British Inside : Email

30 days already?

James — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:59:00 GMT

Aaaaaaaaaaaaah. There must have been an automatic update last night, I came in this morning to a signin screen and the computer was booting from scratch. Of course, I immediately turned around and went for coffee; it's not a quick process.

On my return, the normal things are running; Outlook, Google Desktop sidebar, Pidgin, Twhirl, SlimTimer. But Outlook looks different. Weird...oh-crap-its-clearcontext-and-its-gone!

Yes, it's 30 days since I installed ClearContext trial version. Two people had recommended it, and once I tweeted it I remember one person saying "I bet you won't have it installed in 12 months" or something. Well, he's an idiot. :)

It's completely changed the way I work with email, and made the switch to being a PM a LOT easier. Here's a list of things that I use and appreciate every day:

The categories are just genius. Every project is a folder/category and since I color-coded every category that means that my email, tasks and calendar are color-coded. Until you see it, you don't understand. I can glance at my screen and see which project I am working with today. Super cool.
I (or CC) automatically assign categories to most emails now. I created some rules, maybe some is automatic, I dunno. It just works. So again, emails are color-coded in my inbox.
FWIW, I never have more than a dozen emails in my inbox. (well, technically, threads, but since they are collapsed it's still not a lot)
..which leads me to the magic buttons (can you hear angels singing?)

File Thread == Awesomeness. One click and the thread gets filed into it's folder. That means (to me) that I don't need to action it.
Make Task. If there is something to do, click this to make it a task. Put the date in. It appears on the bottom of the calendar, color-coded. This is too easy.
I've never deferred, but there's a button for it. Personally I just leave it in my Inbox until I can action it.
But Unsubscribe is my favorite of all. If you work in a company with more than 50 people, this is a lifesaver. We have company-all, telligent-life and a whole bunch of internal technical lists. Someone is always selling a cat, congratulating on getting pregnant or having a baby, closing with a big new customer, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. You get the idea.

AND EVERYONE REPLIES "Congtrats" or "w00t"!

Now, I just hit "Unsubscribe" on the first email - and I never see any replies. If you didn't know what you were doing and didn't use rules or CC, you could get a 100 emails a day into your inbox with just this.. er.. crap.

I haven't used the dashboard much, or probably a dozen other features, but the ones I have used have become truly indispensable. Hell, I'd buy it just for Unsubscribe, and that isn't even strictly helping me with my job.

Oh one more thing I forgot - message actions! Every time that I send an email and *need* an answer, I click the message actions and choose "remind me in 1 day if no reply received". Hahahaha - how priceless is that? My brain can relax - one less thing to try and track subconsciously.

Oooo, another big one. I used to run rules to move things around into folders - which sound like the same thing but really isn't. The key thing here is that if you run rules then your cell phone probably doesnt see them - mine only syncs with the root Inbox, not the project folders. So, now my phone "works" because on day 1 of CC I killed all my rules, and now just file the threads when I return to the office.

See, the world isn't all crappy products and ranting blogs. :D

Now deleting spam

James — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:19:00 GMT

Until today I have been reviewing my gmail spam folder each day or so, and marking all new spam as read when I've reviewed it. Most of the time that works ok, but I've noticed that there are times when I get spam with a presumably deliberately wrong date - maybe a few years ago.

That's quite clever of them really, in a way, because it means that I don't see it in my first page of spam.

And it's pretty dumb of them in another way, because, well, I don't see it. Not making much money off viagra if no-one sees the email, guys!

In any case, typing in the "in:spam is:unread" to find them got too much for me today, so I switched over to a new method. Rather than marking as read, I now review spam and then hit the "delete forever" link.

As a little bonus, I get a "feel-good" message back from Google each time!

Thanks Google, you old kidder!

Few Google tips

James — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:04:00 GMT

As I find them..

Gmail: I've seen 20-30 good emails caught in spam, so check it often while you train it. Since I don't want to check the same message twice, I mark the spam as read whenever I check it.

