B. Mann Consulting

Sendible lets you send all sorts of messages to be delivered at a time in the future. Supported message types include: Email, SMS and Social Network messages.

Me showing Monique the magic of flagging and unflagging and showing how it changes the starred / unstarred in the Gmail web interface. Photo by Duane Storey, you can buy some great photos of Vancouver from him.

I've spent this past week or so having switched to using Gmail's new IMAP interface. I had switched to using the web-only interface for perhaps the last year or so, and it worked quite well for me. POP3 doesn't cut it when you have multiple machines (laptop and home desktop) and devices (Nokia smartphone, iPhone, etc.). And that's exactly what the IMAP protocol was invented to take care: keep folders, messages, and other status (read / unread, flagged, etc.) synced across multiple devices.

I wasn't sure whether I would like going back to using a desktop email client. And it's been great. Email is fast, I can go back to having a couple of drafts open as separate windows to remind me to get to them today, and so on.

Gmail's labels become folders....with a few funky side effects, in that thinking of them more as folders rather than things you might use multiple labels for will be less confusing.

A big thing I miss: I'm so used to the Gmail search interface that I find myself typing "from:Some Name" in Mail.app's search box, rather than typing the name and then clicking the "From" button. I bet some enterprising soul could do a good job of an AppleScript or something that could change this to work Just Like Gmail Search.

OK, enough just talking about the outlines. Head over here for extended instructions on setting up Gmail IMAP for Mail.app or your iPhone, which has the excellent extra tips of "mapping" your Gmail Trash, Junk, Drafts, and Sent folders to the right folders in your local app, and everything "just works".

Those of you with iPhones (or Nokia phones or any other device that can talk IMAP to get email) will want to go this method, so you can actually quickly manage email on the go and have all those changes reflected when you get back to some other device.

Now what? Well, I need a way to sync my contacts in Gmail to my local Address Book. A Plaxo plugin already takes care of synching between machines, and the standard Bluetooth iSync syncs to mobile.

Not a big thesis on this topic, just an observation that this evening, as I was thinking about organizing something with friends for tomorrow morning, my instinct was to open a tab and go to Facebook to contact them...rather than email.

And of course, this is exactly what ActiveState's Up4 Facebook app is trying to help with as well.

Update: And of course, today I see that Facebook has added straight-to-email messaging -- "No more switching back and forth between email and Facebook. When you are writing a message, simply enter any email addresses into the “To:” field.". There is a longer post on the Facebook blog about this.

So, I've been accused of using the title for this post -- "Email is the place where information goes to die" -- quite a lot.  I figured I should probably claim it by making this blog post.

Update: Roland found the original quote by Bill French, April 2003. 

And yes, I still believe it: email and mailing list is great for quick back and forths. It's terrible for synthesizing information and finding a conclusion a week later.

I'm in favour of web native / crawlable archive systems. Email for notification and quick discussion, but give it a permalink to the conclusion.

I have many (many, many, ...) gripes with Basecamp, but even if you use it as nothing more than a centralized email archive, it's pretty decent. Other strategies? The Trac wiki/ticketing/SVN repository, email enabled forums (with RSS, of course), etc.

Synthesizing and collecting all the resources we deal with is import. Help make information not die, your future self will thank you

So, I just turned on the notify module here on my site. I noticed that *I* just got a massive email sent to me from the site with lots of posts in it. Err..I may have spammed everyone with an account on this site.

If you *don't* want to get email every week with any of my new posts, you can login, and go to the my account link, then hit the "my notify settings" link.

So, if you got a big long email from this site...sorry for the spam!

I think I just found a feature that's going to be implemented in Google Talk / Gmail real soon now: voicemail.

Try creating a label with the name "voicemail". I was cleaning up my personal account, where I get my voicemail delivered by email. I had set up a label months ago, and was trying to apply the label to one of the voicemails and got the error "The label name Voicemail is invalid". Hmmmm. So, I deleted the label, then tried to re-create it with the same name. No go...same error. Richard quickly verified that he was getting the same error.

Of course, trying to create a label with the name "Chats" gives you a different message -- "System specific names are not allowed. Please try another name." -- but it likely just means that "Voicemail" isn't truly live in the system yet.

Oh, and by the way, Bryght's switch to Gmail for domains is working really well. 

Richard wrote about securing his email with SSHKeyChain in the context of pointing to Kees Cook's discovery of 45 clear auth POP accounts at OSCON.

I actually ran SSHKeyChain before my upgrade to Mac OS X Tiger, but never re-installed. It worked most of the time, but not all the time. To be honest, the whole process is somewhat hard. Richard (or anyone), I'm making a Request for Tutorial (RFT): please document both the requirements (what do I need in a mail server to support this?) and the steps involved in secure email.