gmail

I’ve discovered (quite accidentally) that if you put backslashes (”/”) in your GMail label names, iPhone Mail interperets them as nested folders. A handy trick for those looking to simulate a folder structure in thief webmail. I use Folders4Gmail to accomplish the same thing in the webapp.

I just signed into my GMail and saw this announcement about Google’s new “GMail Paper” service:

Intriguing:

Is it free? Yes. The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica. No pop-ups, no flashy animations—these are physically impossible in the paper medium. How about attachments? All part of the deal. Photo attachments are printed on high-quality, glossy photo paper, and secured to your Gmail Paper with a paper clip. MP3 and WAV files will not be printed. We recommend maintaining copies of your non-paper Gmail in these cases. Is there a limit? You can make us print one, one thousand, or one hundred thousand of your emails. It’s whatever seems reasonable to you. But what about the environment? Not a problem. Gmail Paper is made out of 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum, and thus, actually helps the environment. For every Gmail Paper we produce, the environment gets incrementally healthier.

I love the shot of the guy dropping off the Google box full of printouts.

(Yes, I know it’s April 1st… But can’t a guy want to play along?)

If you’re a competitive sailor, you can’t get much better news than what you’ll get every day from Scuttlebutt. The problem is that it’s an email list, and if you get as much email as me, the last thing you need is one more email to read.

But one thing I do spend some time reading each day is my blog RSS feeds. I use Bloglines, a free online feed reader. Recently I discovered a great feature in Bloglines where you can get a custom email address to turn periodic email lists into feeds in your bloglines account.

Instructions below the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been bad. Until recently I haven’t been backing up my MySQL database. Bad things could have happened.

Today I finally hacked up a simple script to run from cron that will automatically dump, zip, and mail backups of my MySQL tables to an email address I specify. I set up a Gmail account to send the dumps to because they’re about 8 meg each. The dumps are also encrypted using my PGP 1024-bit public key to give me a bit of security.

Since I didn’t manage to find anything similar in my Googling, I decided to post it.

#!/bin/sh # Performs a backup of MySQL, encrypts it using PGP, and mails it to a particular user # The user to mail the backup to. Should have a public key in the above user's keyring... MAIL_TO="your-backup-account@gmail.com" MAIL_TO_KEY="Your PGP key ID" # Subject of the mail. A date stamp will be appended to it MAIL_SUBJECT="[mysqldump] MySQL Backup for ” ###################################### DATESTAMP=`date %Y-%m-%d` FILENAME=”/tmp/mysqldump-$DATESTAMP.gz” # Generate the dump mysqldump –all-databases | gzip > “$FILENAME” # Encrypt it gpg –encrypt –recipient “$MAIL_TO_KEY” “$FILENAME” # Mail it! mpack -s “$MAIL_SUBJECT $DATESTAMP” -c application/octet-stream $FILENAME.gpg” “$MAIL_TO” # Remove the backups rm -f $FILENAME $FILENAME.gpg

I was doing some googling looking for a Gmail applet for Gnome, and found the project page of the (probably dead) application “Gmail” (short for “Gnome Mail”):

Gmail is an experiment in a sql vfolder based email system. It implements sql vfolders, incoming POP3, outgoing SMTP and more.

Hmm… SQL based VFolders. Sounds a lot like “labels” in Google’s Gmail to me…

Interesting.