I downloaded the beta for Postbox yesterday and I’m loving it. I should really post about some of the cool features it has but if you’re using Mail.app you need to switch or at least try it out and see for yourself.
One of the issues I noticed right off the bat was my labels/folders were not being checked for new mail. The inbox is always refreshed but with my extensive filtering with gmail (or google apps) not all my email hits the inbox.
The solution is easy though, very easy. You just need to use the Config Editor to look for new email in all folders and show unread counts for all folders.
First Step:
Go to Preferences (command+,) > Advanced Tab > Config Editor > Select the “I’ll be carefull…” button.
You’ll need to find to preference to change. They are mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new and pb.accounts.show_unread_for_inbox_only . Both self explanatory.
Restart and that’s it.
It looks like Gmail will finally be rolling out IMAP support for GMail.
Sync your inbox across devices instantly and automatically. Whether you read or write your email on your phone or on your desktop, changes you make to Gmail will be seen from anywhere you access your inbox. Don’t fret if you don’t see “IMAP Access” yet under the Settings menu. We’re rolling it out to everyone over the next few days.
And it looks like they did it all for the iPhone, maybe to compete with Yahoo!s support of IMAP. Either way you have to thank iPhone. 
I’m still curious as to how they’re going to solve the tagging labeling. Are they going to make each tag a folder or are they going to just ignore tags altogether? I hope it’s not the later because I use labels for almost all of my e-mail and I’m sure the majority of GMail users do as well. It looks like “changes” need to be defined or someone out there in the blogoshpere needs to post about how labels are handled.
The best solution I can think of is treating labels as folders, the problem will be e-mail duplication since mail could be labeled multiple times or simply once while still residing in the inbox.
Maybe labels aren’t such a good idea after all Google. It seems you’ve learned your lesson and re-configured the method in the new Google Reader, which handles tags and folders separately. Could this be the pre-cursor to a major overhaul for gmail? I hope so because their innovation in gmail years back has created incompatibilities with legacy software, in this case IMAP.
aside: I haven’t recived the option yet, either in gmail or my google apps account. Which also makes me wonder how long it’s going to take for my google Apps account to get this feature, in the past google rolls out new features to gmail users first and then after some time gives it to us apps users.
Update:
In order to “label” messages multiple times from within Apple Mail or the iPhone, you must copy the message(s) to each respective ‘Folder’ which corresponds with your Gmail Label. I think it’s time to move back to the idea of Folders as opposed to Labels. #
Since I have such an elaberate setup for email:
The iPhone allows for makes setting up e-mail so easy for a normal GMail account, even Google Apps accounts work through the basic “GMail” setup but there are a few problems:
One problem just creates the other for me, since I could always just use pop for the GA account the reply to would be setup correctly but I would be getting too much e-mail–including a double of my work e-mail–(since I have IMAP setup for work on another account on the iPhone) so a filter is necessary.
Also a lot of people might want to change that “From:” address if using one of the other methods of e-mail accounts on the iPhone.
Filtering:
From/Reply-to change:
On the iPhone create an “other” e-mail account, the type will be POP3.
Settings>Mail>Add Account>Other
Choose “Pop” out of IMAP, POP and Exchange buttons.
For the “Account Information” give your real “Name” and for your “Address” give the FROM address you really want to use. The key here is that you can now specify a FROM “Address” which is NOT defaulted to your Yahoo!, GMail or AIM account.
Yesterday I e-mailed TLAS about the conversation happening over on one of my posts. Without entirely reading the entire post they noticed a “mac fan” was criticizing them for their stance on Apple and how it clearly biased their Apple news reporting. Chris responded with,
Mac fanboys are all trolls, and well, I try not to feed the trolls.
He is obviously feeling insecure about his “Mac faith” so he needs to
attack us to rally the troops so that they can reassure him that his Mac
life style is worth basing his entire self worth around it. The sad part
is I feel sympathy for that poor man, he does not even realize thats
what he is doing. So I say let them spin their own wheels, they aren’t
getting anywhere and it’s fools like him that killed resexcellence.com.
