GMail Archival Project

I recently complained about GMail's lack of storage space. Yes, I know, it sounds absolutely crazy. How can one person possibly use over 7 GB of space in an email account? I did it a few ways. One, I moved all of my email archives into my GMail account. Two, I subscribe to graphic-intensive blogs via email. And three, I inexplicably have stored thousands of USENET postings to my GMail account.

Google graciously hosts my domain free-of-charge. The fee for upgrading my domain for more storage space is not cheap. Since my account hit 99% a few weeks ago, I had to come up with a solution. In short, I am using POP3 to bleed off my oldest emails to my iBook. Here's how I did it.

GMail's implementation of POP3 works by downloading the oldest email first. It uses the time stamp on the email, not when it hit my account. So if I took an email from 1999 and used IMAP4 to store it in 2007, it'll download with other 1999 email and not my 2007 email. Make sense? Actually this good because it assures the latest and greatest email will be in my GMail account.

I wanted to preserve the tag/folder structure I have with GMail as much as possible. I'm not replicating it exactly. Since GMail uses tags, a single email can have multiple tags making it appear to reside in several places when in fact it's a single email. On my local system I would need to store multiple copies of an email to get it to live under multiple folders. That's a little silly.

First I logged into my GMail account, clicked on "Settings", clicked on "Forwarding and POP/IMAP". Under "POP Download" I selected "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)" and told GMail to delete the copy in my GMail account. The idea here is to get email out of my GMail account and onto my local hard drive.

As many of you probably know Mac OS X is simply Unix. And Unix means fetchmail and procmail. Setting up a good .procmailrc is beyond the scope of this posting. If there's interest I will cover it later. I wrote a script to handle this for me. Some of the email I'm downloading is several years old and I've forgotten about many of the mailing lists I was once on. As I download more and more email I simply add the name of the mailing list to my script and regenerate my .procmailrc on the fly.

We're almost done. I of course had to set up my .fetchmailrc file. It's straightforward:

poll pop.gmail.com with proto POP3 and options no dns user 'name@mydomain.abc' there with password 'MyPassword' is 'local-user-name' here and wants mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d %T" options ssl no keep fetchall

In English I'm polling pop.gmail.com with my user name and password and telling fetchmail who I am on my local system and to handle my email using procmail. I need to use ssl, don't keep messages on the server, and grab it all.

But wait, do I really want to download all of my email? GMail downloads in batches. I have seen as few as less than 300 come across with one fetch and as many as over 500. I can't say for certain, but I believe GMail has a byte limit that it'll download in one fetch. This is handy because obviously I don't want to spend 3 days downloading every email in my account.

I ran this and downloaded thousands of emails to my hard drive. But I was still at 99%. What's wrong? The downloaded messages went into my Trash folder in my GMail account and have to sit there for 30 days before they're automatically deleted. Since I was at 99% and couldn't send anything, I manually deleted the Trash. Now that I'm down around 91% I no longer worry about it.

Because I'm on a Mac I have Time Machine running to backup my hard drive. Make sure the email you pull out of your GMail account is safe.

My New Cell Phone

I got a new cell phone this past weekend. For once in my life I'm actually impressed with a cell phone that I own. Most of my cell phones have been provided by my employer and haven't been top of the line to say the least.

The phone I bought is a Pantech Slate C530. No, I had never heard of Pantech either. I needed a low-cost phone with a basic plan. The Slate was free after rebate at my local AT&T store. It resembles a Blackberry, but it's a basic cell phone and not a smart phone.

A number of things attracted me to the phone. One, it looks nice. Two, it received good reviews online. Three, it's small. Very small. Imagine a stack of about 12-15 playing cards. That's the size of this thing. It's very light without feeling flimsy. I can press the keys hard without the phone "giving". Four, I love the keyboard. Five, the audio quality is superb! It is as crystal clear as a quality, corded, landline phone.

The battery life seems reasonable. It was half charged when I brought it home. I let it charge overnight on Sunday and I haven't charged it since. Of course since it's new I've been making many calls on it. Battery life seems comparable to the more recent phones I've owned.

There are two minor annoyances. One, I cannot change the signature that attaches to my text messages. I would prefer to have it send my name rather than an ad for my wireless company. Two, the only photos I can attach to my contacts are ones taken with the phone. I can transfer photos via Bluetooth, but can't assign those to my contacts.

I have very skinny fingers and can fly on the keyboard. Others with stouter fingers tell me it's difficult to type on. I did not have to get used to the keyboard, I was proficient on it from the moment I picked it up. If you're unsure, check one out in the store. I don't know if I'll ever own a smart phone, but given my inability to type on an iPhone and my proficiency on this, I'm favoring a Blackberry.

I was previously with another wireless company. I sometimes roamed in my own house or had no signal at all. When I did have a signal it was poor. With AT&T I have five bars. Driving around northwest Austin I seem to have four or five bars wherever I go.

A Complaint About GMail

First let me state I love GMail.  I absolutely love the service.  GMail is more than just email, it's my personal "nerve center".  My complaint however is the green text below this message box.

You are currently using 6158 MB (84%) of your 7261 MB.

How did I manage to accumulate over 6 GB of email?  Three words: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  When GMail opened IMAP I moved all of my email stores which existed on various hard drives in various forms into my GMail account so everything would be in one place.  I also recently started receiving all of my RSS feeds into my GMail account.  I like it this way.  However that first byte count is rising faster than the second which means I will hit 100% probably early summer to late autumn 2009.

