gmail — James Poling

Gmail Starts Offering ‘Email Interventions’ for Your Friends Hooked on Another Email Client

July 31, 2011 By James Poling Leave a Comment

I have to admit that it still surprises me that there are actually people out there that are still using another email client besides Gmail. It may not be the sexiest UI out there but it really does just do email right. Not to mention free video chat and calls to anywhere in the US.

It looks like the team at Gmail have come up with a fun, creative way for you to help your friends still tweaking on Yahoo! Mail or, god forbid, AOL or Hotmail.

Check out there new Email Intervention page for instructions on how to invite your friends to Gmail.

You can also check out the video after the jump.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Tech, Videos Tagged With: email, gmail, google, hotmail. aol, Videos, yahoo

Gmail Introduces Two New Themes to Preview Their New Gmail+ Look

July 7, 2011 By James Poling Leave a Comment

Google already made the announcement earlier this week that they’ll be phasing out the Picasa and Blogger brands to more fully integrate them with Google+, it’s no real surprised that they’re doing the same thing for Gmail.

They may not be phasing out the Gmail brand but they did just release two new themes that are supposed to let you “preview” the eventual new look of Gmail. Both themes are basically the same although one is “dense”. The only difference is between this and the non-dense version is the other version seems to be double-spaced, a little too much space for my liking. I prefer the dense theme.

If you have right-side chat enabled in your Gmail Labs you’ll want to disable that otherwise it tends to make the theme look pretty funky.

I’ve been hoping for a new Gmail UI for quite a while and although I do think this is a step in the right direction I think there’s a lot more room for tightening up the UI and making it a just a little cleaner.

To activate the themes simply go into your Gmail settings > Themes and choose one of the two new options listed, they should be the last two themes listed.

What do you guys think of the new look?

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: gmail, gmail themes, google, themes

Gmail Finally Gives You the Option to Turn Off Auto Saving of Every Address You Send To

April 12, 2011 By James Poling Leave a Comment

Oddly this is almost a non-issue since Gmail has already basically solved this problem by allowing you to add only certain addresses to “My Contacts”.

Before “My Contacts” was an option literally every email sent was bunched into one giant group which made it nearly impossible to try and sync your Gmail address book to any mobile device without having thousands of contacts.

Fortunately if it’s still something that happens to be a pet peeve of yours you can now go in your general mail settings and turn off the the option to auto save all email addresses.

Personally I find that now that I can control which contacts get stored in My Contacts, which is what Gmail uses to sync to other devices, having all the other email addresses stored in there doesn’t bother me and does occasionally come in handy when trying to locate an old contact that I haven’t emailed in years.

What do you think? Will you be shutting off your auto-save function or keeping it on as a virtual archive of literally everyone you’ve ever sent an email to?

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: contacts, email addresses, gmail, my contacts, settings

Geekiest Kinect Hack Ever Brings Google’s April Fool’s Prank ‘Gmail Motion’ to Fruition

April 12, 2011 By James Poling Leave a Comment

It’s not surprising that each year Google puts out some pretty elaborate April Fool’s pranks. According to congressional calculations Google spends around $800 billion a year on April Fool’s pranks alone.

Gmail Motion

Some people actually fell for the prank for some reason thinking it would be easier to open and reply to email by using hand gestures rather than a quick keyboard shortcut. Alas, it was all a joke.

Fortunately some guys at ICT MxR Lab took the challenge seriously and used a Kinect hack to accomplish the most useless “shortcut” in the history of email.

Gmail Motion Kinect Hack

Filed Under: Tech, Videos Tagged With: gmail, gmail motion, google, hacks, ict mxr lab, kinect

Google Adds Smart Labels to Gmail Labs

March 10, 2011 By James Poling Leave a Comment

Google has your back in the battle to keep incoming email organized. Yesterday, Google Software Engineer Stanley Chen, announced smart labels on the Official Gmail Blog.

Today, we’re launching a complementary feature in Gmail Labs called Smart Labels, which helps you classify and organize your email. Once you turn it on from the Labs tab in Settings, Smart Labels automatically categorizes incoming Bulk, Notification and Forum messages, and labels them as such. “Bulk” mail includes any kind of mass mailing (such as newsletters and promotional email) and gets filtered out of your inbox by default (where you can easily read it later), “Notifications” are messages sent to you directly (like account statements and receipts), and email from group mailing lists gets labeled as “Forums.”

