Google Rave (Gmail): Okay, another rave on Web 2.0. A few weeks ago I had a terrible hard drive crash. My new drive came in bare and I started the process of loading it up. Some of the stuff was easy, some a little harder. Part of the new strategy is to keep as much off the laptop as possible, or at least in such a way so that I can have a ready back up.
The toughest loss was the e-mail. I live by my e-mail, certainly the most critical business communications tool that I have. I am notorious for checking the e-mail while driving to an appointment (mobile web card). So when Outlook went down with the hard drive I was in a world of hurt. I lost many critical things because I only had a copy in Outlook. But this turned out to be a great thing, because it caused me to think about how I store documents, and how I access my e-mail. When I had a temporary laptop while they were fixing the other, I moved my business mail domain to Google and started accessing from a Gmail account. It really was simple, and I was only down about a day. When the old laptop came back with the new hard drive I was online with mail in less than 10 minutes.
Two things that I missed from Outlook were folders and mail notification sounds. Well, I downloaded an extension for Firefox so that my Gmail now plays the cool notification sound that Outlook used to do. Also, I have learned to get around the folders thing with Gmail's labels. It took a little to get used to, but now I am hooked. I need to find something and I just do a search and there it is. How cool! Now I just have to pray that Google stays online for me.
The toughest loss was the e-mail. I live by my e-mail, certainly the most critical business communications tool that I have. I am notorious for checking the e-mail while driving to an appointment (mobile web card). So when Outlook went down with the hard drive I was in a world of hurt. I lost many critical things because I only had a copy in Outlook. But this turned out to be a great thing, because it caused me to think about how I store documents, and how I access my e-mail. When I had a temporary laptop while they were fixing the other, I moved my business mail domain to Google and started accessing from a Gmail account. It really was simple, and I was only down about a day. When the old laptop came back with the new hard drive I was online with mail in less than 10 minutes.
Two things that I missed from Outlook were folders and mail notification sounds. Well, I downloaded an extension for Firefox so that my Gmail now plays the cool notification sound that Outlook used to do. Also, I have learned to get around the folders thing with Gmail's labels. It took a little to get used to, but now I am hooked. I need to find something and I just do a search and there it is. How cool! Now I just have to pray that Google stays online for me.
1 Comments:
Gmail allows you to have free pop forwarding and still stores all your inbox messages. Your sent messages would be lost but I usually want to forget what I say anyway.
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