Gmail's latest feature is arguably the biggest innovation since the service launched in April 2004.

'Priority inbox' learns from your email usage patterns and begins to prioritise messages that it thinks you'll be most likely to read. Your inbox is divided into three sections: important and unread, starred and everything else.

The classification should improve, because you can mark messages with 'less important' or 'more important', and Gmail will learn to reclassify accordingly. It's like the inverse of junk mail filtering.

Software engineer Doug Aberdeen on the official Gmail blog described this as "a new way of taking on information overload".

"Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over)."

Priority inbox is slowly rolling out across Gmail services. It hasn't appeared in my personal account yet, but will in the next few days along with Google Apps users (if their administrator has opted to 'Enable pre-release features').

Drag and drop, launched in April, helped a little. Filters help, for those that can be bothered to set them up. But priority inbox could make a significant difference, and if Wave wasn't quite the right format for centralising and streamlining messages, then this is a more usable step in that direction.

Jane P is using two email addresses that she doesn't much like, can't change, and which depend on her ISP. She would like a more professional way of handling her email

I have had my email address at fsnet.co.uk for many years, and I use it to send emails to my professional contacts from my desktop PC using Outlook Express. However, when I use Orange webmail from my laptop, I have a different address, which Orange says I chose, but it looks rather anonymous and faintly suspicious. Orange insists that it cannot be changed, though I could have a new identity with the suffix @orangehome. Do I have to start all over again, possibly with another ISP, which would involve changing my email address? As I do not especially like Orange webmail anyway, what would you recommend?
Jane P

You're lucky to have retained your Freeserve address for so long, but there's no guarantee that any ISP's email addresses will survive takeovers, or that the email service will continue to work adequately. Having two completely different addresses is another problem for you, and for your clients.

I think you should start by registering your own domain name, because you will be able to use it for as long as you like, no matter which ISP you choose. It looks more professional to have your own name or company name as your email address. The cost is not prohibitive. At the moment, you can buy YourOwnName.com for £80 for 10 years, and/or YourOwnName.co.uk for £9 for two years. These prices are from Easily.co.uk – if you click to "buy a domain" on Orange's webmail site, that's where it takes you.

There are lots of domain name suppliers who provide hosting and email forwarding. The main thing to watch out for is that the domain name is registered in your name, not theirs. This avoids being held to ransom if you decide to move your name to a different host.

Once you have your domain name, you can log on to your Easily account and tell it where you want it to forward your email. In my case, it's Gmail, and this may well be the best choice for you too. Open a Gmail account with YourOwnName, click on Settings and use "Import mail and contacts" to try to retrieve email from both your previous accounts. Also, use the "Check mail using POP3" section to keep fetching new email from these old accounts as they gradually fall out of use.

I'm not sure if you can collect your old email from Orange Webmail, because its help page doesn't even explain how to download email with Outlook Express. However, try the settings pop.orangehome.co.uk (incoming) and smtp.orangehome.co.uk (outgoing).

The next step is to go to your Gmail account's Settings tab, and select Accounts and Import. This time, click on "Send mail as" and tell Gmail you want to send email from JaneP@YourOwnName.com (ie, using the email address you entered at Easily for the domain name you registered). You will have to verify this address, but the email that Gmail sends to JaneP@YourOwnName.com will appear in your Gmail inbox. To verify it, just copy the code from the email and paste it in the verification box. Now you can send emails from JaneP@YourOwnName.com and your clients can reply to JaneP@YourOwnName.com, though you are actually using Gmail.

In the future, Google might go bust (unlikely), change the way Gmail operates (inevitable), or start charging for features that are currently free. If this happens, you can change to a different email service without changing your email address. To do this, simply log on to Easily.co.uk (your domain name host) and change the email forwarding address from Gmail to your new service.

So far, we have set up Gmail for use as a webmail service. This works pretty well, but you have no copies of your emails, and Google could easily lock you out of Gmail or block your account without giving you any warning, or any reason. You must therefore download all your Gmail (which now includes your Freeserve and, we hope, Orange webmail) to an email program on your desktop PC.

