GeeMail damaged my data

The skinny :

I don't recommend trying GeeMail.

The fat :

For various reasons, I wanted a standlone GMail app on my Windows 7 laptop.

Specifically, it had to run in its own process - i.e. not simply as another tab in a browser, nor as a browser window that's still part of a larger FireFox or whatever process.  I needed to be able to kill my browser without affecting my GMail.

I found one.  It's called GeeMail.  There appear to be no other options.

I installed it.  When I ran it, it consumed 100% of one core for many minutes.  When it finally loaded, it showed about one screenful of emails all with no subject line.  That's right - no sender, no subject line to see in the list.  Basically a useless list.

It appears there's also no built-in search, which is rather limiting.

But the thing that shocked me most, and made me immediately close it down and stop using it (and therefore I don't know what other features it does or doesn't have) :

Since GeeMail was basically useless when just showing a list of emails with no identifying information in each list entry, I jumped back into my browser to check email.

Guess what?

Roughly a few dozen emails that had been marked Unread, were now all marked Read.

For a moment I thought maybe GeeMail had done that for a great slab of emails.

It appears now it had only done it for roughly a screenful.

But that's a screenful too many.

I'm one of those who use an email's Unread status to flag when action is required.

"The fault is with you - you should learn how to use email properly."  Since when were you the expert who knows how a new technology like email should be used?  Since when was the world so advanced that there was no longer room for variation in how we try to tame the email beast?

Nay, the fault lies squarely with GeeMail.

I don't know how many important emails disappeared from my Inbox, but I fished back at least one.

Fished it back, that is, using the browser-based version of GMail.

And sadly, it is with that browser-based version of GMail that I must remain, at least for now.

Experiments for another day :

* Run GMail on a tablet with a keyboard.  (iPad or Android tablet.)

One downside of this approach is that I still want to separate general browsing from email, so I want any links I click in an email to open in a separate browser.  iPad or Android will do that, but then I'm stuck using mobile versions of browsers, which unfortunately are not suitable for the information processing tasks I perform.

* Try to run two concurrent copies of FireFox - one just for email, one for browsing.

One downside of this approach is that I need to go to a lot more effort to open a link from an email.  Open link, copy URL, paste into other FireFox, close tab that opened in GMail FireFox.  But it would sorta work.

* Run one browser (e.g. Google Chrome) just for GMail, and a different one (e.g. FireFox) just for general browsing.

Again, a lot more effort to open a link from an email, but it would sorta work.

* Write a decent standalone desktop GMail app.  C'mon, iOS and Android have ones, so it must be possible!  Why aren't there others already?  Are there really that few of us who want that feature?

Downside : major time cost.

* Use a standalone email client and download GMail messages via POP.

But the very reason I want to stick with GMail is because I like the way it "thinks".  Its concept of conversations, its concept of tagging, its "Priority Inbox", and the built-in search.  Yes, it can definitely be improved on in various ways.  But switching e.g. to Outlook downloading from GMail would be a retrograde step in these key areas.

In short, there are options, but no good options.

If I built a standalone desktop Windows GMail client that preserves access to the things that make GMail great - and if it worked well - would you use it?

Maybe this would be a good open-source project.

SD cards unreadable on Windows 7 - Acronis True Image at root of problem

This was a very weird one, and the solution was to disable the Acronis Nonstop Backup Service.

Symptoms : Sony Vaio Z laptop, Windows 7 Ultimate, built-in SD card reader completely stopped recognising SD cards. Made no sense why, but I got around it by using the SD card reader in another machine.

Eventually got frustrated enough with the problem that I spent more time Google-ing, and lo-and-behold, Acronis True Image was the problem. I didn't have to uninstall it - just going in to Local Services and stopping and disabling the Acronis Nonstop Backup Service did the trick. The next SD card I inserted worked perfectly.

Note - in the post I linked to above, people talk about needing to reboot after disabling the Acronis Nonstop Backup Service. This indicates that they changed the startup type to "disabled" without stopping the currently-running copy of the service. i.e. make sure you STOP the service AND disable it from starting again in future. Or if you just disable it without stopping it, then you will need to reboot for the change to take effect.

Many thanks to the folks in the above-linked forum page for providing such a simple yet inobvious solution to such an annoying problem!

Magnetic Laundry Balls - glad I didn't buy

It sounded awesome - never use laundry powder (detergent) again - just place these reusable magnetic balls in the washing machine instead.

Claimed to alter the surface tension of the water, making it wash more effectively.

