Archive for the ‘Gmail Master’ Category
Texting – Part 2
By Chuck Tomasi on January 9th, 2010
This show is sponsored by Citrix GotoAssist Express. Try it free for 30 days
Welcome to part 2 of our 3 part series on texting from Gmail and Google applications. If you haven’t listened to part 1, you can download it from iTunes or listen directly from the Gmail Podcast blog at chuckchat.com.
In part 1 I showed you how to send free text messages from Gmail chat. Another way is to use Google Voice. Google Voice has several features that make it attractive, including:
• Publish a single phone number and have it ring your home, work, and mobile phone or any combination based on the caller.
• Free voice mail with personalized greetings
• Voice mail automatically converted to text and emailed to you with both the audio file and translated text attached
• Listen to, or read, your voice mail on your computer or mobile phone
• Free text messaging
Begin by signing in to Google Voice using your Gmail account at voice.google.com. At the top, just under the logo, click the SMS button. Begin typing the name of the contact or their phone number. Make sure you have mobile phone numbers associated with the contacts you intend to send text messages. Unlike the Gmail Chat feature, it will not prompt you for the contact if you enter only the number. Similarly, if you enter a name that has no mobile phone number associated in your contacts list, you cannot send a message.
After you have entered a phone number or contact, type your message and press send. It’s that simple. Managing your Google Voice conversations from the web interface is very similar to Gmail. Responses will show up in your Inbox or you can look at just SMS messages and filter out voice mail by clicking the SMS link on the left. You can reply by typing in the text area just under the conversation and click Send.
Currently, Google Voice is free and open by invitation only. Contact me if you are interested in trying it out.
Texting – Part 1
By Chuck Tomasi on January 2nd, 2010
This episode is sponsored by GotoAssist Express. Try it free for 30 days.
Google offers a number of ways to send and receive text messages for free without using a mobile phone. This is part 1 of a 3 part series on using text messages, or SMS, with Gmail and other Google applications.
Let’s begin with Gmail. Texting from Gmail chat is fairly easy. To do this you will need to enable the Labs feature “Text (SMS) in Chat”. You can find this in the Labs tab in the Settings page.
Once the labs feature is setup, begin by opening the chat window and signing in to chat. Type the name or phone number of the person you want to send a text message to in the “Search, add, or invite” box. If this person is not already in your contacts list, don’t worry. As you type, a window appears under your text with options “Mail, Invite to Chat, and SMS”. If you entered a phone number, only the SMS option will be displayed. Finish entering the text then choose the SMS option and a window appears. In the window, finish filling out the contact information. If you entered a name, provide the phone number, if you entered a phone number then provide a name and click Save. This information will be added to your contacts list for easier reference later.
When Gmail gets done saving the contact information, a window appears at the bottom of the screen – much like a chat window. Type you text message and send it with the Enter key. If the other person responds, you will receive a response in the same window. Gmail makes it as easy to send text messages as it is to chat – and best of all it’s free.
Another way to send text messages from Gmail is to use the SMS in Chat gadget. This is also a labs feature that works very similar to the Text (SMS) in Chat feature. I don’t recommend using this labs feature. First, it requires the Text (SMS) in Chat feature to be turned on – so why not use that instead? Second, at the time this article was written, the labs feature seems to have a bug in that it prompts you for contact information each time instead of reusing previous entries from the contact database. This creates duplicate entries in the contact database each time you use it.
Keep in mind that although the text messaging using Google may be free to you, it may not be free to the person receiving or sending replies. Currently, text messages from chat only work with US phones.
Listener John writes in and asks “Is there a way to set a primary email for a contact that has multiple addresses?”
While I cannot find a definitive rule or setting to make any particular email address the primary one, my own experience has shown me that mutliple email addresses seem to be ordered by the frequency they are used. The more you use a specific address for a particular person, the more likely that address will appear at the top of the list. If you’ve got information to the contrary, let me know on the blog or drop me an email.
