reMAP: IMAP reConceptualized
Gabor Cselle, the founder of reMail, recently posted an idea for replacing the IMAP email protocol with something with which working would be easier. The proposed name? reMAP, short for reimagined Mail Access Protocol.
He calls for a RESTful design that among other things would globalize message identifiers (rather than changing them the instant a message is moved to a new folder), replace folders with labels (a la Gmail), require the server to handle email search indexes, and make conversations the basic unit of email (instead of individual messages). reMAP would also make handling MIME messages unnecessary; the client could simply call the server with a request for text or HTML message representations without having to deal with parsing the MIME format itself.
I personally am in agreement with his entire proposal. The experiences I've had with IMAP in the past have highlighted shortcomings in a standard that was drafted over 15 years ago. Email has changed a great deal since then, but IMAP has not been revised to accommodate the enhancements made by newer clients and services like Gmail.
If IMAP is to be improved, it's probably appropriate to just completely replace it with something new. If the new system can translate IMAP commands into the equivalent operations in its own protocol, that's even better, because then servers can be upgraded without worries of breaking compatibility with older clients or the need to run server applications for IMAP and reMAP side by side.
There's plenty of discussion going on at the original post and on Hacker News. If, however, you would like to say something here, please don't hesitate. 
As a side note, I see that Gabor is using Blogger's FTP publishing option, which will be going away soon. I hope the link will still work when he has to move.
How To: Safely Use Twitter Notification Enhancement Services
As you all have probably heard, Twitter is gaining popularity in leaps and bounds. All the new users mean more follower notifications arriving in my inbox, and Twitter's default messages aren't very useful. (The direct message notifications are pretty bare-bones, too, but I don't get many of those so it wasn't a priority.)
Update (05/06): Twitter prettified their emails, but I still think Topify's are better. Unfortunately, Twitter also went back to using the same address (noreply@twitter.com) for all users' notifications, putting the email-address – specific addresses in the reply-to header. So the filter setup in this post doesn't work any more. I had to come up with a new, more complicated filter... Stupid Twitter...
The Beginning
The first enhanced-notification service I discovered was Twimailer, created by a British developer named Jon Wheatley (and apparently later sold—shortly after I signed up — to a Romanian named Toni).
Despite the admonitions in the article above (on ReadWriteWeb) about changing passwords and all kinds of security precautions, I'm not worried about my own account. There's one simple reason for that: I never actually switched my email address in Twitter's settings. Instead, I created a Gmail filter to auto-archive follow notifications from Twitter and forward them to Twimailer. That way, I:
- had all my follow notifications even if the service went down (it did for several days) or glitched (sometimes I get messages with no information)
- only forwarded the messages Twimailer needed to be useful, rather than everything
- made sure to keep password resets (which I haven't used for my main account in the last few months anyway) completely out of Twimailer's hands
I was very comfortable with this system. I can only guess that Jon's original intent was to simplify the setup process. After all, most people don't bother with email filters, and wouldn't necessarily know how to set one up. Changing settings on Twitter's website is a lot easier.
A New Age
Thanks to a TechCrunch post about fighting Twitter spam I read tonight, I discovered Topify, an invitation-only (for now) service based in Israel that offers all of what Twimailer did — and more.
I found an invite on the Topify blog (sorry, no link; you gotta dig through their site too so it's fair for everyone) and quickly signed up. The Twitter password field distressed me a little, but it's obviously necessary for all the extra features (like follow-back, reply to direct message, and block), all of which can be done via email with Topify. (In the future, I hope Topify will implement support for Twitter's OAuth authentication and delete users' passwords from their system. Consider this a request, Arik. 
Anyway, switching was pretty painless. All I had to do was change the address to which my Gmail filter forwards and add my direct-message notification From address to the filter. I'm currently waiting for something to happen on my Twitter account so I can try out the new service. (I considered running Twimailer and Topify side-by-side for a bit, but decided against it; redundant emails would increase my processing time, the opposite of the intended effect.)
Filter Details
For those who want to copy my setup (I'm telling you, it's a lot more resilient than the default instructions from either service), here are the filter settings to enter. Update (05/06): These settings are left here for posterity; they won't work anymore thanks to Twitter's changes from today. See the first update near the top for more detail. Update (05/07): These should now work again, since Twitter appears to have gone back to the old email headers.
