Tag Archive for 'gmail'

21
Nov

Booleans in Googlemail Filters

By admin 0 Comments
Categories: Programming

Just a quick tip, if you’re a heavy user of Gmail then you probably have quite a few labels setup, and also a fair few filters.

A lot of my filters were very similar:

Matches: from:(friend1@example.com)
Do this: Apply label "Friends"

Matches: from:(friend2@example.com)
Do this: Apply label "Friends"

You can end up with a confusing number of filters this way. But there is help, Google have a little known about power-user feature in that the filters can use Boolean search syntax to combine multiple clauses within one pattern.

Matches: from:(friend1@example.com OR friend2@example.com)
Do this: Apply label "Friends"

Using Booleans you can reduce the number of filters that you need to create and maintain to the bare minimum. One filter to label all friends, rather than one filter per friend.

It’s possible to get pretty clever with combining several types of query in one:

Matches: from:(subscription1@example.com) OR to:(mailinglist1@example.com) OR subject:(Mailing List Name)
Do this: Apply label "Subscriptions"

The trickery here is how to enter that query into Gmail given that Gmail doesn’t give you an interface to enter advanced filters. The answer is to recognise that when you fill in a field in the filter form the filter automatically has the field name and brackets wrapped around it.

So… if you took the above example and entered the “from” field, anything you enter in that field will be surrounded by “from:(” and “)”. With that in mind, you would enter the following in the “from” field providing your filter started with a “from” criteria:

subscription1@example.com) OR to:(mailinglist1@example.com) OR subject:(Mailing List Name

Now when you click “Test Search”, Gmail wraps the above in “from:(” and “)” and completes the syntax to make the search:

from:(subscription1@example.com) OR to:(mailinglist1@example.com) OR subject:(Mailing List Name)

Which means you now have multi-field filters and boolean searches.

The full guide to advanced operators is available here on the Gmail help site:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=7190

With the above tips you should be able to perform most queries you could imagine.

Give it a try :)

14
Jun

Where do you store your email?

By admin 1 Comment
Categories: Thoughts

I’ve got something in the region of 17,000 emails stored at home on my Windows PC in a program called The Bat! It’s a great program, I really love it and my love for it has been the biggest delaying factor in my moving to Linux on a permanent basis.

Recently I’ve been using 4 PC’s, all Windows and Linux, and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to get to my email. Previous solutions have involved webmail (for the stuff I haven’t picked up yet), and remote desktop (for getting to older mail remotely). But that isn’t really great because now I’m dual-booting my home desktop, I can’t get to The Bat! all the time I’m in Ubuntu.

So I’ve been considering the merits of uploading my 17,000+ emails to something like Gmail. Having everything online and accessible from everywhere. The concerns over this though pretty much come down to organisation and access.

In The Bat! I have something in the region of 130 folders holding the 17k emails in a nice hierarchy. I can find things pretty damn quick as I know where I would’ve filed things of certain topics and I’m always right. With Gmail there is no hierarchy, just labels. What I am uncertain on is whether it’s possible to label 17k emails in such a way that it is really easy to find what I want? Labels to me are ways of pre-filtering searches, to seperate an email on the purchase of a hard drive from an email on a hard drive failure that a friend has had by choosing to label one ’shopping’ and the other ‘friends’. But it seems that before I perform an import I should probably think about the best use of labels in reducing 130 folders down to something filterable, searchable. So that’s the first thing that concerns me… how best to re-organise such a quantity of mail for a different way of working.

Access is the second concern, and by this I mean the question “What happens if Google close my account?”. I can’t think of any reason why they would, but they do not provide a business critical service, they provide free webmail, that’s it. There’s no accountability should my account become corrupt. No guarantee that in the worst case scenario I could extract my emails from their system. And there’s no way back either… once you’re heavily reliant on Gmail, you can’t export everything and use a different service. This concern doesn’t just apply to Gmail, it applies to all webmail. It’s perhaps a far-fetched scenario, but still one to be concerned about. It’s almost as if I want a “Gmail for businesses” product in which I can gain a level of confidence over the long-term security (business IP value perspective, not physical encryption) and accessibility of the mail.

So my question to you the reader is… where do you store your email? What are the shortcomings of storing it that way? Can you get to it from everywhere? Is it even important to be able to do so?