Overall, the spam protection built into Gmail is very good. Very seldom do I get a message in my Inbox which I mark as spam. On the flip side, however, I have anywhere from 350-400 are in my spam folder at any give time. Personally, I don’t feel the need to spend my time scanning through all these to see if there might be a legit email among the garbage. Instead, I use a Gmail search filter to scan for me.

The linked article is a great idea. I have modified the text I search for to fit what I would consider keywords. Using this filter cuts the messages I scan down to a couple of dozen which is much more manageable.

While this certainly isn’t perfect, it is a great way for Gmail users to catch most any false positive dropped into the spam folder.

It’s rare these days when I come across any app that makes me say, "Wow, now this is useful!" Yahoo’s Zimbra Desktop is one of them.

When it comes to email, there are many who prefer the convenience of web-based mail but wish there was a local application that looked and acted like a mail client. Zimbra Desktop is it. This software absolutely nails it in terms of friendliness, ease-of-use, convenience and everything in between.

First of all, it’s multi-platform. Windows, Mac or Linux. Any truly good application these days supports all three, and this does.

Second, it has support for multiple types of email:

Zimbra, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Mail, two types of IMAP and POP.

It always pleases me when I see an offering by a major player like Yahoo! that is willing to support a competitor’s product like Hotmail or Gmail because it shows confidence in their own offering.

It should be noted however that only some Hotmail accounts are supported due to compatibility issues. Most will be, but if yours doesn’t connect, the software will explain why.

Third, look at this interface:

Slim, clean and super-easy. Look at the tabs on top. Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Documents and so on are all just a single click away. Folder support is easy too.

Oh, and speaking of which, did you ever want your Gmail account to have accessible "normal" folders like all other webmail does? It will when you use Zimbra. Simply add a folder via a connected Gmail account, and it will create nested folders that look and act just like normal ones – and yes they’re completely accessible via the regular Gmail interface as well.

Fourth, although this sounds a bit dopey I really dig it – a mail indicator icon in the taskbar in Windows when new mail arrives:

The yellow envelope is the new mail indicator. This seemingly insignificant feature is just so nice to have.

Fifth, yes it has multiple account support. In the screen shot above, look on the left sidebar. Your other accounts are listed at the bottom and can be accessed easily with a single click. If there is any new mail in accounts lists there, there is a small number in parentheses telling you how much new mail there is.

Sixth is the synchronization features. Using Yahoo Calendar and Contacts? It will sync seamlessly. Using Gmail’s version? It’ll sync that too.

It goes without saying that Yahoo! Mail users will appreciate Zimbra the most because it FINALLY brings a true native client to the desktop. This is Yahoo’s equivalent of Windows Live Mail and it does a fine job even though it’s beta software.

And yes, it’s beta. That means some things may go buggy from time to time. But in my use of it I’ve encountered no issues as of yet.

The way Zimbra works in Windows is by installing itself as a service. You will see a small red icon in your taskbar (when no new mail is present) like this:

This is not a bad thing whatsoever, because when the Zimbra client is minimized, it goes completely out of the way and shrinks to this little icon, which can be clicked to bring the client back up. In addition, it can be right-clicked to completely shut down the service.

Zimbra Desktop was definitely done right the first time. It is the only software I’ve seen that offers a true alternative to Windows Live Mail (especially if you don’t use Hotmail) and the feature set is just plain great.

Oh, one last note. This may be a frilly feature but still worth mentioning. It has 12 different themes you can use:

This is available via the Options tab.

Let’s say for example you want Zimbra to look like Gmail. You would choose "Zmail." This is what it looks like:

Looks pretty close to Gmail, doesn’t it?

Zimbra’s dev team really thought this product through.

As said at the top of this article, this is a product that accesses web-based mail but still retains the total look and feel of a local mail client – and has the very-super-awesome-cool sync features like Windows Live Mail does, so it isn’t an island unto itself whatsoever.

Two huge thumbs up for Zimbra Desktop. You’d be very hard pressed not to like this.

Google’s built in spam protection in their Gmail system is very good. However, some messages manage to get through and clicking ‘Report Spam’ removes it from your inbox but does not necessarily prevent future messages from the sender. The solution is using a blacklist, but unfortunately this is not immediately offered by Gmail.

