Wizard's Blog

One of the most eagerly anticipated features for GMail is offline access, and today Google finally announced that it was available! (as a Labs feature)

Once this is finalized as a release quality feature for everyone to use, Google will have really closed the gap with Outlook.  Combined with Google Apps functionality for enterprises, Google Calendar and Google Docs, I can't think of a compelling reason to keep buying new versions of Office every couple of years.

As expected, the GMail offline access feature uses Gears - same as the offline access in Google Docs etc.

As well as straight offline mode, it also has "flaky connection mode", which acts like offline mode in that you're always dealing with a locally cached version of your mail, but also synchs continually in the background like online mode.  I imagine this will speed some mail functions in the same way that Outlook's Cached Exchange Mode does because more of the processing happens locally.

Apparently they're slowly rolling the offline feature out, so I haven't been able to test it yet but I'm really looking forward to it.

Once the option shows up in your Labs, you enable offline access by following these steps:

1. Click Settings and click the Labs tab.
2. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
3. Click Save Changes.
4. After your browser reloads, you'll see a new "Offline^0.1" link in the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don't already have it.

EDIT: There appear to be some known issues - you can't send an offline message with attachments and you can't access the contact manager offline.  Forgivable in a beta, but these things will need to be fixed.

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Gmail tasks

Today Google announced the addition of tasks to Gmail labs.

They recently added a "Add any gadget by URL" feature, and I was using the Remember The Milk gadget with that to add todo functionality to Gmail.

As Gmail tasks are brand new they're not as comprehensive as Remember The Milk - there's no way to set a task's priority, they're not sorted by due date and there is no use of color to visually deliniate tasks.

That having been said, it is better integrated into Gmail because it isn't a gadget, and I will be using it for a while to give it a chance.

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Gmail themes

Google just announced that they have added themes to Gmail!

They look pretty cool - I especially like the ones that update the time of day/weather like the iGoogle ones do.

Of course everyone's tastes are different, so there is quite a variety and a few I don't care for.

Unfortunately as this is a brand new feature, it isn't available on my Gmail account yet, but I await with bated breath.

Basecamp logo

Basecamp is a cool web app to track projects.  It handles todo's, milestones, attachments and team communication.  There is a single-project free version and three multiple-project paid versions.  I haven't used it myself but it looks useful.

Periscope is a gadget that lets you track the progress of your Basecamp projects.  It was originally just an iGoogle gadget, but the just released a Gmail gadget version.  It seems to suffer from some of the same problems as the Remember The Milk gadget for Gmail - the area Gmail allows for it is quite narrow and some elements get cut off.

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Gmail video chat

Yesterday Google announced the addition of voice and video to Gmail chat.

You download and install a plugin, and then you get extra options in the Gmail chat UI to start a video or voice chat.  It usually seems to work pretty well, though one computer we tried it on ground to a halt.  It has the nice ability to use it one-sided, so someone with a webcam can broadcast to someone without - you don't need a webcam at both ends.

If someone you want to video chat with hasn't installed the plugin, when you try to start the chat Gmail will send them a link to the plugin, so you don't have to explain it to everyone.

The plugin seems to install for all browsers at once, which is nice and painless.

Here's a video demonstrating the new features:

Once again, Google Talk lags behind Gmail chat, but I'm starting to ask whether Google Talk is really necessary...

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Remember The Milk logo

I think GMail has a big piece of missing functionality - todo's.  Most of the emails in my inbox are things I've left there to remind myself to do something.

I signed up for Remember The Milk quite a while ago when they released a Firefox extension that integrated RTM with GMail.  I didn't end up using it for very long because I didn't like the way the integration slowed GMail down.

RTM just released a new GMail gadget that works with the recently released GMail labs "Add any gadget by URL" feature.  This integration works a lot better than the Firefox extension but it still has its issues.

I'd prefer to be able to shrink the box vertically because it takes up a lot of space if you only have a few todo's.  Also it doesn't wrap the text in the todo's, which because of the limited horizontal space means that you can only read the first few words.  There also isn't any integration between emails and todo's like there was with the Firefox extension.

All problems aside, I think I'll keep using the Remember The Milk gadget - it beats sending myself emails to remind myself to do things.

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Image via WikipediaI've been using the late betas and release candidates of Firefox v3 for a few weeks now. I would naturally have started playing with it earlier (as I have a blind spot that says a higher version number is always better) but the inevitable lack of support for my extensions held me back.

Continue reading ‘Firefox v3’ »

Image via WikipediaOver 90% of the email I receive is spam. Some days it's as much as 100%. A few years ago that would have been a shocking statement, but in the 21st century it's just a fact of life.

I've been a long term user of Spam Bully, but I recently uninstalled it. Axaware got too eager monetizing their product - I'm not interested in renting your software from you while you sit back and watch the money roll in.

I also report all spam I receive using SpamCop. Their UI is unfriendly to non-technical users (hell, it's just unfriendly) but I enjoy having the opportunity to have spammers' ISPs switch their Internet access off. Of course nowadays the computers actually sending the spam are probably just zombies, but even switching them off is progress.

The company I work for uses GFI MailEssentials, with mixed success. I can't for the life of me get it to learn when it makes mistakes.

A while ago I moved my personal email over from POP via SpamCop to Google Apps. The GMail spam filter is very good but not perfect.

My contention is that spam blockers are completely unnecessary. SMTP was created with the assumption that you knew the people you were conversing with - it doesn't account for spam at all. This basic technology needs to be rebuilt using assumptions that are true today.

Various attempts have been made to eliminate spam by bolting on new ideas like SPF and Sender ID, but unless everyone starts using them (which they haven't), they won't work (which they don't).

The problem is that everyone's trying to avoid touching SMTP - every mail program uses it, and it has worked reliably for decades. I think they need to just bite the bullet and get rid of SMTP, replacing it with a v2 that from the ground up accounts for spam. You'd have one generation of mail programs that supported both standards and then you could switch over permanently.

The prospect of a spam-free inbox would convince all users to upgrade without complaint. Also a huge number of people are using gmail/hotmail/yahoo accounts, if those companies moved over to the new standard and it would take care of a large proportion of users.

The new standard needs to be non-partisan - any whiff of license fees or patents and you'll get less than universal acceptance, which will be useless. This probably means that no one company can develop this, which means lots of groups and companies will need to agree, which will stretch out the process. The thing is, to my knowledge they haven't even started...