Wondering if anyone else is experiencing this… I’m using KMail for a GMail account to get mail via IMAP. At least two or three times a day, I have to restart KMail because it just hangs trying to refresh folders via IMAP.
Anyone else seeing this issue? And, does anyone know if this is common with KMail and IMAP, or is it maybe a problem with the way that GMail does IMAP? Anything I can do to remedy this?
Aside from that annoyance (and it is primarily an annoyance) I’m enjoying using KMail. I’d like to iron that little glitch out.
Also — wishlist item for you rockstars that work on KMail, Akregator, Kontact, and BasKet — I’d love to be able to just drag an email or article from Akregator into my Journal and have the body of the email or article sucked in.
Had a conversation (well, via email, but that counts, right?) about the importance of command line literacy — things you can do via the command line in Linux that you just can’t do via the GUI — which motivated me to dig up these two pieces: Unix as an element of literacy, and The Elements of Style: Unix as Literature.
Both pieces are slightly dated, but I’d recommend reading both of them. They apply equally well to Linux, of course.
(Mainly, I’m bookmarking the pieces for later reference…)
Two lessons in this story… 1) Trying to take revenge out on your employer for being fired is a bad idea to begin with, but you really wind up looking dumb if it turns out you weren’t going to be fired in the first place. Oops.
2) For the love of goodness, people, make backups! Nothing excuses a disgruntled employee for deleting files, but if they delete the files and you have no backup strategy and no backups for files that are worth millions, it’s your fault too. Sheesh.
One must-have feature (for me) in any mail client is the ability to automatically BCC an address with outgoing mail. I use this to log all my outgoing mail so that
- I can verify that mail was sent, for troubleshooting purposes.
- I can have a record of my correspondence in case I ever need to show that, yes I did send that email I said I sent last week, thankyouverymuch. Having mail in a sent folder on my own system doesn’t really do that — it’d be trivial to edit the mailbox on my own system.
I’ve found that most mail clients support this — but many make it hard to find the option.
In case you’re wondering where to find this in KMail, it’s under Settings -> Configure KMail. Then go to Identities and click the Modify button. It’s under the Advanced Tab, shown here.
Hope that helps!
Holy cats. Looking at the left-hand side of my blog, I see that I first set WordPress up almost four years ago for this blog. January 28, 2004.
I’ve actually been blogging longer than that — I ran a short stint with Slashcode, Geeklog, and Blosxom (respectively, not all at once…), but WordPress stuck, and has only gotten better over the last four years.
During that time, the blog has run on something like five different hosting services (1and1, Data393, Yahoo!, VPSLink, and ServerBeach), but I’ve never lost a post or a comment in moving the blog from one to another. That’s pretty impressive.
Here’s to another year blogging!
Sometimes, you find an application that “just works” for you, and that’s it — no further exploration required. For instance, after I got Vim figured out years ago, I’ve had very little need or motivation to really examine other text editors. (Excepting writing articles comparing text editors…) I’ve also been really happy with Amarok, WordPress, Pidgin, and a handful of other apps that I use frequently that I’ve just had no reason to want to switch to another application.
And then there are email clients. 
I’ve tried ‘em all… from Pine to Thunderbird, Mutt to Gmail, I’ve just never found a single email client that I’m 100% happy with. Perhaps that’s because I spend SO MUCH time in email, I have many occasions to think “wow, this feature is really cool, but I wish I could do XYZ more effectively.”
For instance. I’ve set up Google Apps for my Zonker.net domain, which I use for almost all of my correspondence. In a pinch, I think Gmail is great. I can even get by with it for a long stretch, but it’s really not optimized for my type of work — where I might want to eyeball three or four messages simultaneously — so I don’t like working in the Web-based email client all of the time.
After an extended stretch of using Gmail, I’ve decided to give KMail another shot. I’m using in on openSUSE 10.3, we’ll see how that works out.
I’m curious about what other folks do that works for them. Your mail clients, tell me about them!
Google has several products I use daily and hate to think of life without: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and Google Notebook.
I spend the most time in Gmail, and I dearly wish that Gmail was better (totally) integrated with Reader and Notebook — in particular, I wish there was an easy way to take an email that I’ve received or an article that’s in Google Reader, and annotate it using the Google Notebook features.
Consider this scenario: I’m doing research for an article or something similar. I send a source a few questions via email, or send a request for an interview and get an email back with a phone number and time for a call. Google already has some integration with calendar and Gmail — though they leave a bit to be desired when trying to auto-complete dates — but it’d be 20 kinds of wonderful if I could take that email, pull it into Notebook, and annotate it with the interview notes or whatever, and then keep all the notes related to one project in Notebook just with a few clicks of the ‘ol mouse. Much like you can already just email articles from Google Reader to your contacts.
As a side note, I’m a little concerned about the future of Google Notebook, because it shares a large feature set with Google Docs, and I could easily see Google dropping development of Notebook in favor of Docs. (Or maybe it’d just get sucked in as an extra?) I also don’t see Google doing a lot with Notebook — it’s gotten a few new features recently, but it doesn’t seem to be getting the development attention that other Google apps get.