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Gmail Tip of the Day – Consolidate All of Your Email Accounts into Gmail

December 11, 2008 By Dan Perlman 3 Comments

In an orgy of admiration for Gmail and love for its new Task function (and possible an over-rush of endorphins) I declared the week to be Gmail appreciation week around here at Enquiring Mimes Ranch. In that spirit, today we'll explain another way to increase your productivity due to the general wonderfulness of Gmail. Do you have a few old email address that you rarely check and when you do, you find they are chocked full of spam and maybe one halfway-important message that you've missed and you're going to have to write one of those crow-eating messages that say something like "sorry I missed your message, I don't read email in that account very often?" Gmail to the rescue. You can have Gmail get the mail from other accounts, pull the messages into your Gmail account and throw away the spam. If you do find a treasure you can answer the message directly from Gmail so that it will look like you send the reply from your other account. Tutorial after the jump Here's how: Within Gmail select Settings - Account - Get Mail from Other Accounts - Add an account, enter your email address and press next step.

Enter your username and password, Gmail will probably guess your pop server name. Your choice as to whether to leave the retrieved messages on the server, but if you really don't use the account very often -- don't leave them there. Let Gmail create a label for that mailbox. This is very handy for viewing all messages from the retrieved account. Press Add Account, you're halfway there.

Now lets set it up so we can send mail using Gmail from that account. From Gmail choose Settings - Accounts - Send Mail As - Add email address You can change the name that is displayed when you send email messages, by default you're shown the same name as is used for your Gmail. Then add the new email address for the account that Gmail is now going to retrieve and hit Next Step.

You'll then be asked to send an email to the old account to verify that it is yours. Since Gmail will retrieve the message, press Send Verification and just wait until it appears in your Gmail account and press the link in the message to verify your address. You're almost there.

Okay, one last detail and we're done. One more time, go to Settings - Accounts and check the bottom of the page to see that "Reply from the same address" is select as below, and you're finished.

Filed Under: gmail, How To, Productivity, Websites Tagged With: email

Raving Gmail Fanboy Hails new Feature — To do list

December 8, 2008 By Dan Perlman 1 Comment

As if my favorite email service could get better, but there it goes again. After already singing its praise today, I discovered the newest function added to Gmail – to do lists. You could long keep you to do list directly in messages in Gmail or by using a Firefox plug-in associate your Remember the Milk list with your Gmail. Now through the Labs interface (where they include the new stuff) you can turn on Tasks. That allow you a new action of Add to Tasks after selecting a message, or better yet just use the keyboard shortcut Shift-T and that message will be added to your to do list. You can also add non-messages to your to do list. To do items can be indented and moved up and down in the list to prioritize them. If you don’t use Gmail, you should. Sign-up for it here. Read about this in the Gmail blog. gmail_todo_screen

And since I’ve already outted myself as a raving Gmail fanboy, I’m declaring the rest of the week Gmail appreciation week and will post hints and features for the rest of the week.

Filed Under: email, gmail, Productivity, Websites

Keep Your Notes in Gmail

December 8, 2008 By Dan Perlman Leave a Comment

Use Gmail? If you do, you have a free cross-platform, accessible anywhere-you-have-access-to-the-web perfect place to keep your lists.

When I say lists, I mean the important ones. There are plenty of useful programs and services for keeping track of the old to-do list. I’m talking about the real ones like grocery lists, and errand lists and the “honey do” lists.

Just start a new message, give it a title, no addressee necessary, type your list and when you’re finished save it as a draft. Your list will always be available from a computer on the internet as well as your Blackberry, G1 or iPhone.

If you don’t use Gmail, you should. Sign-up for it here.

Filed Under: email, Productivity, Web 2.0, Websites

Browsing Photo Sites Like Going to a Gallery

December 8, 2008 By Dan Perlman Leave a Comment

Do you like the experience of going to photo galleries but don’t have time or browsing images on Flickr, but don’t want to look at snapshots? Get the gallery experience by browsing these three image sites.

The reviews below are from the NY Times.

Vi.sualize.us: Victor Espigares, a software engineer in Spain, was flipping through a photographer’s portfolio on the Web when he was struck by a particular image. “I was thinking about bookmarking the picture — but not the site — and found that I had no choice,” said Mr. Espigares. “So I started to think about filling that need. Later, I started to think a little bigger and realized that others might have a similar need.”

Vi.sualize.us features more variety than the other sites: anything from T-shirt designs to artsy studio shots and illustrations are likely to pop up. Since the site began in September 2007, the community has expanded to roughly 10,000 members with a collection of nearly 300,000 images.

We Heart It: Unable to land an invitation to FFFFound (see below), Fabio Giolito, a Brazilian Web developer, created We Heart It in March partially as an alternative to the exclusive site.

“As a designer, I keep an inspiration folder on my computer where I throw all the cool images and links I find,” said Mr.Giolito. “I created the site to organize things that I like. People liked it, so I opened it to everyone.”

With its wealth of portrait and fashion photography, the site is similar to Flickr but with a more risqué and avant-garde feel. Unlike the other two visual-bookmarking sites, We Heart It also allows its 16,000 registered users to tag favorite videos from Vimeo and YouTube. The site currently has more than 200,000 submissions, and Mr. Giolito estimates a new selection is added each minute.

FFFFound: Tokyo-based design firm Tha started FFFFound as a side project in June 2007. “We just genuinely wanted to share images that are considered good by a community of people,” said Erica Sakai, a spokesperson for the company. “At the time, there were no Web sites that offered this kind of service.”

As members add fresh fodder to the site, images appear and drift down the homepage, forming a steady stream of album covers, typographical posters, experimental photography and snapshots of street graffiti.

Unlike the other sites, FFFFound is a closed to new contributors. Ms. Sakai said the team elected to cap the community’s size for fear FFFFound would become overly cluttered and unmanageable. But any visitor is free to browse the catalog of 500,000 images.

I’ve enjoyed browsing these sites, be warned that We Heart It does contain images that are NSFW – I’m warning not necessarily complaining.

Read the NY Times posting.

Filed Under: Non-productivity, Websites, Weekends

Twittering the Enterprise — Microblogging with Yammer

December 1, 2008 By Dan Perlman Leave a Comment

Months ago I was skeptical whether there was a use for Twitter, and wrote here "Twitter - Why" Silly me. I did eventually allow that it could be useful. Since then I've become a fanboy and am following more than 400 individuals with about 200 following me. (Shameless self-promotion - follow me on Twitter ). I do believe Twitter is a great communications and marketing (self-marketing?) vehicle. I first heard of the Mumbai attacks via Twitter and now follow world news and industry news via Twitter. Yammer allows you to use "microblogging" which is blogging a la Twitter privately only within your own company. I want to share the same kind of information as Twitter but only to colleagues not the world or twittersphere. Yammer is free and easy to setup. All you need to launch it for your company is to provide your corporate email address, then you can invite your colleagues, boss, and direct reports. Anyone can join Yammer for your company as long as they use the same domain name. yammer-screen

I'm vp of marketing for a software company called Virtual Bridges, our domain name is vbridges.com. All of my friends at Virtual Bridges can join the Yammer conversation using their somebody@vbridges.com email address. yammer-screen2