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 would absolutely lock Facebook in as an ongoing provider and Internet hub for millions of users every day. Not that they’re having a problem keeping users right now, I just think it would be another great way to entwine themselves with their users even further.

If you had an email address like jasonlbean@facebook.com that would allow you to both send and receive email outside of the closed walls of Facebook, wouldn’t you jump at the chance? Would it replace your @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, @live.com, or maybe even your @gmail.com account?

Post from: EveryJoe

Free Facebook Email Account

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 messages.

The one thing I’m not sure how I like yet, is that when I drag a message onto one of the labels it immediately archives the message out of my Inbox. I frequently will add labels to messages but leave them in the Inbox. That may take some getting adjusted to.

Post from: EveryJoe

Google’s Gmail Changes and Adds Functionality

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.

1. White belt
2. Green belt
3. Black belt
4. 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 are available from the Google Labs functionality. There are a number of nice additions you can incorporate into Gmail to improve and enhance the functionality.

What tips do you have that you’d like to share? I do still wish I could sort by subject and other columns in Gmail.

Post from: EveryJoe

Are You a Gmail Ninja

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 I was once again seeing graphics and now I don’t believe I’ve been having anymore issues. There was talk in the comments on the original post that it could be due to some Google Labs issues, but I never was able to confirm or fix anything there. Is everyone else noticing images again? Any ideas of what it was?

Also I’ve been a huge fan of Xobni since I first found out about it. I think it adds some great tools and features to Outlook that don’t exist. They continue to develop and improve the tool and expand the features. My problem though is it still brings my machine to a sluggish pace that’s just not acceptable. Honestly, part of the problem is probably with my machine. Pushing 4 years old and I put it through the wringer in my daily use. I uninstalled Xobni from my laptop, but when I get a new machine, Xobni will be one of the apps I’ll immediately reinstall and give it a try again.

Post from: EveryJoe

Gmail Fixed and Xobni Out Again

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 have one. Just leave a comment. I’ve continued looking but still haven’t found anything that makes a difference. I’ve been disabling and re-enabling extensions to see if that might be the culprit, but I haven’t had any success. That makes sense as well since I haven’t made any changes along those lines since everything seemed to be working fine.

Earlier commenter said it may be a Google Labs issue. That would be annoying that one of Google’s own apps is causing the problem. Then they’d start sounding a lot like Microsoft does sometimes!

Post from: EveryJoe

Ongoing Problem of Gmail Images Displaying

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 getting things working with Google apps is usually not too major of an undertaking.

Image: Snagit from Gmail Accounts Setup

The challenge though is when I’m no longer onsite with that particular client. Gmail keeps checking those accounts for mail instead of just letting me handle it through Outlook 2007. Normally that wouldn’t be that big of a deal because I configured Gmail to leave copies of the mail on the server, so I’m not missing it from Outlook. I’m just having to manage the mail twice now to delete the copy in Gmail.

What I’d really like to be able to do is to “inactivate” those accounts in my Gmail interface without having to delete them completely. No such luck though. As long as the accounts are loaded in Gmail, they will continue to get checked for new email. For that reason I’ve just deleted them and will manage accessing those accounts via their independent webmail sites.

It sure would have been handy though to just keep using Gmail to consolidate all that information and communication. Not quite ready for that though as it relates to my needs from a business stand point.

Post from: EveryJoe

Grabbing POP3 Mail w/ Gmail

Image: sxc.hu

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 (EPIC) has petitioned the FTC to investigate privacy concerns over the piles of online services Google offers. Recently Google Docs came under fire when a security blip made previously private documents visible to the public. While I wouldn’t use Google Docs for information that I see as sensitive and confidential, the point remains the same – if you want it to be private…it should stay private.

So what’s next? The FTC is aware (and has been aware) of this issue and will surely keep an eye on things – if another Google Docs incident comes up, then it’s likely the issue of privacy in cloud computing will need to be addressed more directly. In the meantime, Google’s main issue is to manage the public perception of their products properly…and try to reduce any fears or reservations about privacy that might get blown out of proportion (rightly or not) as a result of this issue.

Post from: EveryJoe

Privacy Groups Lobby Against Gmail, Picasa

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 culled spam by 70% in Nov, 2008, but it has been growing at a rate of 156% ever since. The highest spam last year, however, was on April 23rd, where one undisclosed customer reported receiving 100 emails per minute per user. The unsurprising bad news is that, “All indicators suggest this trend (read increase) will continue as virus, malware, and link-based attacks become both more frequent and more ingenious.” Sigh.

What I observed in my inbox is backed by the report as another growing trend: “emailing spoofed news alerts with URLs that would link to a website hosting the virus.”

Watch out and defend yourself.

Post from: EveryJoe

From Those Who Welcome Spam

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 for new messages received. The gadget has been released only yesterday and is bound to have bugs though I hope they are fewer than in iGoogle.

Gmail With Mozilla Prism: Mozilla has been working on a project called Prism (add-on) which can be used to convert any website into a stand-alone desktop application outside the browser. Prism is available as a Firefox add-on, and is easy to use. You can read my opinion on Prism in greater detail here and let me know if you need any help with creating your own desktop app of your favorite website. I’ve tried this five months ago, so there is a good chance that the technology has gotten better.

Post from: EveryJoe

Gmail on Your Desktop

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 is to use an attachment reminder.

An attachment reminder is a simple function that makes one pass across the text in your composed mail searching for the substring “attach” (and perhaps common spelling mistakes around “attach”) and gives you an error message if you haven’t made an attachment. These are tiny apps (rather plug-ins) and you will be able to find one for most email clients with a straight-forward search.

Following are three widely used ones.

1. Forgotten Attachment Detector: Gmail’s attachment reminder. Go to Gmail -> Settings -> Labs. Scroll down a bit to find the feature and enable it.

2. Outlook Attachment Reminder: Mark Bird’s attachment reminder is an Outlook macro that you can easily add following the instructions in the attachment reminder’s home page.

3. AttachmentRemember: This Thunderbird attachment reminder is an add-in (.XPI) with a wide range of features (custom words and sentences to scan) and is available in multiple languages.

Let me know if you have trouble with any of these attachment reminders.

Post from: EveryJoe

Forgot the Attachment!