The blog has got a little side-tracked over the past couple of days after I visited a new local bookstore and walked away with 40 Euros worth of books! But while I'm reading Ken Follett's new 1,100 page masterpiece, I finally decided to stop procrastinating over something that I have been considering for months. I finally installed Mozilla Thunderbird.

I have always never been able to decide about whether my email should be online or offline. For years I used Microsoft Outlook until I realised I liked email to be online and portable. But then Gmail went through its beta "oops, your email isn't available right now, try again later!" phase so I thought it would be best to download email to the desktop so I'd have access to it at all times. Plus everyone I bump into seems to love Thunderbird. So last night, I thought "screw it, just do it" and I downloaded the email client to see what it is like.

But I gave myself a rescue hatch. I told Gmail to keep a copy of everything in its archive. So if I decide that Thunderbird is not for me, I can switch back to web-based mail in an instant.

On first impressions, Thunderbird IS impressive. It is easily customisable and setting up your email accounts is a snap. Everything seems to work as advertised. Writing and sending emails is pleasant and I can attach different signatures for different email accounts (a feature I wish the web-based Gmail would have). The add-ons for Thunderbird are numerous and interesting and you can customise the noise a "new mail" notification makes (although I disabled this). You can also make filters to send email to different folders and you can even set up a "conversation view" of emails, just like Gmail.

However, I do have 2 negative comments :

1. Thunderbird couldn't import my Gmail address book. It all came through garbled. The thought of having to manually type hundreds of contacts into my Thunderbird address book is depressing.

2. The RSS feeds ability is not easy to handle. I tried to unsubscribe from a feed for example and nothing happened. I tried to manually delete RSS folders and nothing happened. Plus instead of showing you the text in a new feed, it loads the source webpage which really slows things down. Another problem was that instead of downloading all RSS feeds, it downloaded everything from my Google Reader archive - thousands of old posts which I had to manually delete from Thunderbird. Tedious and time consuming.


I'll keep experimenting with Thunderbird and see if it grows on me. I normally give new apps a minimum of a week to prove themselves. However, since I check my email from various computers, I may end up deciding to continue using the portability and convenience of web-based email. But we'll see. Thunderbird has many good things going for it that I am starting to get attached to it.

How about you? When it comes to email, online or offline? Do you use Thunderbird?

I don't like Twitter and I only use Facebook occasionally to play Scrabulous and to network with some business prospects. I am not completely into the whole "Facebook lifestyle" like a lot of other people. I don't need contacts' status details emailed to me as they happen and I don't feel the need to constantly change my status profile to let the whole world know what I am doing.

So Steve has some great advice but on this occasion, it doesn't apply much to me. But I really like the way Steve thinks and how he always finds new uses for everyday web apps. His best post by far is turning Gmail into a personal nerve center. Definately a classic and one I highly recommend you check out.

The net is buzzing over Garett Rogers' post on ZDNet about the possibility of a new Gmail interface being developed. This is quite interesting because it opens up the possibility that some of the things that Gmail is missing, or is currently doing badly, may soon be fixed.

In this blog, I want to try to concentrate also on productivity and how to have a more relaxing / stress-free life. As someone with manic depression, I have to watch my stress levels very carefully so I am always on the lookout for ways to stay calm, ways to have a really great day and so on. I am also reading some productivity blogs such as Zen Habits which I am already totally addicted to. Thanks Aibek for recommending that one to me.

One of the ways that I am trying to be productive and organised is in my online life. Last week, I deleted 75% of my website, and I also deleted 3000 emails from my Gmail account which was actually very liberating (Gmail is so fast now, it feels as if it is on steroids!). I unsubscribed from about 15 different email newsletters, set up filters to send the crap straight to the email trash bin, and today I decided to uninstall Google Talk and only check my email no more than once a hour.

Being honest with myself, Google Talk was a serious impediment to my productivity. With its new mail notification feature, it was disturbing me constantly with its pop-up window and it was chaining me to my email all day. Now with it gone, and my determination to check email only sporadically throughout the day, I feel I can now concentrate on more important tasks - such as things that bring in money - REAL WORK! ;-)

Now I just have to tackle my huge RSS reading list! At 200+ feeds, that will take some serious pruning......