Chen goes on to say that if you’re already using filters and labels to keep track of your email you’ll likely find that smart labels can replace some of the labels you’re already using. Smart labels show up like all your other labels and can be edited and deleted in the same way.

Smart labels are available immediately to all Gmail users just go into your labs and enable them to get the ball rolling.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: filters, gmail, gmail labs, google, labels, labs, organization, smart labels

Three Easy Ways to Backup Your Gmail to Avoid Potential Data Loss

February 28, 2011 By James Poling 1 Comment

You’ve probably already heard about a number of Gmail users logging into their account yesterday only to find out that all of their mail and labels had vanished. Gmail says that something happened that caused those user’s accounts to be switched back to new accounts.

According to their status blog only 0.02% of users were affected and as of now most of those accounts have been restored, presumably with all of their lost data back in place. Google says it hopes to have the remaining 0.013% accounts up and running in within the next 12 hours.

Still, this should be a wakeup call to all users. No matter what web-based email client you use it’s never a bad idea to have your emails backed up in another place just to be safe. For the purposes of this post we’ll just focus on backing up Gmail.

Backing Up Gmail to Another Web-Based Email Account

Forwarding your email with Gmail to another account is free and easy to setup. Go into your Gmail settings and click on the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.

Enter the address you want to forward your mail to, you can choose any email address you like, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail or even another Gmail address, although for the purposes of backing up your emails using a different provider is probably wise. Gmail will send an email to the address you chose to forward to with a code to enter in order to confirm that you actually own the address. Once the address is verified you can add that address and all future emails will be forwarded along. If you’re using this strictly for backup, in the dropdown next to it keep the original copy in your inbox.

Backing Up Gmail to a Desktop Client

There are a number of desktop clients out there that work great but aren’t that great for backing up your files offline. As far as I know Postbox and Thunderbird do not offer this option. Outlook and Outlook Express however both offer “Auto Archive” features that will remove your messages from the server and store them offline.

The problem with using a client that doesn’t have this feature is that if Gmail (or any web-based email) does accidentally delete your emails and you’re using POP or IMAP to access them, they will also be deleted on your desktop client since it’s basically mirroring what is on the server. I could be wrong about this but I confirmed with Postbox and that is my understanding.

For the purposes of this post we’ll use Outlook. Go to File>Options>Advanced. You’ll see the “AutoArchive Settings” button there.

You can configure AutoArchive a number of ways including which folders to archive as well as how often they should be archived. Setting up this option will assure you that your mail is now permanently off the server and stored safely on your hard drive.

Backing Up Gmail Using a Cloud Service

This is the service that may cost you a little investment because not all levels of the service are free. I recommend a service like Backupify which not only lets you backup your Gmail account but also any of your social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook or Picasa.

They offer a free level of service which includes weekly backups of all of your files however this level only includes 2GB of storage and if you’re a Gmail power user, chances are you have way more than 2GB in your gmail account. The next level up is only $4.99/mo and includes up to 20GB of storage plus 25 different social media platforms as well as nightly backups.

The bottom line is, regardless of what system you are using whether it’s cloud based or sitting on your hard drive you should alway make sure to have a backup of your data somewhere else. It’s one of those things that may seem silly until the one day you’re actually confronted with the loss of all of your data. Trust me, you’ll be glad you have the backup.

What sort of backup plans do you have to make sure your online data is safe?

Filed Under: How To Tagged With: backupify, backups, data, gmail, outlook, postbox, thunderbird

Better YouTube Chrome Extension Lives Up to Its Name

February 14, 2011 By James Poling 1 Comment

If you’re a regular user of Chrome and occasionally watch YouTube videos you should head over and install the Better YouTube extension for Chrome.

Whenever you visit YouTube to watch a video it cleans up the entire page, enlarges the video and moves it front and center on the page.

Better Youtube will do the following:

- centers videos and automatically stretches them out to a comfortable viewing size
- centers comments and auto-hides the suggestions
- suggestions are moved to the top right corner of the video page. Click to open suggestions and click to close. (view screenshot)
- centers footer on each page
- centers title on video page
- cleans up the video page
- cleans up the home screen
- removes ads from the home screen
- removes ads and promoted videos from the search

This is the next step in the long line of “Better” Google extensions including Better Gmail and Better GReader, although I now use the Pure Reader extension for GReader which I like a lot.

