FortySouth

Recently I put up a couple of ads on Craigslist for items I had for sale. Almost instantly, some responses hit my inbox with one-liners such as this gem:

So I’m excited, someone is interested. It would only be momentary though:

Bummer. Rather verbose email sans a single mention of the couch I had for sale. Thankfully, Craigslist (and past experience) had warned me about this. To find out where this email originated, one would typically look at the email headers (in Gmail you can do this by clicking on the drop-down next to “Reply” and selecting “Show original”. It opens in a new window/tab with something like this:

Parsing the output, the email was sent at 4:48a from some place on the West Coast.

There’s an easier way to filter out potential spam that’s available for most emails by using Gmail lab’s  “sender time zone” feature. If the message headers contain time zone information, it can be displayed right within the email by clicking on “show details” at the top of the email:

Clearly, the sender is not in any timezone that covers the US, let alone in my local area on the East Coast. So just where could this have been sent from? I looked it up and alas:

So in such cases, I safely ignore and delete the message. Much better than heading down a rabbit hole and getting bilked for cash. Go to Labs in Gmail to enable this feature for your sanity.

Soon after releasing offline access for GMail, Google now makes available offline Google Calendar. It was previously only available to Apps users but has now been turned on for everyone. Like offline GMail, offline GCal uses Gears to sync while online and make content available locally when offline.

The neat thing about this is that you can now have access to your schedule/agenda while on the go, and all in one place within GMail if you have enabled the Calendar gadget.

The downside is that calendar entries cannot be edited while offline for automatic syncing when you get back online. Hopefully this is a feature that will be introduced soon.

Another great feature from GMail Labs.

If you lose internet connectivity because you’re on the go or your wi-fi (or neighbor’s, which you’re “borrowing”) is flaky, you can now still get to your cached email on your computer.

Offline GMail uses Gears to download a local cache of your email while you are online, then makes it available when offline by simply opening your browser and going to gmail.com.

If you use Google Docs, you’ve probably used Doc’s Offline feature to get to your documents. Same concept since they both use Gears.

The feature is now available to GMail users that have the US or UK English edition, although it may be a couple of days for some before it shows under your Labs tab.

Whither art thou, O Yahoo! Mail?

GMail is currently innovating and evolving at a much faster rate than the competition, and if the growth predicted in the graph is anything to go by, then Y!Mail really needs to bootstrap itself.

Related Posts:

• Text Messaging via GMail!
• Offline Google Calendar Now Available