I've been mulling what to do about it.  I have considered deleting email I no longer want or need.  But let's face it.  I would have to delete thousands of emails and I simply don't have time to go through them one-by-one to determine what I need to keep and what can be thrown away.  Another thought is the good folks at Google, being the great people they are, will see I am quickly approaching my limit and will bump that out a bit for me.  Dang, still at 7261 MB.  Sometimes flattery gets you somewhere.  A third option is to create archive GMail accounts and move everything like Father Roderick just did.  But then my email isn't all in one place.

I believe GMail should follow Yahoo Mail's lead and give truly infinite email storage.  What does Google have to lose?  Google hosts my domain and I can create about an additional 20 email accounts.  That's nearly 150 GB of available space for moi if I wanted it.  I would gladly exchange 10 of those email accounts for an additional 75 GB or so.  And don't forget I could just as easily create an infinite number of regular GMail accounts.  Wouldn't it be easier just to allow users all of the space they need rather than have them trick the system?

GMail is More than Just Email

Gasoline prices in the United States have fallen back to around $3 per
gallon. I never thought $3 would sound like a bargain, but today it
does. The rise in fuel costs has made some people consider alternate
commuting methods. Something I have adopted, as have many other
Americans, is the bicycle. It's good to see so many other cyclists
out there everyday, but there has been a downside. Bicycle thefts are
up here in Austin and around the country. If your bicycle were to be
stolen and the police recovered it, could you prove it was yours?

Your bicycle should have a serial number engraved in the frame at the
bottom where your pedals attach. You will need to provide this serial
number to police to recover your bike. If your bicycle does not have
a serial number you will need to engrave your driver's license number,
school ID number, Social Security number, etc. yourself. If you've
engraved the information yourself it should be straightforward to
recover your bicycle. Most of us know our Social Security number by
heart and could easily produce a driver's license or school ID. But
what about the serial number? Where did you write down? Did you
write it down? Could you find it when you need it? Could you
describe your bike to the police?

I was pondering all of the above last week when I remembered that
GMail isn't just an email provider. It's a fully indexed, taggable,
database full of meta data. I took several photographs of my bicycle
including a closeup of the serial number. I emailed these photos to
my GMail account. In the body of the email I entered the make, model,
description, and serial number of my bicycle. I hope I will never
need it. But if I do need it I know right where my information is. I
can very easily print out all the information I need or simply email
it to the police.

I plan to record all of my information information such as driver's
license number, passport number, credit card information, etc. and
send myself a GnuPG encrypted email. I'll be able to recover the
information quickly, but it's safe from prying eyes.

Fwd: Blogging with GMail

If you subscribe to this feed you know I'm not much of a blogger. I like the idea of blogging, I like playing with the tools that makes blogging possible, and I enjoy writing. But in the end, few of my thoughts ever end up here.

I'm playing with Mars Edit again on my iBook. It's blogging software. I like it. It has nice features while remaining simple and intuitive to use. But as of today I don't plan to purchase a copy when my free trial ends. Why? I like the idea of doing everything in GMail. I already read RSS feeds in GMail, so why not use GMail to post to my blogs? Many of my postings are simply forwards from blogs I read (I don't plagerize, I keep the entire entry intact, it's just my way of sharing). I can do all of this from any web browser anywhere in the world (okay, maybe not North Korea).

A New Way to Read RSS Feeds in your Email

Back in May I discussed using RssFwd to send RSS feeds into your email. I have grown less fond of the service each day. Often the site is down so I can't add or delete feeds. I sometimes would go for days without any RSS feeds then suddenly get flooded with scores of them. They've started a beta site, but I'm experiencing similar issues with that site too.
I installed rss2email on my iBook and it works great! You have to be comfortable with a Unix shell window to get it going and know something about your SMTP server. But if you're comfortable with that, it's the way to go. I first attempted to use it on a SunOS system I have access to. It didn't work. The author of the software worked with me and got it going, but I was having issues sending email which I don't think is related to the rss2email software. I will revisit using the SunOS system, but for now it works fine off my iBook.

Read RSS Feeds in your Email

I have long thought RSS feeds belong in email and not a web browser. Why? Because once inside my email I "own" it. I can save it and reference it whenever I want even if I'm offline (assuming I download my email to my computer). Also to me it just feels more natural to read feeds in my email than anywhere else. If your RSS reader is sitting at around 7,000 unread articles you might question the wisdom of marrying your email to RSS feeds, but hear me out.

I am a big fan of GMail. The power of GMail lies in the fact that you have over 6 GB of storage and a powerful search tool. I subscribe to many email lists. I don't necessarily read everything that comes across, but I do archive it so I can search for information later. I was looking for a way to do the same with certain RSS feeds. Note I didn't say all RSS feeds. 43 Folders and Lifehacker post valuable information throughout the day, information I want to have at my fingertips. Perhaps you want to save your daughter's Flickr photostream of your new grandchild in your email. Or maybe you have a hobby and want to keep track of others with the same hobby and reference their information. Or recipes. Or how-to articles.

Both Thunderbird and Apple Mail 3 have built-in RSS readers. If there's a post you want to save you can simply copy it to a local folder. If you use a service like GMail or AIM Mail with IMAP you can copy the post into your webmail account. But there's an even better way! RSS to email services. Two I like right now are RSSFwd and SendMeRSS. Both are free and will send RSS feeds right into your inbox.

Now you're an Inbox Zero sort of techie, right? If not you'd better be! You can use GMail's filters to tag incoming feeds. Be sure to check "Skip Inbox" when you setup the filter. I also suggest using the "+" sign. What is this? Suppose your email address is john.doe@gmail.com. If you subscribe to 43 Folders you can sign up using john.doe+43folders@gmail.com. This will still arrive in your GMail account and it gives GMail something to key off of for filtering purposes.