To do this, go to your Gmail account's Settings, click "Forwarding and POP/IMAP", select "IMAP Access" and enable IMAP. Next, go through the process to "Configure your email client (eg Outlook, Thunderbird, iPhone)". When you have finished, your email software will be able to download and store all your email, and you can back it up. IMAP doesn't delete anything, so all your email will still be on Gmail as well. This means you can use the website to answer emails from your laptop or mobile phone while travelling.

There are advantages to using a desktop email client. It's faster and more efficient than a web interface, and you get more features, including real folders. Desktop software usually lets you sort email in date order or reverse date order, by sender, by subject line, or by size, etc. Gmail does not have these common features because it would put strain on Google's servers. Your PC has power to spare.

I've used Mozilla Thunderbird – a companion program to Firefox – for IMAP email, but you could use something else. The obvious candidates include Microsoft Outlook, which is part of Microsoft Office, and Windows Live Mail, the free email program in the Windows Live Essentials suite. (WLM is useful because it lets people use Hotmail from their PCs instead of via the web.) The IMAP set-up is pretty much the same. However, KhimHoe.Net has an illustrated guide: How to setup Gmail's IMAP in Windows Live Mail.

Either way, I would not recommend using Outlook Express, which Microsoft discontinued about three years ago. If you upgrade to Windows 7 – which is a good idea – then your new PC will have Windows Live Mail not Outlook Express. The latest (Wave 4) version of WLM has an Office-like ribbon interface, a calendar, and some good features such as Quick views and Photo mail (which is integrated with SkyDrive, Microsoft's free online storage). It might be a good idea to transfer all your Outlook Express email to Windows Live Mail now anyway.

I've described the process for Gmail partly because it's what I use myself. You can probably do much the same thing with some other services, and possibly with
Windows Live Hotmail. You can use it with your own domain name, though I've not tried it. I've spent a lot of time switching people from Hotmail to Gmail, but the latest version has improved. While it still has teething problems, the whole suite – including Hotmail, Messenger, SkyDrive, Live Sync, and the Windows Live Photo Gallery – is powerful, and better integrated than Google's offerings. I'd still go for Gmail for professional use, and it has a lot of geek appeal, but the Live Hotmail/Essentials combination is worth considering as a home and family option.

When you need to send an important file to a contact, you can either send it as an email attachment or, if the file size is too big for an email message, you can upload it to any of the file hosting services and share the download link with your contact over email.

IM software like Skype, Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger also let you to easily transfer files from one computer to another without imposing any restrictions on file size or the file type. This is generally quicker than sending files over email but the only downside is that both parties should be running the IM client in order or send or receive files.

There’s another interesting option that offers IM like flexibility and yet you can use it in the browser itself without requiring any software – it’s called iSendr.

It works something like this. You (the sender) initiate a file transfer session at your end and iSendr will provide you with a private link that you can pass on to your friend over a phone call or a text message. When your friend opens that link in her browser, the file transfer will start immediately.

What’s unique here is that the file is getting copied from your computer to her machine directly so some people may find with this approach more secure as their files aren’t not getting uploaded to any third-party server.

Also, there are no file size restrictions and as soon as the file gets downloaded to your friend’s computer, the sharing session will end automatically.

Related: How to Share Large Files over the Internet

When You Need to Send Someone an Important File Really Fast..

     

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO and regular tennis buddy of the disgraced (and now former) chief of HP Mark Hurd, has decided to share his thoughts on the matter of Hurd's departure in an impassioned email to the New York Times:

"The H.P. board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago. That decision nearly destroyed Apple and would have if Steve hadn't come back and saved them."

