Archive

Posts Tagged ‘email’

Outlook not so good.

August 16th, 2010
No comments

An important person in the company (all praise the company!) has just attempted to send me an updated security certificate by email.

Oh, no, no, no, my friend! Surely you know that I’m running Micros~1 Outlook as my office mail client?

You see: Outlook knows what’s good for you, and apparently, security certificates are not. Indeed, Outlook will not allow me to access this file, or even give me the option of “Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.”

[Here's a fun fact: The certificate was *sent* *using* *Outlook*. So, Outlook will happily send files that it deems to be unsafe, but the poor sap on the other end won't get to use it.]

Now, I tend to place a degree of value on others’ time. So it pains me to have to reply to someone saying “Hi, Outlook won’t let me open your attachment. Can you jump through hoops X, Y, Z to get it to me?”

Outlook used to simply be a poor email client. Now it has become actively counterproductive.

Self , ,

My Push GMail Adventure

October 14th, 2008
No comments

Like many other people who have long standing GMail accounts and now use an iPhone (or possibly other smartphone) I am somewhat disappointed by the lack of push notification service.  Here I offer my solution- It’s not perfect and hopefully at some point GMail will support push notification.

Requirements

  • Mobile Me account
  • Gmail Account
  • iPhone
The Steps I took:
  1. I take advantage of a gmail feature detailed here: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=12096.  I always subscribe to mailing lists using myemailaddress+<nameoflist>@gmail.com so that I can filter on mail sent specifically to me.
  2. Set up a rule that will forward all mail sent to myemailaddress@gmail.com to my mobile me address (In other words, everything that isn’t a mailing list).  In the same rule also apply a label “FW_me.com” so I can later filter out these messages to mark as read etc (I know, it’s not perfect!)
  3. On the iPhone, having previously set up ‘Push’ I just add my mobile me account and disable GMail IMAP.
  4. In the mobile me mail settings disable the me.com smtp server and enable the GMail smtp server.  Now when I reply to mail it still comes from GMail.
Results:
Yay, I now have push email on my iPhone without having to move to a new email address.  I believe similar results can be achieved by fowarding through YMail! and some other Push supporting services, but I may as well use my mobile me account.
Grievances:
  • Changes are not pushed back – you must manually mark mail as read later.
  • messages are stored on device – Ideally messages stay on the server
  • Messages are duplicated through services – clogging the intertubes

Self, Uncategorized , , , , , , ,