Tag Archive for: gmail

I am not my father

No, this isn’t a post about how I’m turning into my dad, though my dad and I are a lot alike when it comes to many things, especially politics and baseball. The title of this post needs to be taken literally. For those who don’t know, I am named after my dad. Growing up in the same house, phone calls could get confusing. Are they calling for me or my dad? Then I started getting mail. It was easier to figure out that college pamphlets were for me and AARP material was for my dad. There is one avenue in my life where I’m still confused with my dad: email.

My dad and I have very similar email addresses because we have the same name. My family on his side continuously sends me emails (emails that are sent to the entire family) thinking I’m him. Then I get all the replies when they reply to all. It’s been explained that my email address is not my dad’s, but once your email address is in their address books there’s no turning back. You’re on the chain for good and because of family happenings regarding my grandparents over the past few weeks I’ve been seeing an influx of emails. Sometimes I’ll get 20 a day not meant for me.

I’ve decided I’ve had enough and set up a gmail filter. Any message that comes from the addresses of my aunts and uncles go directly to a new label and are marked as read. It’s not that risky because they think I’m my dad anyway so they wouldn’t be using that address to contact me. They also know that my dad never checks his email so they including my mom’s address on all emails. Then once a day I will delete all the mails from the label. I had a bit of trouble trying to figure out how to enter in multiple email addresses in the from field in a gmail filter but I think I found a solution. If you place a | between the email addresses, gmail will see them as separate addresses and apply the rule accordingly. Let’s hope it works. I’m waiting for the next email to arrive.

Gmail Gadget Problem

I’ve been getting a lot of hits on my site because Google picked up a tweet I posted yesterday on Twitter about the Gmail Gadget problem on iGoogle. The error people are getting is:

The Gmail gadget does not support the “Always use https” setting that you chose in full Gmail. If you would like to use https, please open full Gmail. Learn more

Obviously, this is a new problem and I’ve yet to see a solution for it, besides switching to another Gmail gadget. I’ll keep you updated.

What is Happening at Google?

Google is really starting to lose my loyalty and I don’t think I’m the only one. There are several things that have been bugging me lately, and many of them have to do with the breaking of their products.

I recently migrated my feeds from Feedburner’s servers to Google’s servers. All feeds are being migrated at the end of February, so I thought I’d get a jump on it. Google owns Feedburner so you think there would be no problems. That was wrong. The move broke the API so stats weren’t working for several days. The API is still broken on a lot of third party applications because not everyone has switched over yet so app manufacturers have not updated apps to pull from the right API. You may say that it’s Google’s product and they can do what they want, but the internet is becoming an more and more open and social place where data can be mixed and with other data, and Google has traditionally tried to be a part of that. Now they are breaking thing preventing that from happening.

One of the bigger problems I’ve run into the past couple days is Google has changed the way their search works. They are using Ajax in the search queries now. It appears it’s still in testing phase, as not everyone is getting the new search. The new ajax enabled search is breaking all stats packages search engine referral tracking. When you perform a search for shep in Google you would usually see the query in the url in your browser, something similar to this: search?q=shep. With the new ajax the search string has changed to #q=shep. The problem with this is that browsers stop sending anything after # in the referral string. So all referrals look like they are coming from google.com and not google.com/search?q=shep. That means my stats can’t tell me how people are finding my site. Another thing Google has broken without any official word from the company. Some people think this will be their way to get more people to use Analytics and that Google is abandoning their “Don’t be evil” motto. While this is just speculation, it wouldn’t be surprising if they changed their services to break competitors in order to gain more customers, even if their product is inferior (in my eyes).

The last issue, which is quickly becoming moot as I’ve been moving away from Gmail, is every single day I get some kind of error in Gmail. It either logs me out right after logging in or I get the popular “Error 500, there was an error processing your request. Trying again in 5s…” error.

Seems Google is messing up a lot these days. Maybe, instead of buying up other companies and releasing useless features on products that are out there, they should do something to stabilize their current products, without breaking everything.