#Gmail

For my latest venture, MyFamilio, I needed to know if a user’s Email address is a Gmail one so that I could show the user his/her contacts from Gmail. Figuring out if the user is on Gmail is usually easy – the Email ends with @gmail.com. But what happens for all of those Google Apps for Your domain (like my own, which uses the @sandler.co.il domain) ? Well, you can easily detect that by running a DNS query on the MX record. [Read More]

I’ve recently started to use Google Apps for Your domain to host my private emails on the sandler.co.il domain. Google Apps for your domain is quite cool and was very easy to configure. I mainly moved to it due to the unbelievable amounts of SPAM and I didn’t have the power or time to configure SpamAssassin in a reasonable way that would actually work. When I moved, one of the things I did was to change the “default” URL in which me and other members of my family use to access the web mail of the domain. [Read More]

I own a Nokia E61 cell phone. A nice phone all in all (aside from the backup problems my wife encountered). Gmail has this cool little applet that lets me access my Gmail account in a nicer (and better cached) way from my cell phone. It’s a really nice program and I use it quite often. It has one problem though. If you host your own domain through Google Apps for Your Domain to get the Gmail like interface for your Emails you cannot use this program. [Read More]

Google Gmail recently got a new feature allowing one to open Word documents using Google Docs and we can safely assume that PDF and Excel (for use with Google Spreadsheets) documents are on their way as well. Sometimes a Word document can be quite big with lots of added stuff like images, drawings and so on. If Google can handle the on-the-fly (or at least on-mail-receive) Word documents conversions I do think that they can (and hopefully will) handle Movie files conversions like I suggest in my previous post about integrating YouTube/Google Video with Gmail. [Read More]

A while back Google added a feature to Gmail so that you can see which of your friends is online and chat with them. While this might look cool there is another side to this story, people can actually see when you are reading your Emails on your Gmail account. I, for example, use GAIM as my main IM client and since Google Talk (GTalk) uses Jabber as its underlying protocol, it means that every Jabber supported client can connect to GTalk. [Read More]

I’m sure you’ll all have heard about the Gmail dot scandal and that it WAS confirmed by Google. I’m not a heavy Gmail user but I do have an Email box there (like everyone else) but it DOES pisses me off, specifically since my Email HAS a dot in it. This can also explain why I got an Email a while back from someone that claimed to be my wife (although she was referring to another Eran Sandler ;-) ). [Read More]