Then, to check just the unread spam you can search for in:spam is:unread. Here's a list of other neat search terms.
Google Calendar: If like me you used the Month view, instead try the Custom view set to "Next 4 weeks". It's much better since you don't see all those "old weeks" and the days are bigger so you see more s+.
Adding the US Holidays was easy. Add > Add a public calendar. Here you see the family calendar!

Oh, I forgot synching..

James — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:57:00 GMT

To copy your personal calendar to google, use their new synch tool...

..and then uninstall it.

It crashed my wife's Outlook 2003 almost every hour when it synched up, and I'm still finding strange entries in my Deleted Items folder in Outlook 2007 from when it was running - every hour it would create a few dozen empty appointments from 1979..

If like me you decide just to move over, then it's no problem. Just let it synch once, and uninstall. But if you're trying to sit on the fence then be aware there are issues with this tool.

Living in Gworld

James — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:31:00 GMT

Dan asked me to post an update as I explore deeper into the Google forest. I'm now fully committed to Gmail and Google Calendar (why isn't it GCalendar?) and Outlook is now purely an evil tolerated for work purposes only.

And with Rob Howard's tweet this morning about Google Apps for business, perhaps that's only temporary! Go Rob! (lol, while searching for Rob's blog URL, I found that he's already blogged it too)

Gmail

Using Gmail is great - it's everywhere I am, unlike Outlook that tries hard but is never going to be as ubiquitous as a browser. I continue to love labels over folders, i don't miss the heirarchy simply because all mail is there, never deleted and SEARCH ROCKS. It turns out that I was filing things away in folders in Outlook really only so I could find them quickly. If finding them is super quick, that issue goes away.

So labels rule.

Filters rock too - my aim is to keep everything out of my Inbox that isn't urgent. Therefore every time I get an email I think "is this important enough to interrupt me?" and if it isn't I create a filter to move it out of the Inbox and to a label. I can leave it unread or mark it read depending on if I ever *need* to read it. Some emails are just for filing, so I don't even see them. Perfect.

Some I label, but leave in Inbox because they are something I want to deal with today.

Regardless of the filter, the end result is the Archive button. I don't plan on deleting anything. Spam will delete itself. In fact I posted a suggestion to the Gmail team that they should replace the Delete button that is sitting in prime real-estate with a Mark as read button - something that I think is far more useful. I subscribe to a few mailing lists and want to mark as read all the time.

I setup my Gmail as follows. I have two POP3 accounts that I want sucked into Gmail, so I went to Settings > Account > Add another mail account. I entered the POP3 login info and told Gmail to delete the email from the server (by unchecking the "leave a copy" box). That's it. Gmail sucks in my email in a clever way - if you get a lot of email from an account, it checks more often. Quiet accounts it checks less often.

The only other trick I can pass on is the "Send mail as" option. I noticed that some mailing lists only accept mail from a specific email account (others don't seem to care). Plus I use a lot of email aliases (e.g. dell-at-shawthing.com I use with dell, but it's really just an alias for my real POP3 account). It's nice to reply to some people using the aliases they send to, so for my most popular aliases like @coveryourasp.com I set those up under "send mail as".

Just click "Add another email address" and type in the email address. You have to verify it of course. I also check "Reply from the same address the message was sent to" so that most of the time people aren't even aware that I'm using Gmail. If you send to james@britishinside.com, that's who the reply comes from.

Oh, and don't forget to click the Chat tab and move it below the labels.

Google Calendar

I love the calendar too. I like weekends together so I set Monday as start of week.

Setup is much easier - I created a gmail account for my wife too, so she uses calendar as well now. We share our calendars with full privileges ("Make changes AND manage sharing") so she can add to mine and vice versa. Our calendars are not public though. But I see hers and she seems mine - in pink and blue so it's easy to tell what's what.

