원본 URL: http://www.work.caltech.edu/ling/tips/gmail.html
Gmail Tips
- Secure Gmail
- Gmail Loader Enhanced
- Logical Operations in Gmail Search
- Periods and Pluses in Usernames
Secure Gmail
Gmail offers an SSL-encrypted login (https) by default. After login, it switches back to the insecure http. Users of Mozilla Firefox can install the Secure Gmail script * to ensure Gmail uses the secure connection. Alternatively, try the CustomizeGoogle extension.
* You need the wonderful Greasemonkey extension for Firefox. See also Firefox tips.
Gmail Loader Enhanced
GMail Loader (GML)
is a utility designed by Mark Lyon that can upload your (old) emails into Google's Gmail. As wonderful as it is, it suffers from two main problems.
- If during the uploading process Google resets the SMTP connection for some reason, GML doesn't resend the interrupted emails. You have to pick them out later, manually, and resend them, which is annoying.
- Gmail is famous for organizing emails into tidy conversations. The emails in a conversation are usually sorted by their received time. For instance, if both you and your friend reply to a conversation and Google gets your email first, your email will be listed earlier than your friend's, even if your friend might have sent the email earlier than you. This ordering rule is also in effect when uploading old emails. If emails are stored in a random order in your mailbox, they also appear
randomly
in the Gmail conversation.
To fix these two problems as well as some minor ones, I modified the source code provided by Mark. The modified source code can be found here: Please don't ask me for a Windows EXE version -- I don't know how to compile Python codes on Windows.
I have already sent patches to Mark. Before he releases his next version, I will host my version in case others need it.
Here are explanations to my modifications: [showhide]
- Sort emails according to the
Date
field.
Emails in a gmail conversation are usually sorted by their received time. If emails are stored unsorted in the mailbox (which might happen when you move emails around different folders, say, in Mozilla), they will not appear chronologically within a conversation. This is not nice. So I added a step to sort emails before sending them. The time, including the time zone information, is converted usinggetdate_tzandmktime_tz, the latter was copied from Python's rfc822 package. - Resend emails if a failure happens.
Gmail server is busy. Sometimes it resets the connections just because its load is too high. If this happens, we have to pick out failed emails and resend them later, which is annoying. So I modified the code to let GML automatically resend the email if a failure happens. However, I was lazy to check the failure type---if the failure is unrecoverable, say, wrong attachment type, the resend will give up after 9 times. - Give
Date
information when failure.
I found that when I had many emails in a mailbox, it is very difficult to locate the erroneous emails when I only know the senders. So I put theDate
also in the error output.
Logical Operations in Gmail Search
When searching in Gmail, you can use logical operations like AND
, OR
, and/or NOT
to make your search more accurate.
- AND: Use nothing or capitalized "AND".
-
To search emails containing terrorist and Bush, use terrorist Bush or terrorist and Bush.
- OR: Use braces (
{
and}
) or capitalized "OR". -
To search emails from Bush or Chimp, use From: {Bush Chimp} or From: (Bush OR Chimp).
- NOT: Use hyphen (
-
) before the excluded string. -
Say you have created the labels
Smart
,Good
, andBush
. To search emails with labelsSmart
andGood
but notBush
, use label:smart label:good -label:bush. - Grouping: Use parentheses (
(
and)
). -
To search emails having
party
, or bothhiking
andSunday
, use {party (hiking Sunday)} or party OR (hiking Sunday).
Periods and Pluses in Usernames
Periods (.) in Gmail usernames are not important. For example, first.last@gmail.com or firstlast@gmail.com are actually the same. Try to send emails to your own Gmail address with and without periods and you will get all of them.
The +detail suffix can also be used with your Gmail username. For example, if your gmail username is yourname, you can use yourname+someweb@gmail.com with some web registration. When you see spam emails through this address, you will know that it was someweb
that discloses your contact information.
