Two Minute Offense

Merlin has a great (or at least a decent remindering) series on how to cut down email clutter. For those who need something in their system to tinker with, there is now something else you can incessantly mess with: e-mail filters! Just when you thought you had everything perfected! Of course, if you need some more help on where to start (Merlin’s advice is somewhat high-level, you could digg into this post about how to set up your Gmail account to read newsgroups and mailing lists).

Gmail finally decided that adding Contact Groups to their contact management was an idea worth implementing.

<rant>
As a web developer, I realize that sometimes this stuff takes a while, but how long has Gmail been around? It took them that long to decide that having groups was a good idea and then make it happen? Is it me or does that not exactly sound like an agile company? This seems like something that could have been done two weeks by the guys they have at Google (because I know they’re a lot smarter than me). That amounts to about 8 hours a week for 14 weeks… Maybe that 20% time was taking up too much of the developers time.

Also, they didn’t even make an announcment or anything saying “You can making f’n groups now!”
</rant>

Here’s LifeHacker’s instructions on how to make a contact group in Gmail:

Gmail has been piling on a lot of new features lately, like the addition of contact groups. To set up a contact group:

1. Log in to your Gmail account.
2. Click Contacts along the left side of any Gmail page.
3. Open the Groups tab, and click Create Group.
4. Enter your contact group’s name in the Group name: field.
5. Type the contacts you’d like to include in the Group in the Add contacts: field. (Gmail’s auto-complete feature will suggest addresses from your Contacts list as you type.)
6. Click Create Group.

I subscribe to several newgroups via Yahoo and Google. Recently I decided that digest versions of certain newsgroups were not cutting it, so I changed my membership options to get individual emails… Can anyone guess where this is going?

My inbox was pretty much immediately flooded with emails. Of course, these are emails that I want to read… but not that I necessarily need to read right away.

The solution? Gmail makes it easy…

1. Create a label for the group
2. Create a filter to apply to the “To:” address of the group (since everyone sends email to the same address for it to be distributed to the group)
3. In the filter: apply the label for the group, and have it Bypass the Inbox

Now all the email from your various newgroups will be delivered to the different tags, won’t clutter up your inbox, and is much easier to read than the digest format. This is especially true when people manage to use the same subject to continue the thread (for some reason, people like to change the subject line) since Gmail will group them all together for you.

Fred On Something…

The problem is that to use the Gmail Atom service in Bloglines, you need to build your feed’s URL like this: https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom, to provide the user and password to the feed’s server.

All the problem is there: you have the username and the password in plaintext directly in the URL.

This is something I thought I should carry as it is important information. I tried to use the Atom feed for my Gmail account once, but didn’t have it right, so it never worked. Good thing, I guess. Of course, I realized that reading my Gmail via an RSS feed is not really that helpful anyway. I use the GTDMail method with my account, so it’s nice to be able to see more than just the new messages when I go there. It also means I use my inbox as a to-do list, but I’m working on ways around that (using the Stars is a good example).

Time to work on some categories for the blog now, I think…