A few months ago it became apparent that people with Freeserve/Wanadoo/Orange accounts were having problems with email. My post on the subject has had a lot of attention. The company’s email servers were repeatedly listed on spam databases, and email providers all over the world were therefore rejecting all received email. F/W/O showed no interest in fixing the problem. I don’t know whether it’s working yet, but I don’t really care - their service was appalling and I don’t recommend anybody use them again. Unfortunately there was little that could be done at the time without changing email address, a process which is never fun. Recent updates to Google’s Gmail service, however, have provided a way around the problem without changing address.

It works by replacing your current email system with Google’s free Gmail service. Gmail can now automatically download your F/W/O emails, as well as make it look like all email you send is coming from your old F/W/O address. It means moving to a web-based email system (or not, with a little more configuration - see optional section) and giving your email password to Google (I personally don’t think this is anything to worry about), but email recipients should notice no difference and it should work exactly the same as before, except that all email is actually coming from Google’s servers, which won’t be rejected as spam.

Initial experiments suggest this should work:

1. Go to www.gmail.com and sign up for a free email address
2. Log into your gmail account (called Google Mail in the UK), then go to ‘Settings’, and the ‘Accounts’ tab
3. New users should have a “Get mail from other accounts” option (if this option isn’t there try changing the display language to ‘English (US)’ in the ‘General’ tab). Click ‘Add another mail account’.
4. Enter your F/W/O email address and click to continue.
5. Enter your F/W/O username (this is your email address, as far as I know) and password. The POP server is ‘pop.orangehome.co.uk’ on port 110. You might want to tick ‘Leave a copy of retrieved messages on the server’ while everything is getting set up, then remove it later. People familiar with Gmail can apply labels etc.. When all details are entered, click to continue.
6. It will ask if you want to be able to send email as ‘[your address]‘, click ‘Yes’, and then ‘Next Step’
7. Enter the name you want emails to appear to come from, and click ‘Next Step’
8. It will need to send a verification email to ensure you’re who you say you are. Click ‘Send Verification’, go check your email as normal, and follow the instructions.
9. Once you’ve verified the address, go back to ‘Accounts’. ‘Send mail as’ will contain a couple of different addresses. Click ‘Make default’ next to the F/W/O address.
10. That’s it! All email you send via Gmail will now appear to come from your F/W/O address, and Gmail will deliver all replies into your Gmail account.

I think this will do the trick. Please let me know the results if you try it…

To use Outlook Express / Outlook:

People who are using Outlook or Outlook Express (or Windows Mail, for that matter) and want to keep all their emails in one place / don’t want to use webmail can try this:

1. In Gmail’s settings, go to the ‘Forwarding and POP’ tab. Next to ‘POP Download’, click ‘Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on’, then ‘Save changes’.
2. Follow the instructions here to configure Outlook / Outlook Express (here for Outlook 2003). It’s probably wise to write down the existing configuration before changing too much over.

Email sent through Outlook/Express will appear to come from your F/W/O address as long as you’ve set it as Gmail’s default address in #9 above.

Notes:

This also lets you take advantage of Gmail’s formidable spam filters.

The changes were Google opening up to all users and releasing their POP3-fetching service, if you were wondering.

This would have been possible months ago if Orange provided an email forwarding service like normal ISPs.

Just back from a fun, if completely exhausting dance lesson. I think we managed the Viennese Waltz for over two minutes! Next challenge is to keep going for the full four and a half minute song. My ankles hurt even thinking about it.

Anyway, the main point of this post is to point out the Gmail for Mobile Client that was released today. It’s a small java download that works on most modern mobiles, and provides a gmail-like interface for checking and sending email. Sounds good in theory, but does it work? Happily, yes!

I’ve just set it up on my Nokia 7610, and am very impressed. First impressions are that it’s an effective duplication of the online interface. You can archive / label messages, view the content of existing labels, send mail with auto-completion of contacts and search mail, all with shortcut keys. Viewing mail displays the conversation thread in the same way as gmail, with read messages collapsed to just a header by default. Best of all, it’s fast and intuitive. Well, fast for me, although I keep my inbox empty and label+archive anything that needs attention - I’d be interested to hear how it copes with a 2000 message inbox. The blog entry says it’ll let you view attachments, as well as click-to-directly-dial from the contact list, although I can’t figure out this last one. The only options it seems to lack are ‘All Mail’ and ‘Drafts’, although the former doesn’t really matter when there’s an effective search.

Pics of the interface can be seen here. Nokia users may want to go to the App Manager utility and grant the Gmail app permission to access the internet continually after only asking once, or it will nag you every time.

