You can now chat from within the gmail interface (so no need to open another program) – or at least you can if your contacts also have had this feature enabled in their gmail account. My first gmail account has had this option enabled but my main google account that I use on a day to day basis (as it contains all helsby.net emails) does not have it activated yet. The strange thing is that you can initiate a chat invite from a working account (and I was hoping that would activate my secondary account for chatting) but the secondary account does not receive the invite in the mail box – I’m guessing it probably goes to the chat client – if it has been downloaded.
It will be interesting to see how this progresses. At the moment I’m guessing it is text only IM similar to the web interfaces to MSN and ICQ.
In related news I’ve been setting up a Live Communication Server for a client and the Communicator program looks pretty good. The annoying thing is that I can’t see any documentation on how to get hold of the non-trial version of the client – it apparently is free with licences for the server so you would expect to get the media for the client with the server – but nooooooo…….
Just logged into my gmail account and they now scan for virus’s…This is one more reason to move the rest of my helsby.net emails to gmail. The only issue I have with gmailing my domain is that when I read the mail in thunderbird on the home pc, it doesn’t mark the mail in gmail as read (which I wouldn’t expect it to) but that means that gmail thinks I have loads of unread messages.
Update I’ve now made the switch and all mail that is not addressed directly to Kristen and I now goes via google – that’ll give it some spam to think about 🙂
I’ve taken the step of forwarding all incoming mail for my userid at my main domain to my google account for 3 reasons. 1 is to reduce the amount of spam that I get in my inbox and the second is to give me a decent web interface for my mail as the web interface with 1and1 is awful to use and really slow and thirdly to have a searchable archive of mail available from any computer.
The main computer at home will download the email via pop3 as usual but I’ll also have email on the move. I’ve not forwarded all email via google as it blocks certain attachments (.exe files for example) which I occasionally need but I might do this at a later date with an exception email that goes direct to pop3 instead of via gmail.
A nice bookmarklet, Gmail this allows you to select some text, press the icon on your links bar and it sends the selected text plus url via your gmail account. Works great in firefox (but not in ie) allthough I had to bookmark the script first rather than just drag it to my links folder for some obscure reason. Thanks Mike