Tag: hotmail

Email, Microsoft

Gmail adds IMAP support

I noticed that Chris Gilmer reported this morning that Gmail is now supporting IMAP for getting your mail as well as POP.

I quickly logged into my GMail account and Lo!, there was the IMAP option – wohoo!

Gmail adds IMAP

Why is this a good thing? Well, previously if you wanted to read your Gmail in your email client application (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) you had to use the POP protocol. IMAP is a better protocol for doing that because as Alex Chitu pointed out:

you’re always connected to the server, more clients can connect to the same account, you can obtain the text from a message without the attachments and the state information is synchronized (you can add labels from the client, read or delete a message and Gmail will synchronize).

Of course Hotmail (or as it is now mis-nomered Windows Live Mail) still doesn’t even allow POP access (unless you pay for it), never mind IMAP. This leads to many people’s accounts being deleted and losing all their email (happened to me last year).

Hotmail used to be a ground-breaking product until Microsoft got their hands on it and slowly squeezed the life out of it.

Search Engines

Foxmarks to launch next great search engine?

Google had a great idea. Order your search results based on the number of times a site is linked to. Brilliant! A link to a site is counted as a vote of confidence in the site’s quality/veracity. And it works because people generally only link to interesting sites.

Foxmarks is a nifty little Firefox plugin which uploads your Firefox bookmarks to a central server, so you can synchronise your bookmarks across machines. Again brilliant – if you typically use more than one computer (one at home and one at work, for example).

I read today on TechCrunch that FoxMarks is going to use the bookmark information which users of the plugin have uploaded, to create a new search engine. Privacy concerns aside, I love it!

This is the 1,157th blog post on this site. I don’t have any numbers on the amount of outward links I have created in those posts but I imagine two per post would be a conservative estimate. So I have created, in the order of 2,300 links on this blog. And I write in and contribute to other blogs as well. Let’s say I have created (again conservatively) a total of 2,500 links.

Now how many sites have I bookmarked? About 160. Therefore, any site I go to the trouble of bookmarking, must be significantly more important than one I simply link to.

Foxmarks are taking the Google model of a link as a vote of confidence and replacing it with the bookmark as a vote of confidence. Will it work? Well, according to Mike Arrington, who got a demo recently:

it definitely has a “wow” factor. Searches for most things ended up with incredible results.

Foxmarks also shows if the results appear on Google and Yahoo, and on what page in the results they appear. For many of the queries, the top result on Foxmarks was quite obviously the perfect result – but it appeared, if at all, deep on the result set for Google and Yahoo. Terms that are likely to have a lot of SEO pollution (ecommerce in particular), the results were strikingly better on Foxmarks v. Google.

Having said all that, Google have their Google Browser Sync application which has similar functionality to Foxmarks currently, so fine tuning their search results with bookmark info should be trivial for them.

I hope they do because getting 1,210,000 results for the search term “Microsoft Hotmail deletes email” is just ridiculous, even considering how bad Hotmail is!

Email

If I had a suspicious mind…

I wrote a post a couple of weeks back about Hotmail deleting all my mails and it generated quite a bit of discussion (40 comments to-date).

One of the comments was from Omar Shahine – Omar is a program manager on the Hotmail team. I appreciated his dropping by and commenting.

Then over the weekend, Omar posted about the issue on his own blog – he said:

we have changed the policy for Windows Live Mail accounts to 120 day expiration… I just sent Tom a Windows Live Mail Invite to fix his storage issue and hopefully the expiration issue if he still cares to use the service.

All fair enough so far – execpt for the fact that I haven’t received any Windows Live Mail invite from Omar!

Then when I left a comment to that effect on his blog to that effect, the comment never appeared. Several comments left after mine have appeared so this looks a little bit dubious to me! What does anyone else think?

UPDATE: – Omar came back to me and explained that he had sent the invite to my Hotmail account! I haven’t logged into that account since all my mail was deleted – (why would I?) so I didn’t see it. He didn’t, however, explain the disappearance of the comment I left on his blog.