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!