Migrating My Email to Gmail
By Chuck Tomasi on December 9th, 2009Fate conspired against me a couple years ago when I hit the limit on Gmail. If you’re not a Gmail veteran, here’s a quick refresher. When Gmail first came out it offered a whopping 1GB of storage for free. This was far larger than the 10MB my ISP was offering at the time. By mid-2007 the capacity was up to 2GB – and still free. Who was I to complain… Until late 2007 when I ran out of space.
My solution at the time was to start up Mozilla Thunderbird and use IMAP protocol to download all the messages to my local PC, then wipe Gmail clean. Sure it kept the file attachments, but I lost all my labels. I could still search through the archive and rebuild my email in the cloud.
Sadly (for me), only a few months later, Gmail capacity started shooting up again… 3GB… 4GB… 5GB… 6GB… 7GB… in a matter of months. It figures. Now everytime I want to find something I have to search two places when Gmail is large enough to hold the original 2GB, the 2GB I added since then, and still have plenty of space. But how to get my Thunderbird archive back on to Gmail?
Enter Ben Shoemate and his wonderful article explaining it all. Ben made it sound so simple to gather up the email and send it off to Gmail. Except I had problems.
I couldn’t get Gmail to recognize the server on my machine. Long story short, it turned out to be my Windows XP Firewall settings. Although I believed my exception in the port listing did the trick, it did not. I had to completely stop the service in order to make contact between any other machine and port 110 (POP3) on my machine.
What’s more, once I made contact, I had problems authenticating. Solution: I had to create another account and transfer the email messages (again) from one local IMAP account to another. A little time consuming, but soon I’ll have all my email safely back in Gmail’s hands.
And if you really don’t believe all your data is safe in the cloud, you can always use Gmail Backup to keep a copy.
Thanks Ben!
Hosted Email – latest details
By Chuck Tomasi on July 3rd, 2009Hey Gmail-ers. Just a quick update on the hosted email instructions. It seems every time I go to host email from one of my domains, the procedure changes a bit. The toughest part was getting started with the FREE hosting. Here’s the first few critical steps to help get you started.
- Go to http://www.google.com/a
- Click on the blue button “See details and sign up”.
- Now, look for the link just under the blue “Start Free Trial” labeled “Standard Edition”. This is the free one.
- Click the blue “Get Started” button
The rest of the steps are pretty much the same as before and walk you through on the screen. If you have questions or problems drop me an email gpodcast at gmail dot com.
Multiple Inboxes
By Chuck Tomasi on February 7th, 2009One of the most interesting new features in the Gmail Labs is called Multiple Inboxes. If you need more information on Gmail Labs, check the Gmail Podcast Archives for plenty of details on what it is and how you can enable dozens of useful features. Multiple inboxes gives you a very nice way to see items that would normally be cluttering up your inbox in separate window panes on the same screen. Combined with labels and filters, multiple inboxes makes for a very powerful organization tool.
Begin by enabling the Multiple Inboxes feature under Settings> Labs. You’ll notice your main conversation index now shows a sort of split-screen view of your normal conversation index as well as search results on the right. By default it comes up with search results for starred and draft items. To change this, go back in to Settings and you’ll see a new tab labeled “Multiple inboxes”. There you will see five lines, labeled “Pane 0-4″ that you can put in the search conditions you want to display. You can also set a maximum number of conversations you want to display and if you want the panes displayed above, below, or to the right of the inbox. Now, back at your inbox, you’ll see a whole new layout. Using filters, you can immediately label and move messages to their own window for better organization.
At the top of each pane you can find a link on the right labeled “View All”. When you click on that link the particular pane will take over and take up the whole index.
Be careful not to get carried away with Multiple Inboxes. While they can be a powerful feature to keep you organized, I found the more I tried to configure them with filters, the less organized I became. I thought it would be helpful to take some of my more common messages and bypass the normal inbox by applying them to a label and making them appear in one of the other inboxes. For example, all my incoming notifications from Facebook would simply “appear” in a facebook pane. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a keyboard shortcut to move me to another pane (yet). Maybe something like g 0-4 would be helpful to allow me to select, label, archive, and delete conversations in those other inboxes. Try out the multiple inboxes and see what works for you.