In the filter's From box, enter:
- Topify: twitter-follow-you=yourdomain.tld OR twitter-dm-you=yourdomain.tld
- Twimailer: twitter-follow-you=yourdomain.tld
Replace you=yourdomain.tld with your email address, using = in place of @.
That's all you need to do for filter criteria. (If you have only one Twitter account coming into your inbox, it's even easier; you can omit the -you=yourdomain.tld part(s) of the filter criteria. It doesn't hurt to include them, though.)
For actions, I selected "Skip Inbox" and "Mark as read", and told Gmail to forward these messages to my secret Twimailer/Topify address.
Click the Create filter button, scroll down your filter list, and you should see something like the following (image is linked to full-size version):
(There's also an XML file available to import, for those with the Filter Import/Export feature enabled in Gmail Labs, but creating the filter from scratch is pretty easy. The file link might go dead in a month or two when my Google Page Creator site is moved to Google Sites, but I'll know because things like the site logo will stop working. If that happens, I'll definitely fix it.)
Note: As I was writing this, I discovered Chris Messina's post about this, published almost two months ago. My little hack is nothing new, I guess; but I'll publish anyway because his instructions are focused on Twimailer and Twimailer only.
Wrap
Let me know if you find this little hack useful. I haven't time to make a bunch of pretty screenshots (unlike Chris , so if you have questions, post in the comments.
Incidentally, this is my 500th blog post. If that means anything.
GrandCentral Becomes Google Voice!
It's taken 21 months — almost two years — but GrandCentral ("One number for all your phones, for life") has finally gotten an upgrade (and a new name). I'm totally excited, and happy that the long-awaited upgrade (previously known as GrandCentral 2.0) is finally here. Meet Google Voice: "One number for all your calls and SMS".
New Features
Yes, Google Voice added several new features. One of the things that always, always bugged me about GrandCentral was the fact that my number couldn't receive or send text messages. Well, now it can. According to TechCrunch's expansive overview, the same technology that powers the SMS in Gmail Chat Labs experiment (known as Gateway) is used in Google Voice.
Other new features include voicemail transcription (sounds promising), very specific per-contact settings (definitely a trap for us OCD types), a completely overhauled interface (w00t! Less Flash!), conference calling (cool factor = 100), and easy dialing out via the phone interface.
I have to stop and talk about the dial-out feature. First of all, it was nearly impossible to dial out from GrandCentral unless you either had a new voicemail from the person you wanted to call (so you could press '2' after it to call them back) or had access to a Web-enabled device. Simply dialing out wasn't considered. Now, in Google Voice, there's a "press '2'" option right in the main menu! Finally!
Also, under GrandCentral's auspices, calling out was free during beta, with the shadow of paying per minute after testing was over looming in the future. Google changed that in Voice, which allows free calls anywhere in the United States. International calls are at greatly reduced rates (compared to conventional long-distance). Each new user gets a free $1.00 credit toward international calls, though I don't know if they'll keep that up once sign-ups are opened completely — it could be something just for migrating GC users.
Migration, Stranded Data, and Missing Features
Existing GrandCentral users get (or will get this weekend) a migration link at the top of their grandcentral.com inboxes, which will begin the automated migration of a GrandCentral number to Google Voice. The process was pretty painless, even smoother than the transition to the new FeedBurner system last month.
However, much data is not migrated. Most of the settings are reset, custom greetings and names must be re-recorded, old voicemails/calls/recorded calls are left behind on grandcentral.com, and contacts must be transferred manually by exporting GrandCentral's Address Book to CSV and importing it into Google Contacts. The automatic merging of imported contacts only merged about half of the duplicates in my set, and I had very few contacts to deal with. That was fortunate, because the rest of the merges had to be found and made manually.
In the future, I hope Google will provide a utility to migrate old voicemails from GrandCentral, especially if grandcentral.com is eventually shut down or redirected. Currently, the top of my GrandCentral inbox says:
Since you have migrated to the Google Voice Preview, you can now access your new messages and update your settings by logging in at google.com/voice. Feel free to continue to access grandcentral.com for your older voicemail messages. We're glad you dropped by.
That's inconvenient. But really, how often do I visit old voicemails? Not much. Besides, a lot of them were inexplicably lost... Their listings are present, but they can't be played; I'm guessing the files somehow went missing. I'm not happy about that, but... at least it hasn't happened again.
A minor annoyance is the loss of custom ringback tones, the sounds played to a caller while the phone is ringing on your end. (Google does have a suggestion to bring this back on the Google Voice Feature Suggestion page.)