This morning Tara created more calendars on her account for our kids, and shared those too, so now I see calendars for the kids baseball, softball, teacher conferences, etc. I chose that sandy color for those. It's awesome. We all see everything at once and can search for events easily.

Note that you won't need to invite each other to family events any more! Just put them on the calendar. if you invite your spouse you'll end up with two of them on there, in pink and blue.

Creating events is great too - it's so clever that you can just type "7pm Maisy softball at Alex field" and it picks out the time, description and location automatically. You can choose which calendar you are creating it on.

Wow, I'm kinda pissed actually that this was out here and I was stuck in Outlook all this time. Guys, when you find stuff like this, tell me!

More Gmail

James — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:44:00 GMT

My daughter thinks it's funny when I talk about Gmail - she says it sounds like "super hero mail". I am of course ok with that.

I've been using it more and more recently. I've been sucking in my personal email to Gmail for a month or so and reading it there. When I went on vacation for a week I was reading it on my phone that way. Since I spend my life in a browser I find it very convenient.

I''m loving the rules and labels. It took a few days to think labels rather than folders, but just as in CMS I do prefer the use of labels. The rules ROCK. I have some important ones that forward to SMS which is sooooooo handy. Everyday I add more rules to automatically sort emails into a label and out of the Inbox.

I'm not quite sure yet if the order of rules is important; I'm stuck thinking in Outlook mode where the order is very important and liberal use of "stop processing more rules" is applied to get an email into the "right folder". Of course, this is an advantage of labels (tags) over folders (categories) - an email can be in multiple tags.

For now, Outlook is still the app that deletes my email from the server, although I find myself never checking Outlook for personal email any more so that will soon change I'm sure. I'll delete the Outlook account and ask Gmail to delete from the server as it retrieves.

Btw, did I say what a breath of fresh air search is in Reader and Gmail? So nice. I haven't been able to (effectively) search in Outlook for some time now.

Calendar's is the one thing that is holding me back - I'm using outlook for personal use too and that is integrated into my phone via Exchange. I read yesterday via Matt Cutts that there is finally Google-Outlook integration but I haven't looked at it yet. If that's true, if I can get Google Calendar to appear on Outlook and my phone then I'm moving over to that too.

(Yeah I know there are 3rd party apps that do the integration, but I always figured that Google would do it so I waited)

Integration is the key I'm finding - just like we all thought Office was integrated, now I'm ~~getting~~ hooked into my Google Account. Everything fun is in there - all my webmaster tools, analytics, reader, gmail, adsense, adwords, base, notebook, bookmarks. Wow, when I list how much of my life is in Google's hands...

Google Desktop

James — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 14:58:00 GMT

I've gone full circle. I uninstalled Google Desktop Search back in August 2006 and installed the Windows version.

Yesterday, I reversed that decision. I thought that GDS' problem with archived email was bad; what a joke that was. WDS was far, far worse. By the end it couldn't even find files in folders that matched a filespec - you know, like DOS could 20 years ago.

So, I installed GDS again - now out of beta I think? - and got some "prettiness" too. It caught me in the right mood, so I installed the sidebar too (shown to the right). Not a fan of gadgets normally, but I found some neat ones that save me some real time during the day.

For example, the volume gadget allows me to mute and change volume without clicking on the volume icon and waiting a few seconds for it to popup. Sounds silly? I HATE waiting.

iTunes? Ditto. Why wait for it to popup so I can skip/pause or wait for the tooltop to see whats playing? gdTunes rocks.

An eBay watcher to show my stuff. Very cool.

The weather. Sure, I can look out the window, but temps are nice and forecasts are a click away.

My favorite though are the clocks. How nice are they? I have times shown in Seattle (MSFT), Dallas (Telligent) and Brisbane (parents) so I don't have to think timezones any more.

Dont' forget the perfect geek toy - a plant that I can't kill. I have a kind of bush thing in a pot in the office that (I only realized the other day when I had visitors) I haven't watered for over a year. I dont' know why it is still alive. Humidity?

lol. I didn't even mention that I can search from the sidebar.

