Gmail Adds Drag and Drop Attachments

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.

Rapportive Gmail Plugin Gives You Social and CRM Advantage

I get a lot of emails from people I don’t know asking me questions or commenting on a post or looking for a problem solver. Rapportive gives me a leg up, immediately being able to see a little more about the person and who they are. Fortunately for me this makes me look a lot smarter than I am when I can email them back and drop hints about things they may not expect me to immediately know.

There are a lot of new tools out there that claim to help you aggregate your social media contacts. Most of them want you to sign up and enter the details of all the sites you want to aggregate, not too convenient really. That’s what makes Rapportive so convenient, it doesn’t rely on you entering any information, it pulls its info from the email of the person in your inbox. The best part is that Rapportive replaces the ads on the right side of your inbox with all this useful info.

Rapportive works as both a Firefox and a Chrome plugin as well as Mailplane for Macs. Go here using your browser of choice to automatically install the plugin. Believe it or not I’ve already found out some new and useful info about a few of my contacts that I may never have discovered without Rapportive.

Whenever you open an email in from someone Rapportive automatically uses their email address to lookup various social networking sites to give you an idea of who you’re talking to. The plugin also allows you to keep notes on each user, very helpful if you’re getting hundreds of emails a day and dealing with potential clients that you may or may not hear from for long periods of time.

Go ahead, install it and let us know what you think in the comments.

Google Boosts Their Paid Storage Quotas

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.

google_storage_boost

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

My Account_1257988092607

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.

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

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.

gmail-logo-google-tmSure, 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.

Fixing Gmail’s IMAP on iPhones running 3.0

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.

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Gmail and Google Apps Officially Leave Beta

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.