Filed Under: How To Tagged With: better youtube, chrome, extensions, gmail, greader, youtube

Gmail Adds Ability to Restore Lost Contacts

December 16, 2010 By James Poling Leave a Comment

After years of being the red-headed stepchild of the Gmail platform, Gmail’s contacts section is growing up fast and continuing to add a lot of useful, new features.

Earlier this year Gmail revamped its entire contact section making it much easier to control your “My Contacts” list and thus beng able to sync those contacts with a number of different devices.

Restore lost contacts in Gmail

via Gmail Blog:

We’ve added a new feature to Google Contacts that allows you to revert your contact list and undo any mistakes made up to 30 days in the past. Let’s say you accidentally deleted a bunch of contacts or wiped the contact data from your Gmail account by mistake while syncing to another device. Visit Gmail’s Contacts section, select “Restore contacts” in the “More actions” menu, and choose the time you would like to revert to.

Talk about taking all the pressure out of syncing your contacts on a new phone or different mail program. No matter what happens you never have to worry about losing another contact again. Of course, once you restore to a past date any contacts added after that date won’t show up. No worries. Once you’ve recovered the contacts you lost you can go right back in and restore them again to the most recent date and you’re back in business.

One feature request I would really like to see Google implement is a legitimate business card scanner in their Google App that allows you to scan a business card and then allows you to create a new contact directly from the information on the card.

Filed Under: How To Tagged With: contacts, gmail, google, restore contacts

Gmail Adds Drag and Drop Attachments

August 4, 2010 By James Poling Leave a Comment

Gmail is starting to love the drag and drop. It was a little more than a year ago when they added drag and drop functionality to their labels. Earlier this year they added the ability to add attachments to an email by dragging them from your hard drive into your email. Now they’ve added the ability to drag attachments you receive in an email and drop them onto your desktop (or anywhere else you’d like).

I’m a huge fan of Gmail and I’ve used it to manage all of my email for the past 6 years, I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I’d like to see Google put some serious time and effort into a major refresh of Gmail, not only with features but with its UI as well. Sure, Gmail raised the bar when it launched back in 2004 but since then it has remained largely stagnant, while Hotmail and Yahoo have been doing major overhauls to their platforms. I’m not holding my breath though.

Filed Under: How To Tagged With: attachments, email, gmail, Web Apps

Google Boosts Their Paid Storage Quotas

November 11, 2009 By James Poling Leave a Comment

It’s no earth shattering secret that storage has become cheaper and cheaper over the past few years and since there’s probably no one on the planet with more storage capacity than Google, it’s nice to see them spreading the wealth so to speak.

Hi,

We wanted to let you know about some exciting changes to your Google paid storage plan. While storage costs have dropped naturally in the past few years, we’ve also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce your costs even further. On Tuesday, November 10th, we increased the size of each of our tiers to make storage even more affordable and accessible. For the same $20.00 per year, you’ll now get 80 GB, 8 times as much storage as before. Your current plan will be automatically upgraded and your new quota will automatically show up in your account in the next 24 hours.

We hope you’ll like the extra space, but if it’s more than you need you can always change your storage plan or renewal preferences for next year in your Google account settings: www.google.com/accounts/purchasestorage. Feel free to visit our Help Center for more information.

Thanks,
The Google storage team

This is great news for me because while 17GB of storage for my email is probably enough to last me a lifetime, I use Picasa Web to back up all of my photos and I was starting to run out of room.

Filed Under: How To, Tech Tagged With: gmail, google, picasa, storage, Web Apps

Why I made the switch back to Yahoo! Mail while Gmail plays catch-up

September 22, 2009 By James Poling 2 Comments

yahoo-logo[3] The oldest email in my gmail account dates back to December 2004 and that wasn’t even my first emails. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and I got my first invitation in June of 2004. jamespoling[at]gmail.com has been my primary email account for over five years. Technically I should say, “had been” my primary email account.

Since the first day I signed up for Gmail I was hooked. I was easily the first person in my circle of friends to start using Gmail and I quickly began campaigning, sending out my invites to get people to check out this revolutionary new webmail app. I immediately turned into a Gmail snob. When I was running my own company and hiring freelance writers and producers, I would shamelessly discriminate against people who didn’t use Gmail. If a position came down to two people and one had a Gmail account and the other didn’t, it was a no-brainer.