The solution is just to create your own blacklist using a filter. The linked article walks you through the process of blacklisting some existing contacts you may have, however ongoing you will need to update the list manually. Hopefully, these emails are few and far between so adding a new email to your blacklist is not done very often.

Gmail users may have noticed a new link on their left side navigation bar titled ‘Tasks’. This new function is a simple To Do List. You can read about all the features and shortcuts here, but it doesn’t really offer anything exciting outside of its native integration into Gmail and Google Calendar.

Many of you may already be using Remember The Milk with Gmail and/or with Google Calendar, which seems to be a much more functional tool at this point.

Is anyone planning to make use of Tasks? If you are a Remember The Milk user, are you going to drop it in favor of the native Google tool?

Beta, to the best of my understanding, is a level of completion concerning software development.

There’s the alpha stage, which loosely translates to "this is the very early stage; it’s very rough around the edges".

Then comes the beta stage which usually means "almost everything works but its still somewhat buggy".

After that there may be several beta versions. Beta 1, 2, 3, 3a, etc.

Then comes the release candidate, often abbreviated as RC. The latest downloadable version of Windows 7 at the time of this writing, for example, is an RC. There may be a few versions of that as well. RC 1, RC 2, etc.

Some software titles skip the RC development part altogether and go straight from beta to release.

Speaking of which, the official release is the final version. For example, on my XP computer box I am running Internet Explorer 8. Not 8 beta. Not 8 RC. It’s the official release of 8, period. The long version number is 8.0.6001.18702, like this:

And with Firefox it looks like this:

You get the idea.

Beta to me means unfinished. I have never defined beta as "cool", because anything "cool" is worthless when you’re trying to get things done.

If Apple released an "iPhone 4G beta", the first question by iPhone users would be, "Why would Apple release an unfinished product?"

Upcoming Linux distributions that are in beta stage make it quite clear that everything doesn’t work like it’s supposed to and to expect that. This is perfectly okay because, well, betas are supposed to be buggy.

Generally speaking, the only time beta is misused as "cool" is when it comes to web sites such as Gmail. And in fact this may work against Google, because in all honesty, who wants to subscribe to a service for enterprise use that has "unfinished" tacked right on the title of the product?

Not exactly a confidence booster.

What do you think?

If you are a user of Gmail and prefer to monitor your inbox by just having it sit minimized in your task bar, you probably have noticed the order of the page title elements (Gmail – Inbox (x) – email) can cut off the view of new messages when you have several programs open. This is no longer a problem with the Title Bar Tweak from Gmail Labs.

Simply put, once you enable this tweak (via the Labs tab in your Gmail settings), the page title elements order like so: Inbox (x) – email – Gmail. For obvious reasons, this is awesome. Previously you had to install a plugin or apply a script to accomplish this, but no longer.

Gmail users who are looking to add additional markers (other than text and color) to their labels should check out this article titled: Customize Your Gmail Labels with Unicode Characters.

This is a great idea as the author points out you can create logical groupings without and additional add-ons. Combine this with the ability to color code your different labels and it you have a pretty flexible organizational structure (think sub-folders).

Does anyone else have any Gmail organizational tips they would like to share?

Have you ever sent and email and then realized a second later that you forgot an attachment or didn’t include some information? We all have. To help with this problem, Gmail has introduced a new add-in from their Labs section appropriately named ‘Undo Send’:

Oops, hit “Send” too soon? Give yourself a grace period of a few seconds to cancel sending, then edit your message before sending again.

To add this to your Gmail account, click on the Settings link and then go to the Labs tab. Scroll down until you find the ‘Undo Send’ option and enable it. Once you do this, after you send a message you will see an undo link above your inbox for a few seconds which lets you recall the message you just sent.

Definitely a very handy add-in.

For those of you out there who choose to use a traditional email client with IMAP to connect to Gmail (of which there are many of you), you may have noticed that checking your Gmail can at times be a bit on the slow side. A reason for this may be because you’re subscribed to all IMAP folders in "full download" mode.

If you unsubscribe from specific folders and/or set them to download headers only, this makes checking mail and overall use of the system much speedier.

For this article I’ll show you how to do this with the Windows Live Mail client. Remember, this app is not just for Hotmail. It can easily do POP and IMAP as well.