He is the very type of person that nailed that coffin shut.Thanks anyways man! You rock,
You’ll notice he didn’t understand I was the “fool”ish “troll” that he had “sympathy” for. I had originally wrote it off because it seemed to me he was just lumping me with any mac fanatic and I wasn’t about to defend them. But it turns out that he just lumps any person in the mac community into this description.
I come to this conclusion after digging around at resexcellance and seeing Phill Ryu’s post about Bryan Lund.
I’m going to grab some of my comments form the original post here. The tweet was about how the show has a direct anti-apple stance. And with reading Phill’s post, remembering the marketing ploy and the comments about the issue it’s clear to me that TLAS motivations to keep Apple down is entirely personal.
I’ve used a couple managed voicemail providers in the last few months. My first provider was callwave which sent me my voicemails as MP3 through email and just like any voicemail added the ability to call in and hear the voicemail from your phone in a queue. A month or two ago I started using Spinvox after a hearing it briefly on a forgotten tech podcast. It provides voicemail like any other service with a call in queue but where callwave sends you an audio file through email it converts the voicemail to text and emails me. The result is something really cool.
As a BlackBerry user Spinvox provides my voicemail to my phone immediately as text, allowing me to actually respond to any message much faster in a medium I prefer. Even though I love mobile phones I don’t love them to talk or call my voicemail I love them for the the other connections they provide, ie e-mail, text and internet.
Personally I hate voicemail, it’s awfully time consuming. It’s slow, you have to find the time to call in, listen to the voicemail and then you have to call the person for a reply. The message that I receive now is a very good conversion of the audio left in the queue sent through email that I can read whenever I want, in a setting that I want and I could forward it to the caller with a reply.
No matter who it is I just may not be in the setting where it’s appropriate to pick the phone up; I’d say 95% all my voicemails are the result of me not being able to pick the phone up or I simply don’t want to. Now I wait 2-3 minutes for the email to be sent, I read it either on my computer or the phone and I can call them back when I can without calling my voicemail first. The majority of the time it’s just to get an answer to a question so I just text or email them back with a response. It’s extremely productive for me and it helps me not do something I don’t like, being on the phone.
If anyone want’s a Spinvox account contact me. I’m going to e-mail the contact I know over at Spinvox later this week to sign-up a few friends and he’s told me that I can pass along a full list of people to get free 1-year accounts.
If there are any drawbacks to Spinvox it would be:
I might as well complete my planned post about Google apps since a conversation is about to start.
I’ve been in the transition of using Google Apps for the last few weeks for a trial review. Next week I’ll need to decide whether to keep my apps account or stick with the free apps that 
I’m so dependent on. Since the my reasoning for using Google apps is solely based on my use of e-mail and the guaranteed uptime and support I can’t say anything more about the additional features that I plan to never use (start page, talk, etc.).
Although I do use Google Calendar and having that provided uptime is a major plus.
The problems I have with moving to Google apps is the limitation of taking my already existing gmail account. It wasn’t a problem importing my years of email into the new account through gmails provided pop support nor is it a problem emailing in the new account as @gmail, the problem is being dependent on e-mail forwarding with my @gmail.com. I’m not positive but I’m imagining if gmail is not allowing me to login it’s not forwarding my email, then the uptime means nothing.
The only solution is to transition an email change which fully makes sense because I wont be dependent on a service long term. Of course I like having @gmail rather than dan@[anyone of my domains I decide] and not having to tell everyone to update my e-mail more than I distrust Google’s future. I’ll go on record that I still do not feel locked-in but things would be different if I wasn’t so dependent on @gmail.
So for $50 a year isn’t unreasonable to me it’s having to change my e-mail or changing my Talk account. I use Talk daily especially at work where I talk to developers continuesly and I refer to my chat history a lot. It being an excellent BlackBerry app also helps. And chat history is something I can’t forward to my new account so I would have to login to my gmail to retrieve it.
For my Calendar and docs I just exported and imported them without a problem. however I did have to setup the sharing again with Sara since we both manage each others cal.
