”Today we are happy to tell you about a new feature we’ve started to roll out which will enable you to sign into your AIM account and chat with your AIM buddies right inside Gmail. When you log in to AIM through Gmail chat, your AOL buddies will appear in your chat list with friends from your Google Talk network, and you will see the yellow “running man” logo to the right of your AIM friends’ screen names. To your AIM friends it will look like you are logged in to AIM as usual.”
(Via Official Gmail Blog.)
Wow! Now if they can add the buddy list to the Google Notifier I would be in heaven.
”Without my PDA, I once again was stuck at my desk and was missing out on other parts of my life. With the BlackBerry, I am able to go to my kids’ volleyball matches and Irish stepdancing competitions. True, I do I tend to use my PDA when there are lulls, but at least having the device allows me to be out of the office to attend these events while not falling behind.”
(Via jkOnTheRun: When the BlackBerry dies, the addiction is fully felt.)
Could Twitter, or something like it, tied into your email server, replace this type of addiction?
Twitter pushes updates the same way Blackberry’s pushes email.
Is it about not falling behind? Or the illusion of being involved?
If you want to be involved in other aspects of your life, having a Blackberry conversation distracts from that, while setting the expectation for colleagues that you’re focused on their conversation, which you can’t be while cheering on friends at a volleyball match.
October 31, 2007 · 1 comment
For the most part these templates are just plain ole’ fashioned HTML with a tiny bit of XML. So really the only requirements for editing or creating your own stationery is that you know a small bit of HTML. Some design skills wouldn’t hurt if you’re creating your own from scratch.
(Via The Apple Blog .)
This is a nice overview of how the new stationary works in Mail.app, but it is a tricky path to head down.
Designing HTML email that will pass through most email services and display reasonably well can be difficult.
Firing up Dreamweaver, iWeb or TextMate will get you started, but making sure the email messages sent are received and viewable can be an enormous task.
Here are a few links to chew on:
My rules are as follows:
- Keep it simple
- Host all images on a server, do not embed
- Make sure your HTML degrades gracefully
- No javascript
- Don’t forget to test for mobile devices (Blackberries will choke on CSS)
- Validate - Validate - Validate
Good luck aspiring Mail Stationary designers.
Woot!
Scarcely a week before an existing ban on Internet access taxes is set to expire, the U.S. Senate late on Thursday voted to let it live on for seven more years.
…
The Senate’s bill was modified before the vote to include a section that says states can’t tax “home page electronic mail and instant messaging (including voice–and video–capable electronic mail and instant messaging), video clips, and personal electronic storage capacity, that are provided independently or not packaged with Internet access.”
(Via CNet News.com.)
My main project these days is, MailTank. Part of the fun is parsing email, and I have written many bits’o email parsing code over the years, in PHP, Java and now Ruby.
Why do so many email clients suck at parsing email? For example, Apple Mail has major issues with presenting readable messages from mailing lists, such as the SPF, Communigate and Ruby Lang list digests.
The issue seems to stem from an inability to handle message/rfc822 mime parts correctly or recursively parse all the mime parts correctly.
Recursively parsing of mime structures is the only solution most of the ills email clients suffer from, with a couple of quirks-like parsing tricks to capture relevant data from mailing lists and flowed formats.
Every developer who deals with email must build of a catalog of email to test against.
A good starting place is here.
Happened to revisit this excellent article on managing e-mail.
It is a good to revisit it from time to time and retrain the reflexes.
Ever wonder what causes that sinking feeling of dread just before you open your e-mail client? Is it the hundreds of new messages that will mock you in all their need-a-response-asap, unread glory?
(Via Lifehacker.com.)
Wouldn’t it be interesting to have an unread e-mail box on the side of your blog? A feature similar to those phone holding queue messages like, there are 27 unread messages.
A visual clue for those inclined to send e-mail.
Having fought the good fight at the server level for several years, I know there is no perfect solution.
You can get darn close with careful tuning, meshing different filtering techniques together, but it will never be perfect.
over at IBM's site provides a nice breakdown on the different methods being used.
The article is a bit dated, but still relevant. I picked it up on OSNews.com recently.
Could track-backs or pings from RSS by used on e-mail servers to combat spam and spoofing?
