Quick Bite: Gmail

This is very cool. As is this. Hopefully I can harness the awesome power of these two links and clean up the sewer that is my Gmail mailbox…

Tidying Up Gmail

While I wait for Zooomr to launch, I thought I’d see if I can make my Gmail inbox a nicer place to be.

A quick Google search later, and I’ve got some hints and tips to look at. One of which is “Use a search term like ‘before:2007/01/01 label:sent’ to find everything before a certain date”. Which is great - I could destroy all mail before the beginning of this year. But that’s not really what Gmail is about, is it?

I’m currently using half of Gmail’s limit, so I’m not in danger of running out of space, but despite that it pains me to see such an untidy repository. I’d like to purge all the crap I don’t need, but I don’t know how best to sort the crap from the things I want to hold on to. I’d quite like to create a Google Apps for Domains Premiere account and use that, but there’s no client-based mobile access for GAfD. Yet.

I think I’m just going to have to start deleting anything I don’t want as it comes in, but be lenient with the “don’t want” classification. I just don’t seem to be able to find an ideal way to tidy up Gmail…

Google Calendar

I was using 30 Boxes and Skobee to keep track of gigs and events, but I can't see any reason not to shift everything across to the newly launched Google Calendar.

All of the functionality I need from Skobee (agenda view) and 30 Boxes (calendar sharing) is present here but with the Gmail UI that we all know and love. Calendar provides integrated notifications and address book functionality from Gmail, lets me log in with the same account, and ultimately looks cleaner than most of the other online calendar apps I've seen. As this is Google, you can easily search your calendar too, and there's the obligatory xml feeds.

It's not all roses though - there are a few bugs (creating additional sub-calendars was a bit flakey for me), and it's lacking a few features I'd like (fuzzy timings for events, like morning, evening etc, some sort of client-side tool so I can sync my phone, and better integration with Gmail; opening a new window isn't terribly slick) - but by and large it's a nice app. One of the nicer things that Google have done is create a set of "remind me" buttons, and accompanying html, which allow one click additions of events into your Google Calendar. This could really catch on - I'd certainly like to be able to add, for example, film timings to my calendar with one click.

Now, would someone please knock together a sync app so I can easily pull the calendar down to Outlook, or my phone!