Entries Tagged 'Email' ↓

of Tiger on Saturday and, after doing a full bootable backup I installed it as an upgrade on my main drive. Unlike others, I have always had a very good experience with upgrade installs, and this time was no exception. Everything works flawlessly.

My main question now has to do with Mail. There are two new, and deeply related, features in Mail - the integration of Spotlight, Apple’s new search technology, and the Smart Mailbox functionality integrated directly in Mail. So, the question is this: is it time to ditch all my Mail folders and keep everything in one mailbox (per account) and just use Smart Mailboxes to sort everything out on an as-needs basis? It seems silly to keep things artificially segregated when I don’t have to do so. At the same time, I have tens of thousands of emails going back to 1994 or so in my system and I wouldn’t want to have performance issues with keeping so many emails in a single master list. Any advice?

Boris makes some suggestions. I totally agree that the problem is a big one, and although there is some activity in the area (Boris points to some of this), it doesn’t seem like that much of what is being done is very innovative. Hopefully Tiger will address some of this stuff, with its reinvigorated search and updated Apple Mail. In theory it should be possible to implement a tagging system in Tiger that will leverage both Mail and the new search services.

Getting More Out Of Gmail by Justin Blanton. If you need an invite, by the way, let me know at mikelbyl@gmail.com (this isn’t terribly exceptional - they’re giving away invites like crazy now).

posted a piece about GMail that I overlooked, though many blogs I read referred to it. But it’s just the title that’s misleading - the piece itself is excellent. O’Reilly’s The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It’s Bogus is about MUCH more than the privacy concerns, it’s about the whole thing that GMail represents. “Pioneers like Google are remaking the computing industry before our eyes. Google of course isn’t one computer — it’s a hundred thousand computers, by report — but to the user, it appears as one. Our personal computers, our phones, and even our cars, increasingly need to be thought of as access and local storage devices. The services that matter are all going to run on the global virtual computer that the internet is becoming.”

is the principle that stands behind Google’s Gmail. Rael Dornfest is beginning an experiment to do the same on his desktop.

I hadn’t really thought of it, but it’s not that different than what I have done for years. I have never really presorted email in anything other than chronological folders - no folders for specific subjects or anything like that. Any other system has always seemed inadequate for me, as it relies on building a taxonomy that is complete and exclusive - something that doesn’t mix well with email.

a state senator in California is attempting to block Google’s Gmail service via legislation. She objects to the targetting of advertising based on the content of email. This is one of the most ill-informed and ridiculous things I’ve heard of from a lawmaker.