I have to say, I’m rather impressed with some of the other changes in Gmail recently. The user interface has been cleaned up and a couple new features added. The buttons on the main index have been given cleaner look. Archive, Report Spam, and Delete are still there, however More Actions has been divided in to “Move to”, which allows you to apply a label and move the message out of the inbox, and label which simply applies a label. “More Actions” is still available, but has been tidied up to simply include “Mark as read”, “Mark as unread”, “Add to tasks”, “Add Star”, “Remove Star”, “Create an event”, “Filter Messages like these”, and “Mute”. For you keyboard shortcut nerds, “v” activates the “Move To” menu, “l” for the label menu, and “.” (period, or dot) still gets “More Actions”. It’s been a challenge to retrain my fingers, but I’m learning.
I’ve got dozens of labels and scrolling is quickly becoming impractical. Another nice feature about these new menu options is auto-complete. As you start typing the label name, Gmail will narrow the search down. Once again, I highly recommend keyboard shortcuts for moving between your messages with j and k, select them with “x”, move or label them with “l”, or “v”, archive them with “y”, or delete them with “#”. Applying labels with auto-complete makes organizing your messages a snap. I can quickly narrow down 100 new messages to 10 that I really need to read and reply to in a few minutes.
After seeing some of the recent interface changs, it starts to make the filter and label management screens look a little clunky. Keep watching the Gmail Podcast website and listening to the Gmail Podcast, you never know what’s coming next…
Calendar
By Chuck Tomasi on December 14th, 2008Yes, you heard right. This episode is about the Google Calendar. I’m not running out of Gmail information, on the contrary, I’m having a hard time keeping up with all the cool new stuff coming out. Recently I found a new feature that ties Gmail with the Google Calendar.
To begin, I’d like to give you a wonderful use of the Google Calendar that my co-worker Kevin in Raleigh North Carolina told me about. He said that he keeps all his appointments outside normal work hours in his Google Calendar. This way he can share it with his wife and maintain it from anywhere. I started thinking about our family calendar that hangs on the refrigerator at home. There are some drawbacks to this simple, and somewhat effective means of family communication. First, there isn’t always room to write what you want so you have to make shorthand notations, which can be difficult for your spouse to decipher. Second, you cannot check the piece of paper at home if someone at work asks “Are you available next Tuesday evening?”
This past weekend, I took the three sheets of paper from the refrigerator and entered them in to Google Calendar. I will spare you all the details of setting up and managing a calendar. However, I will let you know that I discovered quite a number of nice features such as notifications via email and SMS, as well as sending a daily agenda to my email box each day just before I wake up – saving me a step of reading my email and reviewing my calendar each morning before we get going.
Next, I shared the calendar with my wife Donna and gave her access to modify it. Finally, to appease Donna, I printed out not only a monthly view, but a weekly view as well to better see conflicts. After all, what good is a new piece of technology if you don’t have a process to drive it. I’ll be out of town and she isn’t quite comfortable with managing the calendar from the web yet.
OK, you may be saying “Chuck, I’ve been doing that with our family calendar for years. What took you so long?” To that I respond “Thanks” and admit I’m not always on the leading edge of all technologies.
OK, here’s the tie in with Gmail. I discovered a Gmail labs feature called “Google Calendar gadget” which displays upcoming events in a window on the left side. There is also one called “Google Docs gadget” to display recently modified Google Docs. The problem is that they appear at the bottom below the chat window and labels so I couldn’t glance and see what is coming up in the calendar. Fortunately, there are also two gadgets called “Right side chat” and “Right side labels” to place those two gadgets on the right side of the screen. This does make the message index a little narrower, and takes a bit of getting used to when looking for the labels or chat – after all they’ve been in the same place for years. However, the calendar and docs gadget now appear right under the Contacts link on the left and offer a quick glance at useful information.
Hosted Mail (updated)
By Chuck Tomasi on February 3rd, 2008A while back I did an episode of the Gmail Podcast where I showed you how to switch your internet domain to be hosted by Google’s mail servers. This gives you the freedom of managing your own mail accounts, distribution lists, and other aspects of your mail environment, while providing all the benefits of Gmail like unmatched spam filtering, a large mailbox, and all the other wonderful features Gmail has to offer.
