Square Galaxy

Before the 2008 Olympics, I was at NBCOlympics.com looking for information. I noticed how they had a form where you could enter your email address to receive Olympic coverage updates or something like that. I entered the email address: nbcolympics@jacob…com.

I have an email system where anything@jacob…com will land in my inbox. That makes it really easy to give a custom email address to different people/sites so I can filter my email based on the TO address.

I didn’t receive a single email about the Olympics in all of that time. But I have received emails from Rotoworld.com about some sort of Fantasy sports thing.

What does this mean? The only person I gave that particular email address to was NBCOlympics. If I’m getting other email to that address, the only conclusion is that NBCOlympics sold off or gave away my email address to others.

Not that I’ll be bothered by the spam, because I’ve now switched all email to that address to arrive in a special spam email account.

In my attempt to clean up my jacobbrunson.com inbox (hosted through Google Apps; powered by Gmail), I wanted to take all the email messages about voicemail from GrandCentral, Gizmo Project, and others, and apply a label to them so I can sort them away.

I thought an appropriate label for these types of messages would be Voicemail.

When I tried this, it returned the following error message:

System specific names are not allowed. Please try another name.

I don’t understand why Voicemail would be a system specific name, unless Google has something special coming to Gmail.

I think we all probably manage our email in different ways. I’m usually the type that only ever looks at the top of the unread message list and goes on with life not worrying what messages might be left around.

However, recently I found that I’ve accumulated 2500 messages in my inbox. I’m not sure it is necessarily a bad thing, but it is something I’m trying to fix.
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Thunderbird is an email software sibling to Firefox, the excellent web browser from the Mozilla foundation.  Today I found out that version 2.0 was released for Thunderbird.  Among the new features are:

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This post really isn’t that important, so feel free not to read it. That is because I just got done reading a lot of emails that aren’t that important, so if I can save you a bit of time from having to read this post, I will.

All it takes is a couple of email lists to go a couple days and the unread emails stack up like nothing else. Particularly, the BYU webmasters list and the Nutch users list kept me quite busy.

In other news, I think the spellcheck feature of the Google Toobar is pretty cool.