I used to be a lifelong addict of Yahoo Mail until Gmail lured me away with lots of space (2.9GB at the time of writing this) and lots of other cool features. But in the past few weeks I have procrastinated over whether to return to Yahoo Mail. Gmail is starting to annoy me partly because it is so damn slow and partly because I am deeply shocked that Gmail's response to Yahoo's unlimited email space was to.....charge users for more email space! Yahoo offers unlimited FREE email space and a very reasonable $25 a year for unlimited Flickr space, whereas Google is demanding $500 for 250GB of space for email and photos. $500! The very thought makes me sick.

If you can get free unlimited space at Yahoo, what makes Google think that people will shell out up to $500 for 250GB? The brand name? The Google "coolness" factor? I don't think so. I sure as hell won't spend that kind of money. Gmail already makes money off me by shoving adverts in my email space. In fact it downright pisses me off that Google has the nerve to charge like this when their direct rival is giving it away for nothing. At the very least, Google could put their prices down significantly. But $500? That's just really greedy. Especially for a product that is STILL not out of beta after 3 years (or is it 4 years?). I am not advocating for one moment that everything on the internet should be free but where is the marketing sense in charging users for something that your fiercest rival is giving away for nothing? I'd like someone at Google to explain the logic behind that one. Let's be honest - if two shopkeepers, side by side, offered the same product and one was free and the other was $500, which one would you take? It's only human nature to be drawn to the free one.

So partly to get this all straight in my head, here are the pros and cons of each service. I'd appreciate your thoughts and opinions.

Gmail : http://mail.google.com

Pros :
conversation views
labelling
good search functions
excellent filters (especially the spam filters)
ability to add photos in contact book
tight integration with calendar and Google Talk
lots of add-ons and user scripts that integrate Gmail with calendar, RSS reader, and Google IG.
built in Google chat and chat logs archived & searchable.
the best one though is the ability to collect email from other email services and send email from those addresses INSIDE Gmail. Plus the keyboard shortcuts are excellent.

Cons :
at times, Gmail is unavailable or really slow.
Gmail also claims their spam folders and trash folders auto-delete after 30 days but I checked those folders the other day and there are emails in there going back to June (which for all you mathematically challenged people out at the Googleplex is 90 days, not 30).
My biggest concern though is that it takes ages to open an email or to show emails under a certain label (if you click on that label). The more emails you have, the longer it takes (so giving you more space kind of defeats the purpose if you have to delete some emails to make it go faster).
Speed is definately the biggest problem for Gmail. Before you ask, I have no Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail to slow things down - only a Better Gmail Firefox extension from Lifehacker (and I don't even use half of the features that Better Gmail offers).
Hardly anybody uses Google Talk, making the whole in-built chat thing redundant.
Oh and one last thing, Gmail shows up as a complete mess on the Opera internet browser. The Gmail interface is like a dog's dinner and totally unreadable and unusable.


Yahoo Mail : http://mail.yahoo.com

Pros :
An excellent Instant Messaging client (which millions of people use) which is integrated into Yahoo Mail.
Completely free unlimited email space which means I can back up my files and MP3's.
A drag and drop interface.
Since my website and business email is with Yahoo (currently being forwarded to Gmail), I can have all my email together in the one place.
One click links to empty spam and trash - without having to go into those folders first (which I wish Gmail would hurry up and do).
More reliable than Gmail and virtually 100% uptime. I have rarely seen Yahoo Mail crash.
A search capability to find emails again.
The contact book has spaces to record Skype ID's and other instant messaging ID's.

Cons :
The interface is a little on the clunky side. Too much on the main page such as news headlines and weather.
As far as I can see, I can't export my Gmail filters and labels. I also can't export my Google RSS reader subscriptions. So I would have to start them from scratch (a major pain in the ass).
If I use up a lot of space, will Yahoo Mail slow down significantly, just like Gmail?
No ability to add photos to my contact book, so the contact book lacks personalisation.