Consider this show an update to the previous one. I noticed that the procedure has changed a bit since the last show and rather than have you frustrated at icons and links that weren’t where they were supposed to be, I figured it was time to provide you with some updated information in case you’ve been thinking of making the switch.
A little warning, of all the things I’ve covered on the Gmail Podcast, this is probably one of the more complex. Not to worry, I’ll walk you through every step. Where specialized steps are needed, depending on your configuration, I will defer to Google’s excellent step-by-step documentation.
Let me first start by explaining the basics. First, we’re going to setup a hosting account on Google for your mail. Next, we’ll tell the Internet that mail for your domain is no longer with your old hosting system, but rather, all your email should now be sent to Google’s servers where it can be transparently delivered and received by you, or anyone in your domain.
- Start by going to http://www.google.com/a
- Click “Get Started”
- Next, click on “Standard Edition” (Sign Up button)
- If you already have a domain, choose “I want to use an existing domain”, otherwise choose “Create a domain”. For this example, we’ll assume you already have a domain.
- Enter your domain name – then click “Use my domain”
- Fill in the fields for your name, a current valid email address, and other required information to sign up
- When you’ve completed the necessary fields, click “Continue” button
- On the next page, enter the email address on your domain (ex: chuck@chuckchat.com)
- Review the terms and conditions, then click “I accept, continue with sign up”
- Note the message at the top of the screen that reads: To activate Google Apps services you must verify that you own your domain – “yourdomain”, click on the link that says “Verify domain ownership”
- You can either upload an HTML file or change the CNAME record. I chose to upload the HTML file. Simply follow the instructions on the page. That takes care of part of setting up the email hosting.
- Next, you need to update your MX, or mail exchange records to have the internet know that mail to your domain should be directed to Google’s servers. After setting up the mail hosting, you should be at the dashboard. If not, go to http://www.google.com/a/yourdomainname and login. From the Dashboard, click on “Activate Email” in the Email section. Select the hosting plan you have and follow the instructions.
- Replication of your changes may take up to 48 hours to be sent around the internet so be patient.
- Once that is done, your email to your new domain will be delivered to a nice big, managed, Gmail mailbox.
- If you already have one or more mailboxes hosted by Google, I might recommend your review the instructions to either get mail from your other mailbox via POP or IMAP, or Forward your domain to a central Gmail account using forwarding and Send Mail As, all of which are explained in other episodes of the Gmail Podcast.
- I’m guilty of always assuming people use the Gmail web interface, and for that I apologize. If you are using a third party client like Outlook, Thunderbird, Mail on the Mac, or something else, you may need to go back to the DNS servers and update the POP and SMTP records as well.
There you go. Mail for your domain is now being sent to Google’s servers. Now that you’ve got the framework setup out of the way, you can use the management console on Google’s hosted site to create more users and mail lists in your new domain.
Accessing Another’s Email
By Chuck Tomasi on June 3rd, 2007This time we take a look at what you need to do if to get access to one of your loved one’s Gmail after they are deceased.
This item has been in the news and fortunately for us, Google has a standard procedure.
You will need to provide Google with the following information in written format. You can send it via fax or postal mail. That information is provided below.
1) Your full name and contact information. Please include a verifiable email address.
2) The Gmail address of the person who passed away.
3) The entire message from the account you are requesting access to. This includes not only the message body, but the full message header. The full header can be obtained by opening the message in Gmail and click on ‘More options,’ then click ‘Show original.’ Copy everything from ‘Delivered- To:’ through the ‘References:’ line.
To obtain headers from other webmail or email providers, please refer to http://www.spamcop.com/help_with_headers/)
4. You will also need to provide a copy of the death certificate of the deceased.
5. and a copy of the document that gives you Power of Attorney over the Gmail account.
6. If you are the parent of the individual, include a copy of the Birth Certificate if the Gmail account owner was under the age of 18. In this case, Power of Attorney is not required.
The postal address to send this to is:
Google Inc.
Attention: Gmail User Support
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Or the Fax number in the US is:
650-644-0358
It takes approximately 30 days for the information to be processed, but if the access is needed sooner, “it is Google’s policy to only provide information pursuant to a valid third party court order or other appropriate legal process.”
