Let’s face it – people are idiots. They can’t manage a simple task and need to be reminded ever five minutes not to kill themselves with household products. My favorite’s Comet & coffeepots. The following snippet is a gem from the Gmail IMAP Client Setup, or how to get your Gmail on your phone, Outlook, whatever…
I love the entire set of warnings in the instruction set, especially since it starts with: Do NOT save deleted messages on the server. It gets fun in part three, my emphasis.
Do NOT save deleted messages to your [Gmail]/All Mail folder as some clients will try to empty this folder and ultimately fail. This can lead to delayed mail access or excessive battery consumption on a mobile device.
It seems that over time I’ve collected over 20,000 Gmail “conversations” and until today had 1,800 unread e-mails in my inbox. Who knows how many “read” e-mails I might have had. When I first opened the account in 2004 I was very diligent when it came to cleaning the inbox up, archiving, staring, and so forth. I rarely deleted e-mails as there seems to be no reason to with Gmail (The footer reads: You are currently using 976 MB (13%) of your 7367 MB). Alas what started as a dedicated mail trap has moved on to become the catch-all mailbox. And why not? It is so easy to search and manage that there is no reason to continually archive and delete. Something had to be done though when I linked Gmail to my iPhone.
I was rarely checking e-mail, up until a year ago, as it wasn’t a source of communication for me. I was e-mailing assignments to teachers (before I graduated from the diploma mill) and getting newsletters and so forth when I started this account. Now everyone is using e-mail and I get quite a few important updates such as Facebook notifications, etc. But that was just coming in too fast, and I wasn’t good about “deleting” stuff. If you click a link an in e-mail on the iPhone you are taken right to Safari and will likely not go back an archive the message when you get the next chance to do so.
The problem I had was that I like to use the “unread” status, rather keeping things unread, to know that I need to follow up on an item (notorious one at this point is the reminder to file my tax returns!). This works for Outlook at work as you can create a search folder that displays just those unread e-mails – I don’t see a way to do that with Gmail on the iPhone (though I have an idea for how to do so with labels!).
So I needed to clean everything up. Turns out it was an easy process. I started by searching for things that seem to flood my “inbox” but that would have taken hours to find each Crate and Barrel, The Onion, Border Rewards and Facebook e-mail that was ever sent to me.
Instead I did the following:
Searched using the following: label:inbox label:read
Selected all (using the Select: All, None, Read, Unread, Starred, Unstarred shortcuts). Then continuted to select more using the “Select all conversations that match this search” option.
Hit the archive button, confirming I wanted to archive each and every one of those suckers.
Profit!
(Though you’ll notice there is an extra step in there – it can be done differently, but it wasn’t allowing me to archive every one using Select: Unread.)
Then to clean up my unread e-mails:
Starred those 10 e-mails that are sitting there as reminders.
Searched: label:inbox -is:starred
(Notice the minus sign in front of the “is:starred”, this will perform an inverse selection)
“Select all conversations that match this search”
Hit the archive button, confirming I wanted to archive each and every one of those suckers.
Profit!
Now I have 10 e-mails sitting in my inbox that I can easily scan over and the unread reminders are no longer spread out with 25 read pieces of junk in between. Very much for the win. Now I just have to keep up on it. But using the above steps I can just go back maybe once a month and perform some clean up when needed, in just a few minutes (if even a whole minute).
Ever wonder where someone’s photo was taken, or with what camera? On this site you can see those details with a Firefox add-on; Exif Viewer 1.45. You can see the camera make and model as well as the resolution with this cool tool – but the coolest feature by far is the ability to click a link and see where on Google Maps, Google Earth, Mapquest and others where the picture was taken. See the cool screenshot.
Posted in Kinda Lame, Rant on October 14th, 2008 by admin
The iTunes Music Store (or iTMS) is already the gold standard of music sales. Why shouldn’t they try to become the worlds clearinghouse of music? They have the user and active buyer base to just swallow the competition in utter control of the market. (And why aren’t they buying the rights to music yet? Or are they?)
They should partner up with Myspace to sell their music downloads. iTunes or Myspace would never let this happen, but they (Apple) could push it in a real slick way. They could just ask Myspace to forward their downloads through iTMS. By forward, I mean that Apple would be a clearinghouse of sorts for Myspace music downloads. They would hold a digital copy of the catalog and only allow downloads through some sort of encrypted API that allows users to purchase the music on Myspace’s mobile application, and have it downloaded and integrated into iTunes.
The question is who stands to lose money? iTMS could suffer because they have made it easier for a competitor to enter the market (on their device no doubt!). Myspace could be suckered into paying too much. I propose just one cent of the purchase should go to Apple. They would be able to make a profit on a few million songs I’d think. The electronic music download market is primed (current economic times excluded, of course) and it could produce more opportunities like this. It could allow any competitor to plug into Apple’s user-base. Apple must do something to compete too. Google Android is just around the corner – it could do this for free (as in speech).
The songs would integrate into the iPod/iPhone and iTunes and create a harmonious experience for the end users and Apple can tax every download that goes through their device. Why not try it? Then get the competitors to do it too and then you have money coming in from every angle. And most companies, I would think, would love to tap into the iPhone user’s wallets.
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