Future Ideas
Of course, Google Voice is not without holes. It can't forward to numbers that require extensions (I don't need it now, but might in the future). It can't take an existing number and turn it into a Google number (which would be eminently useful, I think, for my mother).
Image via CrunchBaseThere are also no apps for iPhone or Android yet (and I don't care about Blackberry, kthx). But the feature suggest page I mentioned above has all these and more. I've suggested about 75% of the features currently on the list, including integration with Gmail and Google Talk. I'm hopeful that these and more ideas (like the two I posted on Twitter) will be implemented, and sooner rather than later.
Speaking of future ideas, Lifehacker ran a short post yesterday speculating that the reserved "Voicemail" label in Gmail is for integration with Voice. It's actually for Google Talk voicemails (GTalk has a calling feature that I almost never use because of various technological or locational constraints), but it could certainly be useful for Voice messages as well, if Gmail and Voice are ever integrated.
Reaction
Despite the inconveniences, I think I'm going to like the service. It's a vast improvement upon GrandCentral; in fact, TechCrunch's Leena Rao says (in the overview mentioned above), "Google is finally bringing us the voice service that was promised back in 2006." I agree; the old GrandCentral was convenient, but Google Voice promises to be many times as useful.
Gmail Chat FAILs with Ping.fm GTalk Enabled
Image via CrunchBaseLast night, I found a chat in my Gmail account that I'd never seen. It was sent an hour after I left the public library on February 26, while I was offline, but never showed up in my Inbox. It wasn't even labeled as sent while I was offline. I was baffled completely until I realized this afternoon what I'd been doing that night at the library.
February 26 (a Thursday, the day of #snowmageddon here in Minneapolis/St. Paul) was the day I discovered that Ping.fm—my very favorite social networking tool, second only to Twitter—had added support for Google Talk statuses. Of course I had to try it out; I'm an early adopter.
So I went into my network settings on Ping.fm and added my Google Talk and AIM accounts. Next thing I know, Gmail Chat is complaining that I'm no longer invisible (I like to be invisible because it minimizes interruptions). It says I'm signed in somewhere else. That somewhere else could only be Ping.fm.
By that, I gather Ping.fm actually signs in to Google Talk and receives all chats sent to one's account, 24/7. Not only is that inconvenient (I'll continue with that in a moment), but it's a bit of a privacy hole, especially if you don't fully trust Ping.fm. And honestly, I trust a lot of websites with a lot of things, but I like my chats to stay inside Google's ecosystem, thank you.
Anyway, the fact that Ping.fm is always signed in to one's Google Talk account means that one always appears to be online, and offline chats won't work. Invisibility in Gmail Chat is also disabled. Both of these, combined with an apparent dysfunctionality (I couldn't get my GTalk status to update from Ping.fm), led me to deactivate the integration.
What I'm trying to say is, Ping.fm has a lot of work to do before I'll even consider re-adding my GTalk account to my Ping.fm networks. It doesn't work, and causes a lot of problems.
SPAMfighter Tagline is Just Spam to Me
This is what I was doing while I was supposed to be finishing my coursework for the year. Don't worry, I'm working on homework now; this was supposed to publish four hours ago and didn't, so I tried again. Manually, because scheduled posting is temporarily borked.
Image by Josh Walker via FlickrSpam is something everyone's heard of, and probably gotten at least a few times. Messages like the one on the right have been going around with different month names for a long time. These are the kinds of things most of us know to ignore (but somebody must be buying or else the spammers wouldn't bother).
Email taglines have probably been around longer, but they're not the work of spammers. Legitimate companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft (*cough*), and AOL (*cough cough*) have all used advertising taglines on their free email services, and only Yahoo! has so far gotten rid of them. I just wonder how effective they are. Personally, I ignore everything below the signature unless it says "PS".
Tagline ads are, to me, a pretty stupid marketing ploy. When software you've installed on your computer to protect you from ads starts sending out advertising of its own, however, I get very, very annoyed.
Personal Experience
My mother forwarded to me a message from one of her friends. It was a joke about the "ID-Ten-T" error -- I'm sure you've heard it (and if not, just click the link).
Granted, the ID-Ten-T error joke isn't all that funny, but the tagline on the email was worse. See, this friend of my mother's uses SPAMfighter to fight spam. (Yeah, yeah; what else would you use it for, etc. etc.) It has apparently caught 377 spam messages to date.