The communique, also obtained by the Mercury News, included other tasty tidbits such as Ellison describing HP's disclosure of the apparently unfounded sexual harassment claim against Hurd as "cowardly corporate political correctness," and dismissing the financial irregularities that forced the former CEO's resignation as "petty expenses report errors." So, in short, the world according to Larry is populated by messianic CEOs who shouldn't be held up to the same petty standards as the rest of us.

Ce-Oh no he didn't!: Larry Ellison likens HP board to 'idiots' at Apple originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Aug 2010 04:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google has announced it is ending development on Wave, the cross-platform communication tool it launched with much fanfare at its I/O developer conference in May 2009.

Google said in a post last night that "Wave has not seen the adoption we would have liked" and that elements of Wave's technology, including drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are now as open source so users can "liberate their content from Wave".

Like most people, you've probably heard of it but not actually tried it, which sums up the problem. What was it? The Wave idea was a centralised communications tool that combined the real-time advantages of Twitter with the aggregation of your email and chat, with collaborative documents too. Easy to dismiss as something too ambitious and far reaching, but perhaps the difficulty in describing its function was its biggest downall. Twitter managed to survive a similar fate (remember that moment of trying to describe it to a non believer?) but Wave was far more ambitious.

There will be plenty of coverage today reeling off lists of Google's failures; Google Squared, Google Answers, Google Radio, Google Lively, Google Health, Google Notebook and Dodgeball among them. Those will be reliably dwarfed by Google's successes. Our European perspective might make us more critical of failure than in the US, where it is more rightly regarded as an inevitable and positive sign of productivity and innovation.

Chief executive Eric Schmidt himself said of the Wave failure that it is just a symptom of trying things out. "Remember, we celebrate our failures. This is a company where it's absolutely OK to try something that's very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that," he told journalists late yesterday.

Co-founder Sergey Brin was convinced to support the Wave concept by a Google development team in Australia. "When they came and proposed this idea they said, 'We want to do something new and revolutionary, but we're not even going to tell you what it is. And we want to go back to Australia, hire a bunch of people and just work on it.' ," Brin told the Guardian shortly after Wave's launch. "That was a crazy proposal. But, having seen their success with Maps, I felt that it actually was pretty reasonable."

When Wave launched at I/O, some developers were waving their laptops in the air. It was a moment.

I'd file this under ideas that were just a little ahead of their time. With refinement, a clearer proposition and better integration with existing services, it would have stood a better chance. Wave was one stab at tackling our information overload, at providing a central hub for all the information we need to deal with every day. And it will be back, in one form or another.

Your Gmail Inbox is overflowing with email messages. Some are newsletters that you are subscribed to, some are messages from friends and colleagues that you would like to read as soon as they arrive while the rest could be spam that managed to trick the built-in Gmail filters.

Focus on the Most Important Emails First!

When you only have a limited amount of time to process that long queue of unread messages, it is important that you prioritize your emails and defer reading stuff that is not very important and can wait (like those newsletters).

Here are two simple Gmail filters that will automatically move out all the low-priority emails out of your Inbox so that you can focus on the important ones. They should also come handy when you are checking emails on the go – the high-priority items will be delivered to your mobile device while everything else will stay in your Gmail account for you to follow up later.

1. Filter out emails that are not addressed to you

If your name is not in the TO: or CC: field of an email message, chances are that you may not have to worry too much about responding to that message.

The following filter will automatically move messages out of your Inbox to another folder that are of less-priority as they are not addressed to your directly.

• From: –you@email.com
• To: –you@email.com
• Has the words: cc:–you@email.com
• Skip the Inbox (Archive It)
• Apply the label: Not for me

If you have more than one active email address, you can either add them all to the above filter separated by the OR operator or setup another similar filter per address.

2. Move Bulk Emails to another folder

Bulk email messages are likely to contain words like “click here” or “unsubscribe” even if those hyperlinks are just a tactic of the spammer to confirm your email address. In either case, the existence of such words in the message can help us easily filter out bulk emails:

• Has the words: unsubscribe OR “click here”
• Skip the Inbox (Archive It)
• Apply the label: Bulk Mail

Not everything under the “bulk mail” folder will be spam as it will also match email newsletters that you are subscribed to. That said, email newsletters never require immediate attention so they safely reside in a folder other than your inbox.

