Google Blogoscoped asks the question :

what if Microsoft, not Google, had created Gmail? What would be the differences in that web mail client for users today? What if we apply some of the same design rules that brought us Hotmail, for instance?

The answer is entertaining.

Here is a teaser, but as the post unfolds the mock-up screenshots get better and better:

Head on over and have a look for yourself. microsoft, windows live, gmail, google, interface design, humour

Hmmm…. Late to the party on this one, but still worth posting.

Derek Punsalan has posted a comprehensive guide to getting Gmail’s new IMAP service, Apple Mail and the iPhone’s Mail.app working together in perfect harmony.

He explains how to mail the special folders in Mail.app (Sent, Draft, Trash) to the correct ones in your Gmail account, and then how to match them in the Gmail account on your iPhone.

He also provides a summary of several clever tips that were left in the 212 comments to the post, including how to use Gmail without all the Gmail folder hierarchy, and how Mail.app flags and Gmail stars are the same thing.

Curiously, he doesn’t mention a tip for email hoarders. If you like to keep everything, select Gmail’s all mail folder and under Mail.app’s Mailbox > Use this mailbox for… menu option, select Trash.

Then your delete key becomes a quick archive shortcut.

Of course, there are many reasons why this might be a bad idea — See an earlier Hawk Wings post on Why the delete key is your best friend.

[Via just about everyone]mail.app, apple mail, gmail, google, imap, iphone, folders, tips

Daniel Parnell has released an initial Leopard-friendly version of HTTPMail (1.50), a plugin for Mail.app that fools Hotmail and MSN web-based email accounts into downloading POP emails into Mail.

It basically does the same thing as MacFreePOPs, now also released for Leopard.

The plugin comes in a disk image with an installer and a detailed PDF on how to use it.

Daniel provides a handy list of how far the Leopard development has come:

He also outlines how to set up a Hotmail account in Mail.app using the plugin. He reminds users that older free Hotmail and MSN accounts will probably work but that newer one may need to be upgraded to Hotmail Plus .

HHTPMail is freeware and available from Daniel’s web site (but not yet from its sourceforge page ). microsoft, httpmail, hotmail, msn, plugins, mail.app, apple mail, email, leopard

Every now and then someone will poke their head and claim that email is dying or is dead. Almost two years ago Business Week predicted the death of email and the rise and rise of IM, wikis and blogs in its place. A year before that technology pundit Stowe Boyd forecasted that 2004,

will be the year when it becomes truly obvious … that email’s days are numbered. Not that it will disappear — surface mail and fax will linger on due to the long-tail of communication media — but it will clearly be a byway, and not the highway, for communication and collaboration.

Now ValleyWag has dredged up the first actual statistics that I have seen, in defence of its claim that “email is dying as a form of communication”:

I’m not a statistician, but it seems that there are least two things to say about this “evidence” from Valleywag.

1. The chart displays the amount of traffic – or “hits” – to email services and to social web sites. The number of times a person visits his or her email service provider may not be a safe indicator of the value that person places upon email, nor of the frequency with which email or other forms of online communication are used. All it shows is that people in the UK now visit social web sites more often than they visit their email service providers, which is… well…. unsurprising.
2. The general trend is not one of social web visits supplanting visits to email service providers, but of supplementing them. As the social web site traffic grows, visits to email service provider do not decline by a corresponding amount for most of the graph.

If there is eveidence for the death of email, this is not it. email, not apple mail, internet, web 2.0, social web, facebook

Knowledge workers like me (and you?) spend much of the day pushing emails around from one place to another.

So nothing is more annoying than people who thoughtlessly waste time and effort by composing their emails badly. Once a week perhaps, sometimes more, I find myself looking at an email with a death wish.

Scott Young has composed a list of seven bad email habits that make readers want to kill you.

He lists the obvious offenders — the hanging question, the buried request (with a fine example of how not to ask a question), and bulky paragraphs — as bad in snail mail as they are in email and which come from unthinking composition in any medium.

But then there are the email-specific sins. Think carefully enough about your email, he suggests, to work out if email is the right tool for the task:

E-mail works best for direct and non-time sensitive information. Conversations, discussions and anything that requires a heavy amount of back-and-forth should be done on the phone or in person. Trying to use e-mail to have these conversations can be slow, time-consuming and painful.

This extends to using email as emergency communication for urgent requests. If you need a response right away, the phone (or getting up and walking down the corridor) is the answer, not email. Don’t forget there are people who (unbelievably) only answer their emails once or twice a day.

And lastly he lists my most besetting sin, being an email smart arse:

Don’t try to be witty or sarcastic in an e-mail and pretend as if everything you say will be taken literally. Although a few metaphors can come across well in an e-mail, most don’t…. And don’t think using emoticons gives you the green-light to be clever and charming.

Sometimes, I find myself going so flat-chat to get to Inbox Zero that I dash stuff off without thinking, thus unwittingly making even more work for myself. It’s a kind of anti-productivity strategy.

There must be a better way. “Festina lente”, as Erasmus (Wikipedia ) might have said when opening his own inbox. email, not apple mail, not mail.app, communication, productivity

Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has done all Gmail users an enormous favour with her Better Gmail extension for Firefox.

She has taken some of the best Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail and rolled them into a more user-friendly extension that adds (among other things): coloured labels, a mind-bending array of extra keyboard shortcuts, a fixed font option, larger attachment icons, skins and more.

It almost converted me. Almost.

Now the latest version (0.8) adds even more goodies — bottom posting for replies, Google Reader integration, fixed conversation previews, and a Mail.app skin:

Each option can be enabled or not as you like from the extension’s preferences.

Needless to say, with the labels feature and the extra keyboard shortcuts that Better Gmail provides, it is not very difficult to hack up a very efficient “Getting Things Done” (GTD) system, which doesn’t have all the polish of the tailor-made GTDInbox (formerly GTDMail) extension , but not everyone needs that kind of power.

It also makes managing mailing lists the work of a new keystrokes and can filter work emails from personal emails quickly and easily.

I could go on and on.

Marriage is for life, we like to hope. Mail.app and me are forever (obviously), but — golly! — the occasional harmless flirt with Better Gmail is diverting! Try it out for yourself.gmail, mail.app, skins, email, labels, keyboard shortcuts, productivity, GTS, Getting things done, webmail, alluring

Thomas McMahon has knocked out some styles for the “Stylish” CSS-extension that produce brighter, better looking labels in Thunderbird.

The Stylish extension is a user style manager: “Stylish is to CSS what Greasemonkey is to JavaScript, and unlike other methods of using user styles, most styles take effect immediately.”

When you have installed Stylish, you can follow the instructions on Thomas’s web site to download some pre-made label styles that will turn your Thunderbird labels from this in to this:

And it’s not just a Mac-only solution as Thomas notes:

The new labels code has been tested in Thunderbird 1.5 and 2.0 on Mac and works great. It should work fine under Windows and Linux too.

thunderbird, mozilla, stylish, labels, CSS, hack, extension, not apple mail, not mail.app, email