Turn off Gmail’s conversation view
Thursday, September 30, 2010
I absolutely love Gmail conversations. Whenever I try another email client, I terribly miss them. If you do not agree, here's the solution:
you can now get Gmail served up sans conversation view. Go to the main Settings page, look for the “Conversation View” section, select the option to turn it off, and save changes. If you change your mind, you can always go back.
This feature will be rolling out over the next few days so if you don’t see it immediately, check back in a bit.
Gizmodo recommends Mailplane
Friday, September 24, 2010
The folks at Gizmodo rely on Mailplane!
Mailplane, an excellent Gmail client for Mac that many of us Gizmodoers rely on every day, just got a new upgrade (2.2) that brings support for Gmail's actually-pretty-useful Priority Inbox, among other things. Great software that we enthusiastically recommend.
TUAW: Mailplane 2.2 adds several key features
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
TJ Luoma just published an excellent post on TUAW. It is a comprehensive account of the Mailplane 2.2 features.
Here is his favorite feature:
My favorite new feature is the ability to drag a Mailplane URL directly from the title bar. I use this with BusyCal's URL field if I need to connect an email with a meeting. It works for conversations or searches.
And the conclusion:
Version 2.2 is a pretty significant update despite its minor numerical increment.
Naturally, you can always use Gmail in a browser for free rather than spending money on an app like Mailplane. But I've used Mailplane since it was in beta, and I would never go back. It is very actively developed, with new features regularly being added. Having a real Mac app for a mail client is well worth the money for anyone who spends a lot of time in email. If you manage multiple Gmail or Google Apps email accounts, the easy switching alone makes it worth the asking price.
Alarms & Mailplane: Schedule Gmail conversations
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Alarms is an extremely handy application I use everyday. It was the main reason why the "Drag Mailplane URL from the title bar" feature was implemented.
Well, what is Alarms anyway? Alarms "sits" in the menu bar and alerts about scheduled events. When an event is due it'll display a Growl notification, flashes its icon, and plays a sound.
The coolest part is how Alarms lets me create an event. I just drag a document, a Safari URL, or in most cases a "Mailplane URL" to the title bar.
Alarms slides the screen down to reveal a calendar (it reminds me of TimeMachine) and allows to drop the URL on the day or hour to schedule it.
When the event is due, I click the "eye" icon to open the URL and work on it. Mailplane will then open the linked conversation and I've all required information to complete the task. When I am done, I just check the mark and the task disappears.
Sounds useful? It is. Check out Alarms
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PlanetGraham: Mailplane App. The best way to use Gmail on a Mac.
Kerry Graham just published a very favorable Mailplane review:
But a few years ago I came across a shareware program called Mailplane that changed everything for me. Mailplane is a small shareware application that gives you all the features of Gmail's web interface via a desktop application. And if you have multiple Gmail accounts, you can manage them all in the same application, without having to sign in and out of your different accounts.
Mailplane 2.2 released
Monday, September 20, 2010
Mailplane 2.2 has just been released. It's free for all registered Mailplane users. Either use the Mailplane > Check for update menu item or visit the download page to get it.
Translations: French, German, Norwegian Romanian, Swedish, and Traditional Chinese have been updated by the translators. All other languages contain a couple of English words.
Support for Gmail's Priority Inbox
Mailplane now supports Gmail's recently released Priority Inbox. You can now set your default inbox by choosing between the Priority Inbox, the normal inbox, or a custom label. The default inbox is used to calculate the unread message counter and to display Growl notifications. The new "Inbox" (or Mail > Go to > Inbox menu item) can be used to open your default inbox. You'll find the settings in Preferences > Accounts > Options.
Drag Mailplane URL from the title bar
Just drag the icon to any application and you can easily link back to a Gmail conversation or Gmail search.
TrueNew: The 'unseen' message counter
TrueNew displays two counters: the unread message counter and the unseen counter. If you'd like to give it try, it's in Preferences > Accounts > Plug-Ins. More...
Rapportive: Contact information instead of ads
Mailplane now includes Rapportive, which replaces the sponsored links on the right-hand side with useful contact information. When viewing a conversation, Rapportive displays data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites. To enable Rapportive, go to Preferences > Accounts > Plug-Ins. More...
Automatically open 'safe' attachments
Like Safari, Mailplane can now automatically open 'safe' attachments after downloading. Just turn on the setting in Preferences > General > Downloads. You can now directly open the last downloaded attachment with the Downloads > Open menu item.
CRM/Helpdesk Integration: Compute BCC address
Mailplane's auto-insert-BCC feature lets you integrate with a CRM, HelpDesk or similar service. Now you can write a script to compute a BCC address based on the Gmail account and its from/to addresses. Here's the how-to article.
Bug fixes
- Contacts > More Actions > Export didn't work
- File > New, File > New Separate, iPhoto plugin/mailto URL etc. didn't work for some users.
- Fixed unwanted resizing of picture attachment optimization window.
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New Gmail lab feature: Video chat enhancements
Friday, September 17, 2010
Found on the official Gmail blog. If you use Gmail video chat, you may want to check out this new lab feature:
If you use video chat in Gmail, you might be interested in a new Labs feature we just rolled out that allows you to preview new video chat features before they're turned on for everyone. Visit the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, turn on "Video chat enhancements," and right away, you'll see higher resolution video and a bigger video chat window.