I had trouble accessing the official page, and wonder whether it’s meant to be limited to the US. Maybe it’s to do with it being called ‘Google Mail’ in the UK. Whether that’s true or not, going to http://www.gmail.com/app from my phone initiated the download.

Given that gmail.com (suspiciously) times out over my Orange connection, I’ve been using the POP3/SMTP setup, which is far from trivial and involves creating two separate accounts on my Nokia. This is a much better solution, imho. I’d best watch the data transfer costs, but overall: nice one, Google. This’ll come in very handy.

Big enough to threaten the security of the nation. Via.

If you happen to use Firefox, Gmail, Google Reader and greasemonkey, this post is for you…

The recently relaunched Google Reader is very swish. Nearly good enough to wean me away from FeedLounge, in fact. The interface is very similar to Gmail, and Lifehacker pointed me towards this greasemonkey script, from a member of the Google Reader team, which directly integrates the post list into Gmail:

When items are selected the usual Google Reader options are available (although ‘email’ doesn’t currently work for me):

Reading between the lines of the post, it seems that official integration is a possibility but a long way from production, and this is their pre-Labs way of testing things out with a tech-savvy crowd. It does work very well, imho. It’s fast and doesn’t slow down Gmail overall, and feels surprisingly handy. Currently the list view can’t be filtered - the tag interface would undoubtedly clutter things up terribly - so it’s only appropriate for people with a relatively small number of feed items.

If you’re comfortable messing around with the greasemonkey script it’s apparently possible to get the ‘expanded view’ by searching for and removing “&view=list”.

Google Calendar has had US SMS notifications since it launched, and just added UK networks to the list. I entered my details and it seems to work fine, but the initial setup message said ’standard charges apply for each reminder’ and I’ve no idea how much these would be. Standard outgoing message cost is 10p, but incoming messages can vary up to £1 (if not more). Even if it’s 10p it’d mount up over a few weeks, given how much is in my calendar. Still, it means I can theoretically add events to the calendar via SMS, which could come in handy.

I’m in love with Google Talk’s voicemail woman. I can’t leave a message without giggling.

The new version of Google Talk supports file transfers and voicemail messages to both GT users and non-users (it sends the latter an email with the voicemail as an attachment). They’re rolling it out slowly, but if you want to try it out now there’s a direct link. The only available version is US English, so if you’re anal bothered about seeing the word ‘color’ or whatever within the interface you may want to give it a miss.

File transfer is a feature I’ve needed in Google Talk from time-to-time, so this is a good addition imho. The only outstanding feature I’m bothered about is multiple-person chat windows; then it’ll be a worthy MSN replacement. Via Digg.

Google today launched Picasa’s long rumoured ‘web album’ feature. This allows direct creation of online albums from within the photo-management software. Although fairly simplistic currently, Google will undoubtedly add features as time goes by. It may well end up challenging Flickr, but Yahoo - who bought Flickr last year - don’t seem to care.

Having full control of the best and most popular photo-sharing website on the internet, what have Yahoo done? Built a competitor of their own, of course. You see, Yahoo have decided that Flickr is only for “professional and serious hobbyist photographers”, so are launching Yahoo Photos for “the mass market”. It’ll have the same tagging and organisation capabilities, but all photos will be private by default. There are claims that the two are aimed at different markets:

and that is the principal difference between those who will like Flickr (global exposure/RSS feeds) and those who will like Y! Photos (sharing with friends and family)

But it doesn’t make much sense to me. Why not just add some kind of password-protected album feature to Flickr, so that friends and family can view photos without creating an account? A separate system ignores the possibility that people might realise the advantages of sharing their photos, which is the concept that Flickr was built around. I don’t think the younger generation really care all that much about keeping everything private - MySpace users share everything, afaik, and MySpace is hardly doing badly. Plus, it’s not like Flickr doesn’t have privacy support already, if that’s really what people want.

Yahoo, please don’t kill Flickr. I like it. Please sell it to Google.

I was very glad for the break in the weather today. I don’t want to complain about the sunshine, but over the weekend my flat was a kiln. Although marginally cooler outside, opening all the windows did nothing at all; thermodynamics is therefore a pack of lies.

There’s a new beta of Google Earth out, with a revamped interface and support for textured 3D buildings with textures (via a new version of SketchUp). This builds upon GE’s massive imagery upgrade last week. The beta is a little slow for me, although obviously your mileage may vary.

24’s running times may, it seems, be partly determined by the font of the advert-break clock.

