Jay Meydad's Life Mashup

Just got an announcement from Xoopit that they are shutting down Xoopit for Gmail in order to focus on improving Yahoo mail and My Pictures. This comes as a surprise to me and does not smell like a business decision for two reasons:

• Xoopit should have more resources now that they are part of Yahoo
• I agree with Ouriel that Yahoo could benefit a lot from the data Xoopit collects about Gmail usage

For these reasons and also for the way their email ends, I actually think that it was Google who forced Yahoo and Xoopit to make that decision -

Thank you for using Xoopit for Gmail. We’ll miss you!

Anyways Xoopit, it was fun to use you. You helped me find some forgotten pics that were buried deep inside my Gmail archive. I will miss you as well.

By default, Microsoft Entourage automatically adds a signature at the very bottom of an email thread. I reply to dozens of emails every day and for a long time I used to cut the signature from the bottom and paste it to the correct place.

You might ask yourself how come I kept doing this. Very simple, I just could not find the right setting under the Preferences pane that would change the behavior. There is also no setting related to the positioning of the signature under the “Signatures”window to address this.

I finally found the time and did some online research and was able find the answer. I figured others could benefit from this tip as well. So, here it is. To get Entourage automatically add the signature at the top of the reply/forward, make sure you have the following setting:

BTW, Gmail used to have the same problem but recently added a fix to the Gmail Lab called Signature tweaks. Hard to imagine this has not become a standard feature of every mail client.

Despite what a few bloggers have posted lately, despite the fact Google wants to buy Twitter very much, despite Twitter’s speculated price tag, I am calling the Twitter executive team not to sell itself to Google’s.

If Twitter will be part of Google it is probably going to go down at the same time Gmail and other Google services go down (you can check status here). This would leave millions of folks in the twittersphere with no effective tool to immediately post their rants.

Biz, Ev, You have built the internet’s freedom of speech best tool. Don’t do it.

Earlier today, while reading Google’s response to the Gmail outage, a little “Sign up for Gmail” text link had caught my eye. I know it is an editorially selected link rather than a target ad, but it reminded me those complaints from advertisers who don’t want their ads (display or text ads such as Google AdSense) to show next to certain types of objectionable or sensitive content, for example an airline ad on a page that talks about a plane crash.

So what do you think was the CTR on this text link and what was Gmail’s sign up process conversation rate for those that were brave enough to click?

Do you know these house organizer services you hire to come to your house and organize stuff? Well, one of the best things that often happen when they organize your house & closets are the forgotten photos and other items they are able to find.  Things that you know are somewhere in the house but you have no clue where exactly.

Well, Xoopit is the same but for your Gmail (as long as you use Firefox). It is a great inbox search utility that makes it easy to find attachments (photos, videos) and browse through them inside Gmail.

You should give it a try.

Gmail users need a simpler & quicker way to attach files to a message. The current process requires too many clicks and is ‘99ish.

Just like many file upload and photo sharing services (Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery), I should be able to drag multiple files into the body of the message (or into a special attachments dropbox) and then, using Ajax, the upload process should start automatically and asynchronously as I continue to compose the email.

I wish this would be added soon by the Gmail team as part of their Labs program. IMHO, this feature is more useful and important than (useless) features like Superstars, Old Snakey, Random Signiture and others.

But until this is going to happen, you might want to try dragdropupload, a useful Firefox Add-On which partially solves this problem.

I really wanted to try Yahoo Mobile on the iPhone. I swear I did. So as soon I saw this invite to upgrade to the best mobile experience for the iPhone, I hit the Download link.

But then I got this message that my phone is not currently supported…

Confused? Me too.

I guess I will have to keep using the Yahoo Mobile Web version,  a poor client, that has no way to select & delete emails without opening the email and scrolling all the way to the bottom!

Good thing that I’ve migrated most of my email accounts to GMAIL (with IMAP support) which works great on the iPhone.

• Gmail announced the addition of IMAP support. Finally my inbox can be kept in sync when I read emails using my iPhone. This is how to set it up.
• Meebo, my favorite web based IM service, released a very cool and useful Firefox plug-in. Try it out.