Back in September of ’07 Lifehacker published a post titled, “Yahoo Mail Innovates, Gmail Stagnates“. Adam Pash, the post’s author sums up his thoughts towards the end of the post with, “It’s probably obvious that Gmail is my preferred web-based email (I’ve sung its praises many times before), but I’ll be damned if I don’t want to see some improvements out of it.” That pretty much summed up my thoughts on the matter as well.

Sure, Yahoo might be innovating but nothing is going to come between me and my beloved Gmail.

The problem with that train of thought is that part of my job is to be on the cutting edge of innovation. I just naturally assumed that since Gmail had basically knocked it out of the part with their first attempt at webmail that they would eventually address the concerns of its users, the ones that had been staunch Gmail loyalists all along. I was sorely mistaken. Rather than addressing basic issues like true push on iPhones or Blackberries, or anything that would pass for a useful contact management tool that would allow you to sync to your mobile device, Gmail pushed its users to the side and went straight for Enterprise level clients.

While Yahoo has been busy developing a new, user-friendly and appealing UI, a robust contact management system and wonderful new calender, Gmail has released such useful tools as “Graffiti theme” and “beer goggles” to keep you from sending emails while you are drunk.

Yahoo offers extremely effective real-time push on the iPhone with IMAP folder syncing that works amazingly well, neither of which Gmail offers. Yahoo! Mail syncs your calendars and your contacts to your iPhone as well.

Gmail, who now seems to be playing catch-up to Yahoo, has released a way to get Gmail to Push on your iPhone as well as syncing your calendars and contacts. The only problem with that is that it requires you to set up Gmail as an Enterprise account (see above about Google pushing aside it’s personal users to appeal to Enterprise level corporations) which is completely useless if you, like many people, actually use your iPhone with your company’s Enterprise mail service. You cannot set up two different Enterprise accounts on your iPhone so, sorry about your luck I guess.

After over five years with Gmail I have spent the last week moving everything over to my Yahoo! Mail account and I couldn’t be more satisfied. It’s amazing how much time something as simple as filing away or deleting an email on your iPhone and having that reflected when you sign-in to your web account can save.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: blackberry, gmail, iPhone, push mail, technology, webmail, yahoo mail

Fixing Gmail’s IMAP on iPhones running 3.0

August 29, 2009 By James Poling Leave a Comment

Not long after upgrading to version 3.0 on my iPhone I began to notice that my Gmail IMAP began being unresponsive. In other words, actions I would take on the iPhone wouldn’t show up on the web. It’s pretty frustrating to go through and archive and organize all of your messages on your iPhone only to log into your web account later and see that none of it is actually reflected.

Apparently the key for people using firmware version 3.0 is to delete your current Gmail setup and start fresh choosing “other” on the setup screen rather than “Gmail”.

It’s still not perfect, but it’s better than what it was before. You can see the full setup directions via Gmail Help after the jump. This is definitely a step forward, but come on Gmail, you can do better than this.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: How To Tagged With: email, gmail, How To, IMAP, iPhone, mobile

Gmail and Google Apps Officially Leave Beta

July 7, 2009 By James Poling Leave a Comment

Gmail out of beta(2) It only took almost five years but Gmail is finally taking the leap and removing the beta tag from its product.

Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both enterprise and consumer versions — are now out of beta. “Beta” will be removed from the product logos today, but we’ll continue to innovate and improve upon the applications whether or not there’s a small “beta” beneath the logo. Indeed, today we’re also announcing some other Google Apps features that we think will appeal to large enterprises: mail delegation, mail retention and ongoing enhancements to Apps reliability.

What does this mean for the average user? Probably not much. Google will continue to innovate and keep pushing out new lab features so for the casual user not much will be changing. Google is even giving people, who apparently hate change, the option under the settings tab to keep the logo with the beta tag on it.

This move is geared more toward potential Enterprise level users. While Google Apps keeps pushing its way into what used to be exclusive Microsoft Outlook or *cough*Lotus Notes*cough* territory it was practically mandatory that they remove the beta tag from Gmail and Google Apps. You’re not going to convince many IT Managers, or more importantly the big guys above the IT Directors, to trust their entire Enterprise infrastructure to something that’s still in beta.