Monthly Archives: August 2004

Software Freedom Day

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Apparently tomorrow, August 28th, is Software Freedom Day.

On August 28, 2004, we will celebrate the first annual Software Freedom Day. On that day, we will make the world aware of the virtues of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), and encourage its widespread use. We will set up stations in public places to give away informational fliers and CDs with selected FOSS, including TheOpenCD and a Linux Live CD

This is a “a global grassroots marketing campaign” organised by the United Nations, through its International Open Source Network (IOSN) . It sounds like a worthy cause to support, pity I only found out about it on such short notice.

Gmail

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I got an invitation to join Gmail the other day (thanks Sara). Of course, I decided to take a look. So far I’m quite impressed! In order to test it without too much risk I have set two of my email accounts to forward to my Gmail account. That way I get a decent amount of email to play with.
I’m very impressed with the interface. I like the fact that so much is done on the client side. It makes things very slick without having to round trip to the server all the time. Strangely, I have been thinking about fat web clients recently. I’ve been thinking that quite often you really don’t want to take that round trip to the server to process a single click. I think I really want an opportunity to play with the the wonderful 204 HTTP response code so that the server can still know state changes.
Anyway, back to Gmail. I think that the labels are a great idea. Much better than folders, though I worry about the stuff I don’t label but which I do archive. I can no longer see it, other than in ‘All Mail’. Of course I can search for it, but I can’t really browse it. Unless I’m missing something? I like the ‘conversation’ view. It seems slightly more intuitive than Mozilla Mail’s (and every one else’s) tree structure for threaded emails.
I like the fact that it knows to apply the same labels to all mails in the same thread. That helps to compensate for the paltry 20 filters. I hope they increase that number soon. In Mozilla Mail I have 36 filters set up just for the two mail boxes I am echoing to Gmail. There are more in my other accounts!
Of course, I love the fact that they have so many access keys set up. Far less mousing around allows me to work quicker!
There are lots of things I need it to do before I could consider it a suitable replacemement for a decent fat mail client like Mozilla Mail. For instance, I need to be able to set lots of different from/reply addresses without having to edit preferences each time. I need more rules like ‘BCC to <email address>’ automatically, or request receipt, I need to be able to sort my mails! And backup! I must have backup. And import; the tools knocking about the web at the moment are no good for me as I must preserve dates, and folders. Mind you, one gigabyte wouldn’t be enough if I were to import all my email archives!
I think I like the way it deals with spam. I’ve noticed that it catches a lot and filters it to the spam folder, but I like it less that it’s silent about it. That is, I see no indication that I have spam to check through for false positives. I also noticed that it bounces some spam.

Still, first impressions are favourable so far.