TOPIC: MAIL
Changing Outlook usage habits
2nd August 2010Given that I have been using it for so long, I shouldn't be discovering new things with Outlook. However, there is one thing that I have been doing for years: leaving messages set as unread until I have dealt with them. Now that I look at it, it seems a terrible habit compared with an alternative that I recently found.
Quite why I haven't been flagging messages for follow-up instead is beyond me. Is it because I worked with Outlook 2000 at my place of work for so long, and the arrival of Outlook 2007 into my life wasn't sufficient to force a change of habits? In fact, it has taken a downgrade to Outlook 2003 to make it dawn on me; it was the sight of search folder for messages marked for follow-up that triggered the realisation.
Speaking of old habits, there is one that I'll be dropping: setting up loads of rules, allegedly for organising messages. Given that they were the cause of my missing emails quite a few times, it's one more nuisance that needed to be left behind me.
The case of a wide open restriction
7th November 2007The addition of IMAP capability to Gmail attracted a lot of attention in the blogosphere last week, and I managed to flick the switch for the beast courtesy of the various instructions that were out there. However, when I pottered back to the settings, the IMAP settings had disappeared.
A brief look at the Official Gmail Blog confirmed why: the feature wasn't to be available to those who hadn't set their language as US English. My setting of UK English explained why I wasn't seeing it again, a strange observation given that they are merely variants of the same language; I have no idea why I saw it the first time around.
My initial impression was that the language setting used was an operating system or browser one, but this is not how it is. In fact, it is the language that you set for Gmail itself in its settings; choosing US English was sufficient to make the IMAP settings reappear, while choosing UK English made them disappear again.
Personally, I am not certain why the distinction was made in the first place, but I have Evolution merrily working away with Gmail's IMAP interface without a bother. To get it going, I needed that imap.gmail.com needed an SSL connection while smtp.gmail.com needed a TLS one. After that, I was away and no port numbers needed to be supplied, unlike Outlook.
Moving Emails from Outlook to Evolution
3rd November 2007It seems a little strange to my eyes, but Evolution cannot import Outlook PST files. On one level, I see a certain amount of sense: after all, Outlook is a Windows application and Evolution remains resolutely on the Linux side of the divide. Nevertheless, it is still a pesky nuisance.
The cure is, very oddly, to import data from Outlook into Mozilla Thunderbird and pop the Thunderbird files into the Evolution mail folder. Both Evolution and Thunderbird share the same file formats, so all is hunky-dory, since Evolution should just realise that they are there and bring them in.
That's what happened for me, and I have now migrated all of my old emails. Evolution's single file import wizard is there for those times when a spot of extra persuasion is needed; the data files are those without the file extensions. As it happened, I didn't need it.