Only if Google allowed a gmail upgrade service or the integration between a Google app and Google account because that’s really what’s making me hesitant. Its a shame for them since the money isn’t an issue. I can’t guarantee any uptime like that for $4 a month and e-mail is too critical to grovel at. My issues are e-mail forwarding dependency (or having to chang my e-mail address) and not having the gmail history integration for Talk.
After posting this on Twitter:
Whoever is recommending dotster for hosting and domains please stop. Sorry, but if you’re not ignorant you’re an idiot.
Jared asked, “What’s wrong with Dotster?”. LOL, I had forgotten he uses it.
I was requested to setup a client’s outlook to receive email from one of his many domains he purchased through Dotster today and I anticipated it to take a few minutes since he already had a server/hosted plan. Nope, it took forever and I found out a lot of crappy things about Dotster.
First thing I noticed, you can’t add additional domains to your server plan. I’m not sure how they could get away with this so I contacted “live” tech support and after a quick “hello, how can I help you” I never received a reply and I waited 20 minutes since I was looking through documentation and the control panel. Maybe it was the plan that he purchased but any hosting plan limited to one domain is inexcusable.
I just gave up on the hosted plan and looked into the domain configurations. Turns out they love the idea of upselling the customer.
Additional POP and SMTP is $12/yr.
I’m a GoDaddy fan. And after seeing this I’m a bigger fan because the second, third, fourth, fifth and seventh options are all free. I was amazed to see that domain forwarding was an extra charge as well as e-mail forwarding. I’m unclear with transfer locking since it says free / $10 and I thought domain locking was required by ICANN.
I ended with the gmail solutions Setting up the client with e-mail forwarding to gmail where POP access is free and has a bunch of other spectacular features that I rather not list here but I will say it’s the best solution I’ve found for managing e-mail from your own domains. That way he can have webmail access, archiving and use personal email accounts without worry.
So that’s why I have a beef with dotster. Their confusing admin panel, limited hosting plan and extremely expensive domain registration is amusing to say the least.
aside:
Outside of the the average user perspective, like todays client; DNS management is a big plus for me with GoDaddy (it’s free BTW). I had originally started using it because I didn’t have BIND setup on my own VPS when I moved all my sites so I instead opted for the “quick and easy”. I intended to get BIND up and running but soon after I realized having GD manage DNS is ideal. Not only do I have all the controls I need but it gives the extra redundancy if my VPS crashes and I need to point to another IP. There most likely are some limitations but after 9 months I haven’t found any.
All we need is better integration for GMail and Notebook like adding e-mail functionality to your Notebook and my personal GTD process will be complete through the help of this article. An online notebook is something I really lack, even though I’ve tried many times with basecamp and the old Notebook; my current process of sorting bookmarks in my toolbar with no notes is easy but not effeciant. Especially since I do not have any archiving for past reference.
Maybe I’ll just try again and instead use the firefox extension to add emails to Notebook. I’ll still hav ethe problem of personal vs. work though.
I’ve been a loyal shopper of Amazon for years and I just noticed this last Friday that the problem to my unsaid grief for the last year or two have been the result of two accounts. It was a real pain to not have any order history online except my email archive. And I don’t know how it happened either because the puzzling thing, both accounts had the same email address and password. So there was no way to tell, except when I went to change my e-mail Friday I noticed my history showed up and I could log in with my other email perfectly fine.
Other then having a limited experience with amazon everything is fine now. Even my Prime memberships have been straightened out. And yes I actually had two paid for memberships; one I bought 6 months before the second without realizing it had only been 6 months. What a strange incident.
Thank you GarageSale, you’ve just made my weekend a little easier. And since you were so nice to me I had to buy you. Hopefully you’ll pay for yourself soon enough.
Seriously though, the tool is great. 74 templates, built in FTP and image editing. I’m looking forward to tracking all my auctions through it. And controlling the payments, emails and feedback through it too. It’s going to be nice fore Sara when she starts listing a bunch of stuff and with it storing templates it’s going to make her life so much easier.