The higher resolution video uses a new playback mechanism which enables widescreen VGA and frees up valuable resources on your computer. For it to work, both you and the person you're chatting with will need to have the lab turned on. Remember that you can always revert to standard video chat by disabling the lab.
We plan to add more video chat enhancements to this lab in the future, so if you have it on you'll automatically get those too. Feel free to post your comments or report any issues you encounter in the video chat forum (we also follow #googlevideochat on Twitter).
ComputerWorld: Mailplane works perfectly with “Priority Inbox”
Friday, September 10, 2010
Mitch Wagner, author of the Tool Talk Blog on Computerworld, just published a great post about Gmail's new "Priority Inbox" feature: Gmail Priority Inbox, 10 days later.
And here's what he wrote about Mailplane:
Similarly, Priority Inbox breaks new mail notifications on desktop mail as well. Fortunately, for Mac users, there's a workaround: Mailplane is a great $24.95 Gmail client for the desktop, I've been using it for a long time. The developers are working on a new version, still in beta, which allows you to customize desktop notifications to only show new Priority Inbox messages, or new messages with any user-configurable label. I've been using a it all week, it works perfectly.
If you like to try the brand new "Priority Inbox" in Mailplane, visit this download page. Make sure to read the release notes found on the same page.
Read the full blog post: Gmail Priority Inbox, 10 days later
5 tips for using Priority Inbox
A few days again Google release "Priority Inbox". Now, they just posted 5 tips for using Priority Inbox:
1. Customize your sections
By default, Priority Inbox has three sections: "Important and Unread," "Starred" and "Everything Else.” But that doesn't mean you have to leave them that way. You can make a section show messages from a particular label (like your “Action” or “To-do” label), add a fourth section, or change the maximum size of any section. Visit the [Priority Inbox tab under Settings][2] to customize your sections, or do it right from the inline menus.
2. Train the system
If Gmail makes a mistake, you can help it learn to better categorize your messages. Select the misclassified message, then use the importance buttons at the top of your inbox to correctly mark it as important or not important.
3. See the best of your filtered messages
You can set up Priority Inbox to show you not just the best of your inbox, but also the best of messages you filter out of your inbox and might otherwise miss. Just change your Priority Inbox settings to “Override filters” and Gmail will surface any important messages that would otherwise skip your inbox.
With this option turned on, you can use filters to archive more aggressively and worry less about missing an important message.
4. Use filters to guarantee certain messages get marked important (or not)
If you read and reply to a lot of messages from your mom, Gmail should automatically put incoming messages from her in the “Important and unread” section. But if you want to be 100% sure that all messages from your mom (or your boss, boyfriend, client, landlord, etc.) are marked important, you can create a filter for messages from that sender and select “Always mark as important.” Similarly, if you regularly read messages from your favorite magazine, they should automatically get marked as important. If you’d rather they end up in the “Everything else” section, you can create a filter to never mark them as important.
5. Archive unimportant messages quickly
One of the features that can help make you more efficient is the ability to archive all of the visible messages in the "Everything Else" section at once. Just click on the down arrow next to "Everything Else" and select the "Archive all visible items" option. If you want to be able to archive even more messages at once, you can increase the maximum number of messages that show in that section from the same drop-down.
FrüchteMix Blog: Swiss Mailplane Review in German
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Remo Röthlisberger has written a nice Mailplane review. The blog title is "Mailplane – Mehr aus GMail machen!" (Mailplane - get more out of Gmail). Check out his full review here.
Mailplane 2.1.11 released
Saturday, September 04, 2010
Release notes:
- FIX: Marketplace applications didn't appear in the Gmail "More" menu.
- FIX: Safari crash when clicking a link inside Mailplane and Safari wasn't already running.
- FIX: mailto: URLs stopped working with the release of 2.1.10
- UPDATED: Romanian Translation (thanks to Ovi Pascui)
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Google is trimming privacy policies
Friday, September 03, 2010
According to this Gmail blog post, Google doesn't change its privacy policy it just simplifies the documentation.
Three interesting pages:
Email overload? Try Priority Inbox
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
Another very interesting Gmail improvement: "Priority Inbox":
Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this "bologna" from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.
Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:
As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. 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). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)
After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we’re ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.
Easier event scheduling in Google Calendar
Google improved Google Calendar scheduling inside Gmail:
A new repeating event editor
The old interface for creating recurring events was clumsy and took up too much space on the screen. Now you'll see only a summary of your recurring event on the main event page; if you want to edit it, you can use a window that opens when you select the "Repeats" checkbox.
A new tool to help you find a time for your event
You'll notice a new tab on the event page that should make it easier to find a good time to schedule an event. When your friends or coworkers give you permission to see their calendars, you can click this tab to see a preview of their schedules and hover over their events to see what conflicts they might have. This should make scheduling a tad easier, especially for events with large numbers of guests. For Google Apps users, the new schedule preview can also show data from other calendar services using our Google Calendar Connectors API.
