Feb 23

There is one hugely annoying problem with Gmail and many people are frustrated with it.  It's the spam folder falsely identifying legitimate email as spam.  This happens to me quite regularly and I've lost several important emails this way.  Many people including myself use Gmail with an email client like Outlook, or Thunderbird over POP3.  Everything works fine until someone calls you up and asks why you haven't responded to their email.  It turns out that their email was delivered directly into the spam folder.  When this happens there is no way for you to know unless you use the browser interface to check.  On top of this, the "spam" gets automatically deleted after 30 days, so you have to check at least once a month and wade through potentially hundreds of emails if you don't want to miss anything. 

I've done some research and discovered a few things.  I looked into creating a filter to move spam to the Inbox.  Unfortunately Google allows you to move it into any folder (more accurately, tag it with any label) except the Inbox.  That seems strange. Continue reading »

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Feb 14

I've used Google Desktop Search, Copernic, Yahoo Desktop Search, and Microsoft's Windows Search.  What do all these programs have in common?  They are all resource hogs that can slow down your system.  After I got tired of the constant noise coming from my hard drive being accessed relentlessly, I just gave up on all of them.  These programs build huge databases of all the files on your hard drive including the contents, for the purpose of allowing you to quickly find the files you are looking for based on keywords that appear in the files.  Admittedly, they do a good job of searching and the results come up quickly if not instantaneously.  But that is to be expected.  After all, that's what an indexed database of every word in every file is supposed to do.  Unfortunately, with all these products, the cost is a big chunk of hard drive space, coupled with what seems like constant disk access.

Continue reading »

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