It takes some screen real-estate, sure. But I have 3 screens so I treated myself - and actually programs act like my middle screen got a little smaller so it works really well.

Uh-oh, perhaps SmarterMail is innocent..

James — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 23:43:00 GMT

Steve Schofield at ORCS Web just pointed me to a very worrying article:

Why Outlook 2007 is slow: Microsoft’s official answer

My personal PST is 2.6gb.

I am going to SHIT A BRICK if this is true - can Outlook 2007 really be worse than 2003 with large amounts of email?

Outlook 2007 and SmarterMail? Not so much..

James — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 20:56:00 GMT

Since I installed Office 2007 one of my POP3 accounts has been incredibly slow, so today I performed an experiment to start tracking it down.

I set my email alias to point to two POP3 accounts on the SmarterMail server, then left it untouched for the afternoon. Just now I got my desktop to download one account and the laptop to get the other.

The results:

Faster desktop running Outlook 2007 took..wait for it..210 seconds (3.5 minutes) to download 19 emails.
Over 10 seconds PER EMAIL.
Slower laptop running Outlook 2003 took under 10 seconds, as you'd expect. After connecting etc, basically instant email flowing down the pipe.

At the moment it really seems that Outlook 2007 has issues with SmarterMail POP3.

Any SmarterMail or Outlook experts out there?
Anyone found the same thing (I've read about Vista-related issues, but I'm on XP Pro)?

Office 2007 - you were right

James — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 11:48:00 GMT

When I asked if I should install Vista and/or Office 2007, I really didn't know what to expect. Geeks can be funny, and although wanting to install all the latest doo-dads is common I've heard a lot of whinging about Vista.

In the end, I just installed Office 2007, and will pass on Vista until I repave. It's just too much of a risk, and will take too long to reinstall all the stuff I use daily.

Office 2007, I have to say, rocks so far. It took an hour to upgrade and everything worked. Kinda cool.

Love the ribbon stuff. So hard to explain, but it does seem that the options that I want are right there now.

Two gotchas - first my newsgator toolbar disappeared, but it came back after rebooting (strangely Office 2007 didn't reboot after installation) and second, it does seem slow to download email right now. Perhaps it'll improve, but I'm getting the internet connection hanging up (browser hangs too) when email is being downloaded. And this is not a lot of email - since I deleted my catchall my email count has plummeted.

But overall I'm very pleased. Thanks for everyone's advice!

I made a mistake many years ago..

James — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 21:15:00 GMT

..and I'm now paying for it big time.

I'm not the only one either - when I bought shawthing.com and started using that as my email address I decided to be smart and use the "nobody" (catch-all) address rather than setup lots of different accounts.

And then I used pretend email addresses that matched the site I was signing up at. So, at msdn.microsoft.com I registered as msdn@shawthing.com; at Google AdSense I used adsense@shawthing.com, etc.

Looking back now, I'm not quite sure why I did this. I think it had something to do with finding out which sites would share my email address without my permission. So, if I started getting spam to adsense@shawthing.com I could get on my high horse and call Google evil again.

What really happened though, wasn't that I caught web sites selling my email address. No, what happened is that spammers found that anything-they-bloody-well-wanted@shawthing.com worked as a valid email address.

So today I'm getting 2,000-3,000 spam a day that poor spambayes is trying hard to keep under control.

Ironically, very few are to my published email addresses. I estimate that 90% are either to or from a fake email address - which of course beause of the catch-all account I get in my Inbox. Every single one.

I admit that I was going to ask how to find my email addresses, perhaps using some Office API? But then I thought, let's keep is simple you pillock.

So, I started a simple search in Outlook and specified "In Folder" doesn't contain "spam", and "To" contains shawthing.com. And of course, it gave me a list! I just sorted on the To address and soon I will have made this problem my bitch.

Take that spammers. :)