Hmmmm - y'know, sounds cool. I considered buying.

But I Googled for more info, 'coz it did seem, well, pretty extraordinary.

First big clue that something's sus : page after page of search results are almost entirely official websites or resellers.

Y'know, if I'd found such an awesome product and it worked for me, I'd've blogged about it, right? So where are the rave testimonials, not from random unknowns who might be company agents, but on blogs that have loads and laods of reviews - some positive, some negative - demonstrating their impartiality?

In contrast, there are numerous reports that cast these "magnetic laundry balls" in very bad light. You can find them yourself if you dig & dig through pages of Google search results. I'll just link to a few here to help improve their Google rank.

Magnetic laundry ball scam

Magnetic laundry aids and surface tension reduction - a critique

Magnetic laundry scams - not as detailed, but relevant

Buyer beware!

Google Apps GMail bug with multiple sign-in and POP3 access

The skinny : Trouble with POP3 or forwarding from one GMail or Google Apps account to another? Make sure you're signed out of all multiple-sign-ins in all browsers for the affected accounts, and don't multiple-sign-in again with the account your trying to get emails from.

The fat : read on...

GMail is a very refined product, but unfortunately, its rare bugs tend to be extremely poorly handled, causing wasted time chasing rabbits hither and thither.

Take my recent challenge of combining a Google Apps email account into my personal GMail account. Should be easy, right? And it did seem so.

I configured my personal GMail account to be able to send as my Google Apps email address - all worked fine.

And I configured the Google Apps email account to auto-forward to my personal email account and delete - and that was working fine too.

Then I discovered a cool new feature in GMail (and the wider world of Google) called "multiple sign-in", making it possible to be concurrently signed in to multiple accounts! Whoohoo! I tried it, but it wasn't as seamless an experience as I'd hoped for, so I decided to just stick with having everything pouring into my personal GMail account.

And the world got pretty quiet.

But hey - it was new year, so I figured everyone was away.

But I did get a report of an email sent to me, that definitely never arrived.

And then another report from a different sender.

Hmmm..........

I logged into my Google Apps email account, and there were 15 emails that had never been forwarded to my personal GMail account!!! How did that happen!!!??!!?!!

I looked at the Google Apps email account's settings, and it had reverted back to not automatically forwarding emails. I corrected that, telling it once again to forward all emails to my personal GMail account.

That's not the end of the story - it's just getting started - but on this matter my educated guess is that GMail automatically disabled the auto-forwarding when that Google Apps email account became enabled for concurrent multiple sign-in. (Whether they would do that generally, or whether they did it because the forward-to email address was associated with the other of the concurrently-signed-in accounts, I don't know. It would be easy enough to test - you could let us know in the comments if you determine either way.)

So now my problem was 15 emails sitting in the one account when I wanted them in the other. I could manually forward each one - not optimal. Or I could try to use POP3 import that I use successfully in GMail for other accounts.

Only, every time I try POP3 import from the Google Apps email account to my personal email account, GMail tells me that the username + password combination is not accepted. Very strange.

I dig around and manage to confirm that pop.gmail.com is the correct POP3 server name even for Google Apps email accounts. So no problem there.

I've definitely set the POP3 port to 995 and set to use encryption. No problem there.

I try some other combinations of settings anyway just in case, but the error messages made it clear they weren't the right answer.

I found the POP3 bulk downloader tool in my personal GMail account, and tried to use that to download the emails from the Google Apps email account. But it just sat there saying "Connecting" for many minutes, until I closed the window. tried again with equal non-success and gave up on that approach.

I found a note about using Captcha Unlock for your GMail account, so I tried to use it for the Google Apps account, just in case that would help, but crazily, it kept telling me that the password I'd enterted was incorrect, even though it was correct. Just in case, I even went ahead and changed the password, which involved entering the current password for verification, and the change password proceeded fine, but even the new password was rejected as incorrect by the Google Captcha Unlock page.

Bizarre! Some Google pages knew my password, but others rejected it. Go figure.

I even tried multiple browsers - same result.

So it was no thanks to useless error messages and processes that totally failed me that I finally found what seems to be the solution.

I document it here for the few travellers encountering the same problem.

The solution? I signed out of all Google accounts in all browsers, and then studiously avoided using the multiple-sign-in feature. That was all it took. When signed in only to my personal GMail account, I was able to easily add a POP3 download from my Google Apps email account, and it worked flawlessly.

No thanks Google for the time wastage, but hey, big thanks still for an in-nearly-all-other-respects AWESOME product. GMail fanboy is me.