The outgoing mail server to stores a hash or simply the message-id of each message originating locally.
The receiving server, or any along the way, would track-back/ping the originating server (based on MX records) with some unique ID header tag, to see if the message truly originate there.
A simple web service would respond with appropriately information for success and failure.
Sure, there are a range of issues, but perhaps this type of technique could go a long way towards combating spam, and more importantly spoofing.
I’ve built a prototype, using Ruby and CommunigatePro, but need to deploy it in our data center to run real world tests.
Just a thought.
During my personal reboot over the last few weeks, I settled on a strategy for keeping e-mail in check.
That is, not distracting me from being present and focused on current activities.
First, I re-committed to the golden rules found at 43 Folders. Such as, organizing e-mail by priority (Inbox, Action, Hold, Respond and Archive).
The most important change though, was dumping my Crackberry and Growl notifications.
They were too distracting, pulling attention from what I was doing. Nothing breaks a chain of thought or the flow of activity faster than an e-mail message.
The golden rule for e-mail is to never expect a reply in less than 24 hours.
If something is urgent, get on the phone to either discuss the issue or alert me to any time constraint your incoming message may have.
I think a lot of internet-centric workers think they are working and being productive just by sitting in front of a computer.
Not so, in my opinion.
I just uploaded the version 1.5 beta of MailTemplate for both Mail and Entourage.
This release includes the following changes:
- Compiled as a Universal Binary for both PPC and Intel
- Added support for Shortcuts by Abracode
- Added ability to use a template when selecting file in Finder
- Added real toolbar interface
- Added Command-Delete for Delete command in TemplateEditor
- Changed layout of TempateEditor
- Changed to Apple installer
- Disabled folder selection in Finder to work around long delays and potential issues
Enjoy.
On Monday I will post a beta of the Universal Binary version of MailTemplate.
This update contains a revamped editor interface, ability to select a template with a file in the Finder, preliminary support for a new product by Tom at Abracode, and a few other minor tweaks under the hood.
For those waiting for rich message template, I am hoping to have some level of support for rich messages in early summer, as well as a few other swanky tricks.
I will post here, as well as e-mail everyone when the beta is posted.
It would be great to here from people about how they are using MailTemplate, so drop me a line with your story at lon AT mactank DOT com.
In my opinion, e-mail and text messaging requires a qwerty key pad. T9 Predictive Text Input or other bastardized input methods inhibit the flow too much.
### Nokia
E61
Nokia E Series Ships Later This Month via
Gizmodo.
### Motorola Q
The Motorola Q Smartphone via
Engadget.
Only time will tell if either of these are worthy successors.
While listening to Adam Curry, on the Daily Source code, the recurring topic of business white listing services came up again.
This involves large e-mail providers like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and others requiring businesses to purchase white listing services through supposedly independent 3rd party companies to insure delivery of their messages.
For example Hotmail will not talk directly to a business. Instead expecting the business to go to the 3rd party and pay huge fees for their services.
The fees seem to range from a few thousand to 10’s of thousands of dollars.
Adam is right. Today he has no choice but to pay these fees if he wants to guarantee delivery of his businesses e-mail to these providers.
But users need to understand that free e-mail costs us all.
The costs are delayed broken communications and higher prices when businesses have to pay what is extortion in a sense.
Forget DRM, the erosion of e-mail’s usefulness and metering of internet content are the real threats to the Internet as we know it.
Unfortunately, big business doesn’t see the Internet as a universal resource for everyone. It is simply another profit center, where obvious volumes of traffic indicate opportunities.
Though, Adam has to pay for a more obvious reason. His investors would never let his business and their investment be hampered when they can throw cash at the issue.
It is hard to stick to your values when someone else holds the purse strings. When you are an up-n-coming big business.
Jeffery Veen has a nice post about social software adoption.
Email is conversational and collaborative, but ephemeral. Wikis can be somewhat disruptive to the flow of communication in a group, but are great at recording a first draft of institutional memory.
Via People use software they like, by Jeffrey Veen
I am relieved to hear his comments on the struggle Adaptive Path went through in adopting a system for share their internal knowledge.
And I thought I was the only who struggled with this? ;-)