Skuds spotted a 10-foot unicycle chained to a lamp-post.

Has anybody else picked up the new Keane album? It seems very different from their first and not particularly my style, to be honest. I’m hoping it’ll grow on me - it only came out on Monday, after all.

Tom Morris has a good post that mentions the abysmal state of education when it comes to technology and IT. Why are spreadsheets and databases the most exciting things we learn about at school?

I don’t like the complete credulity in this article on John the Baptist’s hand:

Vladimir Mastukov, a pensioner who lost the use of his legs after a stroke five years ago, bent down to kiss a display case housing the hand. Moments later he cast aside his crutches and skipped out of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in central Moscow.

“Skipped”. Yeah, of course he did. Either there’s information missing, it was a con, or the whole thing is a lie. What the hell is the Telegraph doing publishing such crap? Have they been watching too much Fox News?

Speaking of Fox News, this clip of their presenter going ballistic at a rather despicable anti-gay zealot demonstrates…something.

Finally, the Astronomy Picture of the Day is a sun-halo. I saw one of these when I was in Australia, nine years ago now, and this is the first decent explanation I’ve read.

I updated Google’s Firefox toolbar at the weekend, and Firefox promptly fell over with CPU usage at 23% and memory allocation continually increasing. Disabling the extension seems to have fixed it. Can’t guarantee it’s not my computer being weird, but if you’re a google toolbar user it might be worth waiting on the update. The problems I see are with toolbar version 2.0.20060515W.

Windows has a built in screensaver that purports to show random photos from the My Pictures folder, and the Google Pack contains something similar. Neither seem to work very well, though. Google’s in particular seems to iterate through folders in a regular order, and despite having 10,000 photos I see the same shots on a regular basis - there are whole directories that are never touched. According to my parents the Microsoft version is the same.

I know that true random numbers aren’t really do-able by microprocessors. But there must be at least a faux system that’s appropriate in this case, surely? Google’s screensaver always shows me images from the root directory first - that can’t be the result of problems with random number selection. Are there any random photo screensavers out there that at least give the appearance of being random?

Google today released a free version of SketchUp, the before-now-$600 3D modelling program. It’s fun. Here’s a house I want:

Never mind the pool, tunnel and space elevator: death slide, baby!

The program itself is far easier to use than any other 3D program I’ve ever tried. Hell, if I figured it out it must be simple - I normally give up in frustration after trying to build a square and ending up with non-Euclidean geometric primitives. The built-in tutorials are very helpful, too.

You can’t go inside the houses, so it’s not much use as an interior design program, but for exterior house modelling it’s certainly interesting. It fully supports real dimensions, and you can use your own textures, so it should be possible to create very accurate replicas of buildings. Google are touting the built-in Google Earth links, which let you create a 3d version of your house for display in GE, although I don’t find this as exciting as does the SketchUp website You can download (and upload) models from an online warehouse, so if you ever wondered what the White House would look like with monkey-army-deterring turrets in the front garden, now’s your chance.

You know what’d be great? An exporter into Second Life You could rapidly construct a mansion in Sketchup, then do all the interior design inside SL.

Sorry this isn’t terribly in-depth, I’m just heading out to dancing.

From TUGW:

A Pension fund with a holding of over 4700 in class A Google stock, wants a change to eliminate a tow tier voting structure. This change would funnel the control of Google from its main three executives, Brin, Page, and Schmidt.

Yes, well. They would. I can’t see any way in which this is a good idea for anybody except the shareholders themselves.

The long-awaited Google Calendar is apparently live, although as of this moment it’s down, as is Gmail. Annoying; I want to play! The Unofficial Google Weblog has an initial-impressions review:

Google Calendar is live, and it rocks. I’m not shy with my complaints of Google’s erratic launch quality during the past two years, but credit is due here. This thing is gorgeous, easy, flawless during my initial poking, lubricated with Web 2.0 juice, and brain-dead simple to use.

Sounds fun. Hopefully it’ll be working soon!

10 mins later: It’s back up.

The Unofficial Google Weblog points toward the Maxim USA homepage, which details an image of Eva Longoria visible from space. If you open up this Google Earth file, you’ll zoom down onto a 22m x 32m¹ wire-mesh magazine cover created in the Las Vegas desert:

I wonder whether they could see it from the International Space Station.

Update: It seems that although the image is actually there, Google’s satellites haven’t got updated imagery of the area, so the Google Earth link just overlays an image on top. I suppose this is the same effect, but it feels like cheating.

1. GE’s measure tool comes in very handy in this case, although temptation to measure other dimensions should be resisted [↩]