyze and counter them. Nearly a month after the new year started, they have posted a retrospective post “2008: The Year in Spam” which you may go through if you have time. Otherwise this summary will suffice.
Closing the McColo Network …read more

Ways to run web services through desktop apps are constantly explored especially for oft-used ones. Desktop apps are preferred to web services because they tend to use less resources. Today, Gmail can be run as a desktop application through two means: Google Gadgets and Mozilla Prism.
Gmail With Google Gadgets: To run the official Gmail Google Gadget, you will need Google Desktop 5 or above installed on your computer. The gadget is tiny (79KB) and offers all the basic features of Gmail including reading, sending, searching and starring messages; keyboard shortcuts; and contact auto-complete. But it doesn’t yet have the sound notification …read more

A friend of mine once defined the tiniest measurable period of time as the time between you sending a mail and then remembering that you forgot making the attachment. How many times have we clicked “Send” without adding the attachment? A few of the instances may have been embarrassing as well. If only there was a way.
I’ve trained myself to add the attachments before composing the mail and to fill the address fields after composing the mail. Just so that I would neither forget an attachment, nor send to the wrong person. You could try that, or an easier way …read more