I'll just paste the whole tagline here:
I am using the free version of SPAMfighter for private users.
It has removed 377 spam emails to date.
Paying users do not have this message in their emails.
Get the free SPAMfighter here: <link snipped>
That, frankly, makes me want to stay as far away from SPAMfighter as possible. I am told that paying users don't have the message, and am then offered a download of the free version, which will cause me to spam everyone I email with that same message.
Do they honestly think I'll download their program if I know for certain that it will do that? Seriously, I hate email taglines. Signatures are fine -- in fact, I have one myself, all of two or three lines -- but ads make me crazy. Especially if the product being advertised will cause me to send out those same taglines to other people.
So, you want me to use your anti-spam product? Limit features instead of tagging my email. Of course, I don't need an anti-spam product anyway because I have Gmail's spam filters. 
But not spamming your users' innocent contacts with ads would be a nice touch.
As a side topic, while I was composing this post, Zemanta showed me a couple of my own screenshots from Wikipedia as image suggestions. Cool!
Gmail Tips
There are tips and then there are tips. I was just emailed by someone from another site, which yesterday published a lengthy list of tips for using Gmail effectively.
Some highlights include a few I've already heard of (Zoli Erdos' guide to importing old mail comes to mind), and a few ingenious hacks (like embedding MP3s in email; no specific link, just go near the bottom of the above-linked list). While the list mentions using Gmail's labels, it didn't seem to explain anything about them; so my views on using labels properly might complement those other tips.
It's not something I usually do here, blogging just a link -- I think such practices contribute too much to the "echo chamber" view many people hold of the Internet -- but rather than just submission to StumbleUpon, etc., I thought this one deserved a mention. Partly because it's a great list, and partly because the author took the time to reach out and ask me if this list would be useful to my readers (the few of you that there are, heh heh).
I note that the Gmail tips list is that blog's inaugural post, and I just left the third comment ever on the site (judging from its fragment ID, #comment-3). It might still be awaiting moderation; I haven't time to check.
But anyway, go read the list. Even I learned a few things, and I (at least like to think I) am an expert Gmail user. There's something in it for everyone.
As a side note, I probably will be continuing my sparse blogging schedule, as this is tech week for one theatrical production and next week is another, then I play in the orchestra at a graduation ceremony for my local high school. Plus I am behind in schoolwork. So all this Internet stuff is going to have to go on the back burner until a few of these commitments are out of the way.
Webapp Keyboard Focus Issues
I've found a pretty frequent problem with keyboard-enabled webapps. Gmail, Google Reader, Remember The Milk, and a whole bunch of other services (Google Calendar, for instance) all fit into this category.
It seems that nearly all keyboard shortcut-enabled webapps have one big annoyance in common (no, not AJAX): The shortcuts lose focus in certain scenarios.
The three apps I'm most concerned with are, of course, Gmail, Google Reader, and RTM. I do use them the most, after all.
I've found tab-switching to be the number one cause of focus switching. Keyboard entry is sent to the browser chrome or something, rather than the page. I've noticed that switching tabs with the keyboard (using Firefox's Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab keystrokes) is much less likely to cause a problem than clicking the other tab.
At this point, I should mention that I haven't checked other browsers for trouble; I've only been observing Firefox 2.0.0.x.
Yet, the problem does not seem to be webapp-specific. I have trouble with Home, Page Down, Page Up, and End when switching tabs, too. I'll switch to a new tab, hit Home or End (usually), and nothing will happen. I go back to the previous tab and find that the keypress was actioned there. Harrumph.
I really have no idea whose problem this is -- app developers' or Mozilla's -- but it's certainly annoying. When I'm trying to copy data from one site to another, without a clean import/export interface, I would prefer to not have to click in the page to get the shortcuts to work again.
Anybody have a definitive answer as to why this happens?
Gmail April Fools’ 2008: "Custom Time"
So when my Internet connection decided to finally come back up this morning after a four-hour outage, I loaded Gmail to find a link reading "New! Gmail Custom Time" in my account. After reading the linked page, I instantly knew it was Google's 2008 April Fools' Day joke for Gmail.
First, take the heading: "Introducing Gmail Custom Time™: Be on time. Every time.*" (The asterisk refers to a note at the bottom of the page that "Every time" is used to loosely represent the number 10; see the page for more explanation.)
