Gmail with Thunderbird

thameera — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 15:41:13 +0000

I’d been dealing with my work-related mail with Mozilla’s Thunderbird for a few weeks. For the personal Gmail account, it was the good old webapp. For a change I hooked the Gmail account with Thunderbird to see how things would go. It had trouble authenticating the Google account, but then remembered about the 2-step verification so created an application-specific password to make it work.

The experience is better than I’d imagined. It’s quite handy being able to open mail in tabs. There are hundreds of add-ons to choose from. Especially, the Conversations add-on is a must. It’s smarter than Gmail’s conversation view. For example, if you get code broken into separate git patches like [PATCH 1/7], [PATCH 2/7] etc, they appear as separate threads in gmail. But this add-on groups all related patches to a single tree of conversation with branches. Clever! Guess I’d be sticking with this for the foreseeable future.

2 step verification for Google

thameera — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 08:18:27 +0000

If you haven’t activated 2-step verification for Google / Gmail already, it’s high time you did. 2-step verification essentially requires you to provide two proofs to show that you are actually you. After getting the password correct, you’ll get an SMS with a verification code which you have to enter to sign in. In case the phone is lost, no cellular coverage, etc you can add recovery options.

Why bother? Because you never know when your account’s gonna get compromised, and when you do, you’d wish you were dead.

2-step verification – Accidents Happen

Gmail with Thunderbird

2 step verification for Google