The default view in Windows Live Mail is that the menu bar is hidden. Show it by clicking the icon to the far right next to the blue help icon and select Show Menu Bar, like this:

When you do this you will see File, Edit, View, Go, Tools, Actions and Help appear at the top of the mail client.

Select your Gmail email account on the left (clicking Inbox is fine). You should see a button labeled IMAP Folders, like this:

If you do not see this button, make sure your Gmail account is selected.

If it is and you still don’t see it, click View then Customize Toolbar.

Looks like this:

Make sure IMAP Folders is listed under Current buttons as shown above. If not, select it from the left and place it on the right.

When done, click the IMAP Folders button. This will show your currently subscribed list.

Looks like this:

I suggest double-clicking the Starred folder so you can unsubscribe from it. There’s no reason to have it there when using an email client (unless you specifically want it there). On double-click the folder next to the word will disappear, meaning it is unsubscribed. If you want to subscribe again, double click again. Click OK when finished.

Setting a folder to download headers only or not download at all

With IMAP there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to fully download spam, so that’s the example I’ll use here.

Right-click the Spam folder, select Synchronization settings and choose Don’t synchronize or Headers only, like this:

All spams that on mail check from now on will now download just the header and not the body of the message. This will significantly speed up overall use just from doing this alone.

Bear in mind this can be done with any IMAP folder – even the inbox.

In addition, if you encounter Gmail IMAP server timeouts even if only a semi-regular basis, setting folders for headers-only should cure that ill in short order.

For you GMail users out there who like the threaded view (such as myself) looking to make Outlook behave the same way, be sure to check out this post: Give Outlook a GMail Conversation view. The author walks you through the entire process of setting up your Outlook inbox to behave like GMail. It is pretty simple to do and you can always go back to the standard view if you don’t like it.

Unfortunately, you cannot get the behavior to be exact (GMail archiving, for example), but you can get pretty close. Regardless, this is definitely worth a try if you like the GMail interface.

Situation: You’re up in the wee hours of the morning (around 1 or 2am) and find this oh-so cool YouTube video that you want to e-mail to your friends.

However if you send off the link at that time of the night everybody knows when you sent it. You are basically admitting to all “Yes, I was up at two in the morning doing stupid stuff on my computer.” Oh, the ridicule. Oh, the shame. Continued

Most of us like to be notified of new email messages without having to go to the inbox itself. Linux users who use Gmail as their preferred client are no exception, so here is a very nice article which points out some available programs for automatically checking your Gmail inbox.

The author discusses 4 different tools which can be used, but cutting to the chase:

If you want the most features, CheckGmail is the way to go. KCheckGmail is well integrated into KDE, but offers fewer options than CheckGmail. The other two programs have even less functionality; Mail Notification redeems itself by allowing access to several different kinds of accounts, but suffers from a harder than needed installation procedure.

Of course there is always the option of leaving your browser open and minimized and with a quick glance you can see if the number of unread messages changes in the title bar. Of course if you have a lot of programs minimized there may not be enough room to see which makes these programs useful.

Situation: You have a Gmail account and want to switch over to a Hotmail account – or – you want to do the exact reverse and switch from Hotmail to Gmail – and you want to keep all your existing mail.

This article will show you in detail how to do this – and you will be able to import all your existing mail with timestamps, sent mail and so on.

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You have a Gmail account but want to switch to another one. Most people do this when they want to set up a “business” Gmail account or simply because they found an Gmail e-mail name they like better.

You could enable POP on the old account and retrieve the mail in the new Gmail account that way, but then the timestamps get all reset to “new” and the Sent Mail gets all screwed up.

Is there a way to migrate from one Gmail account to another while retaining all proper timestamps and Sent Mail?

Yes there is and this article will explain exactly how to do it.

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You heard all the wonderful things I said about cloud computing in the last article, and I mentioned that the transition process – while easy – takes a bit to explain how it’s done.

This article explains how it’s done in easy-to-understand terms.

We’ll be using Outlook Express 6 as our example. There are many who use this program as it comes free with Windows XP and feel that they’re stuck with it. No, you’re not. You can migrate all your mail over to Gmail or Hotmail easily. All it takes is a minimal amount of setup and a small amount of your time.

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