The instructions give it away even more:
Just click "Set custom time" from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient's inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.
I've messed with message times by changing my computer clock in the past, but that was back when I still used a desktop client. This kind of feature joke is what makes me love Google. Last year's Gmail Paper hoax was equally amusing.
While I'm at it, how about a look at the screenshot Google posted? It's definitely not present in my version of the application... (That was a sure-fire way to confirm the hoax, because the new feature links only appear after a complete roll-out.)
Another problem here is that the recipient might not use Gmail, in which case how does Google control the status of the email once it arrives in their inbox? Yeah, that's what I thought.
I have one more thing to gripe about: It makes my user bar into two lines! The link text is so long it causes an unintended line break:
I know it's my "low" (1024x768) screen resolution. I can just hear everyone saying, "Go widescreen already, dude!" Well, I have news for you: I don't want to use widescreen, and I don't have a choice anyway because I have to use the computer I have, which is on loan from my school.
Anyway, despite the little glitches, it's still a well-crafted joke, probably made in someone's 20% time. Whoever you are, thanks!
Google Blogoscoped has a big list of Google April Fools' Day jokes for 2008, though it includes things like the Google Docs Offline announcement, which I don't think was a joke. After all, Gmail was launched on April 1 and everyone thought Google was kidding. Despite appreciating the humor, I don't think I can trust anything I see today 100%... All this seemed to start a day early, actually, on March 31. April Fools' Day is now two days, apparently.
Move to Gmail from an Offline Client?
Various methods for switching to Gmail and bringing along your old mail have been discussed to death in the blogosphere, I know. Gmail does turn four next week, after all (it was released to the public on April 1, 2004; April 1, 2008, is next week). Since its release, Gmail has added lots of features, including IMAP support.
Ordinarily I wouldn't bring up something that's already been done before (well, anything that was last posted about more than a week ago). However, the Official Gmail Blog posted a short set of tips for moving to Gmail, and I thought I'd sound off on the list. (Comments are turned off on that blog, and I need a post anyway.
So, despite the title ("Tips for importing old email to Gmail"), the only things we find out are that we should set up POP retrieval on all our old accounts and enable sending messages as those old addresses just in case. Nothing is mentioned about getting mail from email clients, which has been deleted from the POP server, into Gmail. And nothing is mentioned about getting mail out of e.g. Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail (which are, admittedly, pretty difficult as they don't support POP access anyway).
Various solutions for the desktop-client problem have been posted in the years since Gmail's launch, as I hinted earlier in this post. (I haven't seen any good solutions for Hotmail/Yahoo! Mail yet.) Some rely on automatic forwarding scripts, others on the new IMAP support (Zoli Erdos has a good write-up of the IMAP method, which I would like to try when I get the chance).
What irks me is the fact that none of these ingenious solutions for getting already downloaded mail into Gmail are mentioned in the Gmail Blog post. If you use a client like Outlook Express or Thunderbird (Mail.app, Outlook, Eudora... the list goes on), Google can import your stuff if you get a business-class Google Apps account, which supports email migration. But that would be $50 a year. (The migration API on which the migration tools are based is only available on Google Apps-based Gmail accounts, unfortunately.) Granted, the solutions that simply forward everything to your account and ruin all the headers probably aren't all that useful; but the IMAP-based methods would probably be quite useful. It's just a drag-and-drop from local mailbox to Gmail. Why didn't the post mention them?
I hope that tips for uploading email from offline clients get posted to the Gmail blog sometime in the future. Preferably in the next few months, but anytime in the next up to two years would be fine by me. It had better be before Gmail's tenth birthday, though.
Oh, and rest assured, I will try the IMAP import method as soon as I have the time. That will probably be around June, after school's done for the year. Cross your fingers for me in advance? (Thanks if you did!
Update (04/01): Just got a comment from Zoli Erdos, who brought my attention to the text surrounding the link to his site. I cleaned that up; it didn't make much sense before. So this update is really just a short series of edits. I've marked my inline insertions up with <ins> tags for visibility. Thanks for bringing me back here, Zoli!
Funny Randomization: Google: Web 2.0?
Here's a randomization from google.isyournewbicycle.com that is obviously untrue, this time about Google (rather than Microsoft):
That's really funny, considering that Gmail was one of the first major Web applications to use AJAX extensively. Google's Calendar, Reader, and Docs services (among many others) also use AJAX as a fundamental part of their inner workings, so it's even funnier in that case.
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