email – Accidents Happen

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.

RSS to Email: the right way

thameera — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 07:11:29 +0000

Need the updates of some RSS feeds in you email inbox? A simple IFTTT recipe can do that for you. And no, no need to create a recipe for each feed or merge the feeds into one feed. Simply add the feeds to a specific folder/tag in Google Reader (eg: mail) and ask IFTTT to mail you all new items in that tag. To save you time, here’s a public recipe you can use.

Automated emails

thameera — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 16:02:06 +0000

One day I boasted to my little sis that my inbox receives 20+ emails a day. She was amazed.

Today I came home after three days away from the computer and had to deal with 50+ unread mails. The sad truth is that 95% of those were automated emails. 16 of them were triggered by ifttt recipes, 5 were from goodreads, 4 from twitter. The rest were from StackOverflow, WordPress, Evernote forums, LinkedIn, and so on. Only two mails had been sent by real people, and out of the two, one was a forward. Is this pathetic? Maybe. Maybe not.