The biggest inconvenience though is one of my own making in that I have completely married myself to the Google concept - so I use Google Docs, Google Talk and this blog is hosted on Blogger. All of these things are connected through my Google Account. So if I were to break away and use Yahoo Mail, I would have to either stop using Google Docs, Talk and Blogger, or maintain both the Yahoo account AND the Google account.

I guess some more procrastination will be needed! Any opinions and thoughts would be appreciated in the comments.

It may sound so obvious, given how long we've had email, but you'd be amazed at how people still don't know what the "bcc" stands for in emails.

When you enter the recipient's email address in the "To:" column, there is also a column for "cc" and "bcc". "cc" is "carbon copy" and is basically just for passing on a copy of the email to someone else. However, "cc" won't hide the actual email address and will be visible to anyone who receives and / or opens the email. I know, you probably know all of this already but as I said, you'd be amazed how many people don't know.

Now "bcc" is much better (in my opinion) because it cloaks the email addresses, making them invisible to everyone except the person that sent the email in the first place. All the other recipients see is the person's name but NOT the email address. Now this is good because if you are sending an email to a large group of people, you have no idea who will receive that email afterwards. Chain emails such as jokes get forwarded to a lot of people so who's to know who will receive that email next week or next month? One of them might be a spammer or might be someone who knows a spammer. Suddenly that huge list of visible email contacts are wide open for a spammer to harvest and abuse. The "bcc" feature stops all that.

So......keep the "to" and "cc" fields blank and place ALL the email addresses in the "bcc" column. That way, none of the email addresses are visible for someone to read and abuse

On the subject of email, I read an excellent article today in the Wall Street Journal about taming your inbox. Well worth a read.

The internet being what it is, there's a lot of crap out there. But in among the dung are a few gold nuggets which you should fish out and treasure. One of them is 3 particular email newsletters.

Email newsletters have partly suffered from the advent of RSS feeds (I cut my newsletter subscriptions by as much as 75% when RSS was introduced). A lot of email newsletters contain advertising and I quickly unsubscribe from those. But there are 3 newsletters that I practically read as soon as they arrive in my inbox.

Here, based on years of reading, are my recommendations for the top 3 newsletters you MUST subscribe to. I have removed specialist newsletters such as freelance writing vacancies or computer geekery as they won't be of much interest to the non-writers and non-geeks of the world.

1. This Is True

Written by Randy Cassingham, This Is True comes out each week as both a free version and a paid premium version (after months of procrastination, I finally upgraded to the paid version). TIT (great acronym!) covers weird and wacky stories found in the international media such as a man suing his doctor because he survived his cancer longer than the doctor predicted. Or only 68 of 200 Anglican priests polled could name all Ten Commandments, but half said they believed in space aliens. All the stories are true (hence, "This Is True").

What I like about Randy is that he makes some commentary on the stories and his views are often thought-provoking. He also adds on funny tag-lines to each story which are almost as funny as the story itself. He also has a "Bonzer Site" section where he shows you a cool new website he has found and "Honorary Unsubscribe" where he does an obituary on a recently-deceased person who made an impact in the world but was probably overlooked by the world's media. Oh and if that ain't enough, he has other sites such as his blog, Jumbo Joke, and Cranky Customer.

TIT has spawned books and also a TV channel broadcast on YouTube. Oh and if you're feeling a little unsecure, why not purchase a "Get Out of Hell Free" card. Hey, I've got mine! ----------->>>>>


2. True Stella Awards

Also written by Randy Cassingham (where does this guy find all the time?!), the True Stella Awards are named after Stella Liebeck who won $2.9 million from a New Mexico jury after she spilled hot McDonalds coffee on her lap. So the "True Stella Awards" are a look at some of the most ludicrous lawsuits currently working their way through the US legal system. Includes commentary and links to relevant online news stories. TSA are not published as often as This Is True due to Cassingham's time restraints (he has recently hired some "guest writers" to help him with the articles). Still worth a look though if you have an interest in the law.


3. The Straight Dope

I'd like to ask Cecil one important question - how does he know so much? (my hunch is that he looks on Google!). The Straight Dope gives you the answers to any burning questions you may have. Cecil gives long and fascinating answers and I guarantee you will be bookmarking a lot of his pages for future reference! Oh and the FAQ is a real hoot - especially number 15.