Here are some more ideas around Gmail filters:

• Scan the Junk Folder for any Important Emails
• Reduce Spam with a Language Filter
• Gmail Search Commands
• Prevent Gmail from Marking Important Emails as Spam

A Gmail Filter to Find your Most Important Emails

     

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

If you've ever wondered where all those Nigerian princes and male performance enhancement professionals live, you're going to want to take a closer look at this: an interactive map that shows where spam originates in real time. More »

Looks like those regulators over in the Middle East don't mess about. Following this week's revelation that the United Arab Emirates' telco overseers weren't happy with being unable to monitor how people were using their BlackBerrys, today we're hearing what their solution to the problem will be: an outright ban. Internet access, email and instant messaging on RIM devices will be blocked in the UAE starting this October -- provided, of course, that the Canadian phone maker doesn't do something in the meantime to appease the authorities. Saudi Arabia is similarly peeved with the BBM service, which it intends to shut down later this month. And just in case you were wondering why all this drama is taking place, the BBC cites a Saudi Telecom board member as admitting it's designed to pressure RIM into releasing users' communication data "when needed." Charming.

BlackBerry email, web and messaging banned in UAE due to 'security concerns' originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember NTP? The tiny company with a portfolio of patents on wireless email technology that wrung a $612 million settlement out of RIM in 2006 after years of litigation? Well, get ready to fall in love all over again, because the company just sued Apple, Google, Microsoft, HTC, LG, and Motorola for the same thing. Given the company's protracted history defending its patent portfolio -- the RIM case alone took nearly five years and ultimately involved USPTO re-examining several patents, rejecting some and then ultimately declaring some others valid in 2009 -- we can't see any of this ending quickly or easily, especially with such formidable adversaries aligned as defendants. In particular, we'd note that Apple and Microsoft have a long history of cooperation and cross-licensing in the patent space, so we're sure their lawyers are ready to party down in lawsuit town, and adding Google, Motorola, HTC, and LG to the mix isn't going to make any of this easier for NTP. We'll see what happens -- this one's going to be long and messy. PR after the break.

Continue reading NTP awakes, sues Apple, Microsoft, Google, HTC, LG, and Motorola over wireless email patents

NTP awakes, sues Apple, Microsoft, Google, HTC, LG, and Motorola over wireless email patents originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While alternate channels like Twitter and RSS feeds have grown in popularity, the good old email newsletter still has its charm. Provide a newsletter with relevant and well-written content and they’ll come for sure.

Email Newsletters – Where the Provider Pays

Like everything else, there’re plenty of email newsletter services on the web to choose from.

For instance, if you are business owner looking to connect with your customers, you can go with Mail Chimp, Campaign Monitor or Constant Contact – these services will not only deliver your emails but will also help track the performance of your marketing campaigns.

Web publishers (including bloggers) can deliver RSS updates in the form of email newsletters using services like FeedBurner, AWeber or FeedBlitz.

Email Newsletters – Where the Subscriber Pays

Some of the service discussed above are free while others are paid but they all have one thing in common – the email newsletter is always delivered free to the subscriber. The service costs, if any, are borne by the newsletter provider and not the subscriber.

If you’re however planning to launch a subscription based newsletter where people will have to pay a certain fee to receive your email, a service that you should explore is letter.ly.

With letter.ly, you can offer subscribe a one-click sign-up page (see example) – they simply have to share their email address and pay with their credit cards (through Amazon Payments) to become a subscriber of your email newsletter.

You get a unique email address and any email that you send to this address will be forwarded to your subscribers as a newsletter. So you get decide the format of the newsletter as well as the frequency and time of delivery.

It can’t get any simpler than this. Thanks Mathew Ingram.

Publish your own Paid Newsletter with Letter.ly

     

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.