Add Event to Calendar
By Chuck Tomasi on March 31st, 2007Listener Steve Holden pointed out that while reading messages, he noticed that the Gmail web interface has a link on the right side of the screen to add the event to your Google calendar when a date appears in the body of the message. I tried doing little experimenting to see if I could trigger the link, but was unsuccessful. Once Steve sent me a sample, I found out the format.
If you have a line of text in your message, then on the next line a date followed by a semicolon and a time, the link will appear. Gmail is pretty good about recognizing a wide format of dates. I have used month/day/year digits as well as spelling out the month then digits a comma and a year. As long as the date and time are on their own line and a semicolon separates them, the link will appear. I will include some examples in the show notes on the web site.
My Special Event
April 3, 2007; 5:00PM
Pay Taxes (US)
4/15/2007; 8:00AM
Why is this useful you ask? For the same reason Gmail presents a link when it recognizes package tracking IDs or a Google Map link when it recognizes an address – to be more helpful and save you time. When sending an email to a gmail user, you can include a date and time for an event and have it easily added to the calendar.
Quick Tip: If you have shortcut keys enabled, you can use the “#” key to delete messages. From the conversation index, begin by checking the messages, or using the “x” key, then clicking “#”. If you need more information on how to enable shortcut keys, have a listen to the podcast from January 2005.
Mail Fetcher
By Chuck Tomasi on February 10th, 2007Gmail now has a way to get email from other accounts with a feature called Mail Fetcher. This differs slightly from the existing technology available in the “Send Mail As” feature described in an earlier podcast. Send Mail As is a “push” technology meaning that your mail is pushed from the original source (say your ISP mailbox) to Gmail. The Mail Fetcher is a pull technology, meaning that Gmail will pull information from your Internet Server Provider, or ISP, mailbox.
While this may seem like semantics at first, the underlying technologies differ quite a bit and the use for one over the other is up to you.
Mail Fetcher is configured from same screen as Send Mail As. Begin by logging in to your Gmail account and clicking on “Settings” in the upper right corner of the screen.
Next click on the “Accounts” link.
Find the section labeled “get mail from other accounts”. Normally there won’t be anything configured yet so click on the link “Add another mail account”. At this point, you can add up to five accounts.
Now enter the email address of the account you plan to pull the information from. For example if I want all my mail that normally goes to chuck@chuckchat.com to arrive in my chuck.tomasi@gmail.com, I would enter chuck@chuckchat.com since that is where it will first be delivered according to the mail routing rules setup on the internet name servers. Sorry if this is a little too technical.
Now, click “Next Step”
You will then be prompted for credentials regarding the other account. you should have your login and password handy. It will also prompt you for the POP server. This is the system which provides access to your mail on that server. If you don’t have that information available you may need to contact your ISP or mail hosting provider. If you are unsure of the port, leave it as the default.
Further options are available to leave a copy of the retrieved message on the server. You may want to check this, but if your other mail host is like mine, the mailbox size limit is not anywhere near as generous as Gmail and it will fill up quickly.
You can also choose to use a secure, or encrypted connection, but make sure your other mail host supports this first.
The third option is to allow the automatic application of a Gmail label of your choosing to the messages from that provider. This may help to identify the originating source of the email or just provide you with a visual record.
Like the filters, you can have this message complete skip the mailbox and go straight to the archive. This is handy if you have an account you use for purely marketing and spam collection, but don’t want it to get filled up.
Once your options are chosen, click “Add Account”.
The final question asks if you would like to be able to send mail as that other account. this is similar to the Send Mail As and allow the recipient of a message to think it came from the other account transparently.
The main difference between Send Mail As and Mail Fetcher is that the former requires you to send a test message, enable forwarding on the first mail account, and allow email to be received by Gmail. Mail Fetcher requires you to enter your credentials and then pulls the mail directly from the other server.
Gmail’s mail fetcher also keeps a history of attempts and fetches from the other account. Once you have setup the account, the same Accounts screen under settings has a link for each account labeled “View History”. The fetches will be done at regular intervals, but you can force Gmail to retrieve email from our other account manually by clicking “Check mail now” for the respective account on the same screen.