OK, I admit it. I am addicted to RSS feeds. They're really useful for monitoring multiple websites and I wouldn't get my daily fix of news if I wasn't subscribed to the CNN feed and the BBC feed. I used to spend an inordinate amount of time each day reading them so I cut out all the non-essentials and outright crap and came up with my best "must-have" 50 feeds (although sometimes that creeps up a bit if I have a run of good luck finding interesting blogs).

But quite often I am too busy to check my Google Reader app and when I do log in, I find 150+ new posts waiting for me. So when I was reading Steve Rubel's excellent "Micro Persuasion" blog, he mentioned that he has the same problem and he uses a service called RSSfwd to have new blog posts emailed to him. You still have the original posts sitting in your RSS reader but copies are emailed to you, free of charge.

What are the benefits of this service? Well for a start, I check email much more than I check RSS feeds. So if an interesting / important post is put on a blog, I am likely to see it faster if it is sent directly to my email inbox. Second, using Gmail's filters, I can have the email automatically labelled and, once it's read, archived so I end up with a database of posts from my favourite blogs. So if I need to find a certain post in the future, I can simply search my Gmail archive for it (Google Reader still doesn't have a "search" capability which, considering that Google is a search engine company, is really perplexing!)

The best way to set it up is to do what Steve suggests and set up a separate folder in your RSS reader (mine is "favs"). Then label the RSS feeds you want sent to you with the "favs" label and give the RSS links for your "favs" label to RSSfwd. That way, if you want to add or remove feeds from your RSSfwd mailings, all you have to do is add or remove the "favs" label, which is a lot easier than separately unsubscribing from each feed.

How do you keep on top of your RSS feeds? Can anyone suggest a better idea?

Following on from the previous post on Gmail labels, I have come across a problem and I am wondering if anyone can help.

Every day, I have a lot of stuff automatically emailed to me as backup copies - backups of my blog posts, copies of news stories, photo backups, and so on. When these arrive in my Gmail account, I have a filter set up to automatically divert this stuff from appearing in the inbox, as they don't need to be seen right away. They are automatically archived with an appropriate label so I can find them again later if need be.

But what really irritates me is that these emails are archived as "unread" which means I have to find these emails on a daily basis, tick them, mark them as "read" and untick them. OK, it only takes a few minutes but it gets really tedious after a while.

From what I can see, there's no option in the filter set-up to have the email automatically marked as "read" before it is archived. So I am wondering if anyone has a hack / workaround solution to this problem. How can I tell Gmail to automatically mark certain emails as "read" before they are archived?

First one to give me a good answer gets the first prize of "my eternal gratitude". I'll also make sure your place in heaven is guaranteed.

Listen to this post by podcast! Download original mp3 file

It always amuses me when I read yet another online rant about Gmail abandoning the folder structure in their email application, in favour of labels. Whenever Gmail asks their users what features they would like to see, one of them is always "give us folders!". But answer me this - what precisely is the difference between a folder and a label? Answer : absolutely nothing at all.

A folder is basically a place-holder for you to find something again when you need it. A label performs the same function. By labelling something in Gmail, you are assigning it to a certain area of your email app and if you need the email again, you will just click on the label name and up pops the email in question. A folder does exactly the same thing.

So to all the anti-Gmail whiners that ridicule Google's decision to employ labels instead of folders, why don't you tell me precisely how a folder differs from a label?

I bet you can't.

I have been spending the last few days reading the excellent book "Lifehacker - 88 tech tricks to turbocharge your day" and it has a big email section. One of the things the book advocates is an empty inbox and immediately assigning each incoming email to a certain label or action. Unimportant low priority mails get archived with a label to be read later while highly important emails immediately arrive in the inbox to be dealt with.

It's reading this book that has given me so much insight and appreciation to the labelling and filtering system that Gmail offers. Thanks to the new filters that I put in place yesterday, I haven't been interrupted by a single email all afternoon today. This has allowed me to get some tasks finished which have been sitting around idle for days and even weeks. Absolute bliss.