All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

I’m finally moving on from bryan (at) btvillarin.com and switching entirely to me (at) bryanvillarin.com. I’ve made a forwarder, but I’ll phase that out after a month. I just hope that I changed my email address from all the various online services.

As of today, Saturday, April 19th, 2008, I’ve stopped using bryan (at) btvillarin.com. That’s a relief.

I want the fewest amount of inboxes as possible. Having to read private messages from multiple social networks detract from that.

I like that Flickr and Twitter send the full text of the message to your email address (if you request those notifications). Plus, Flickr allows you delete all your inbox messages easily - Twitter needs to add this feature.

Facebook and Myspace don’t send the content of the private message in your email. Instead, you have to click through and log in to read it - terrible!

I have my email address listed everywhere. Why can’t you just go with that?

Post inspired by Paul Stamatiou, “Why Private Messages Suck“

Since the beginning of April, anybody I’ve emailed at Yahoo says they haven’t gotten any email from me, or they don’t reply (when they normally would). The exception seems to be my web host’s Yahoo email address. Yes, it’s odd, isn’t it?

My email is being blocked by Yahoo! Mail. What can I do?

Talking with my host and looking at the mail server logs, they’re delivered successfully. Some of them will say “421 Message from (205.134.225.50) temporarily deferred.” A few seconds later [in the mail server log], it’ll say “250 ok dirdel” which means it’s all good.

I’ve been bugging my host about this, but if I don’t have to, I need a reason to believe everything is okay except for these few people who don’t check their Bulk Mail folder. (That would be another issue.)

Any ideas? If you want to help me test, email me with your Yahoo address and I promise to email you back. The more the better. Thanks!

Update 4:20pm 4/29/07 - Thanks to Connie’s help, at least I can verify that my emails are going directly into the Bulk Mail folder. What now?

Update 8:25pm 4/29/07 - My last email to Connie went directly into her Yahoo inbox — but she added me to her address book beforehand. Is there anything I can do?

Update 10:16am 4/30/07 - Carlo (who emailed me from Yahoo-Inc.com) emailed me through a co-worker that saw this blog post. Carlo, if you’re reading this, I emailed you back at 9:30am and haven’t heard back.

Update 10:43am 4/30/07 - From Carlo: “I’ve updated our database to reflect the correct category for your sending IP; the changes should take full effect in a few hours. If you continue to receive reports of your emails going missing or into your recipients’ Bulk folder thereafter, just let me know.”

Lastly, refer to Why am I getting “451 Message temporarily deferred” or “421 Message from x.x.x.x temporarily deferred” errors when sending mail to Yahoo!? and fill out the form if you’re having the same problems.

Blogging is cool, especially if important people actually read it. All should be back to normal soon enough — whatever that means! Special thanks to Carlo and your co-worker informant!

My host just emailed me this evening, quietly announcing that he installed RoundCube Webmail for me. Sweet!

When Alex King first mentioned RCW, I really wanted it instead of SquirrelMail. Perhaps I’m a sucker for a gorgeous interface. At least when I’m checking email at a friend’s house or at school, it’ll be in style.

Unfortunately, I can’t import my address book from Thunderbird. Until that feature rolls out, it’ll be tough to switch to using RCW full-time.

Oh yeah, and I’d be without Thunderbird’s Bayesian spam filters. I don’t think I have SpamAssassin - my host is running DirectAdmin, and there’s just an adult filter.

I hope Alex King gets his tabbed email proposal accepted, because the RCW mock-ups he created looks really good.

Anyway, if you have SquirrelMail, I think you should ask your host if they could install RoundCube Webmail. It’s awesome!

A coworker asked me, “Outlook is broken - can you fix it?”

I go to her office, asking them to reproduce the problem. So, they use the “Find” feature to try and find an email, types in one search term, then clicks “Go” (or whatever it was). Then, Outlook froze. Okay, so she ends the process and restarts Outlook. A couple minutes later, I walk out of their office, problem “solved”.

What happened?

She was searching 6,000+ emails! Those aren’t stored locally, either; we have an Exchange server. So, I explained that the server probably got overloaded and didn’t respond to her client computer, which led to Outlook freezing up.

My suggestion? Move the emails around (into sub folders, since their inbox contained all those emails). Then, you could narrow down the search more easily. I saw a bunch from 2004 and 2005, so those probably need to be purged and/or archived. My other tip, put the email from 2004 and 2005 into their own folders, labeled respectively. A few minutes at a time, they could go through them and just delete the ones they don’t need anymore.

From what I’ve learned with GTD, I went a bit further to explain that the inbox should just be used as a collection box, and they needed to sort the email into other folders to make it easier to take next actions.

So, what are my current email folders?

• @Action
• @Public Counsel
• @Read Only
• @Waiting For
• Archive
• Finances
• Public Counsel Reference
• Purchases
• To Nuke

I have folders which help me narrow down where an email from my inbox should be relocated to (if needed). That allows me to find emails more easily. However, you should definitely tweak the system to suit your needs.

My secret: the “To Nuke” folder. When I get an email, and I’ve already replied to it or took action with it, I’ll move it to my “To Nuke” folder immediately. Every week, I’ll sift through it to see if any email won’t be needed any longer. Most times, it’s usually safe to clear it out.

Remember, this is what works for me. You need to figure out a system that’ll help you manage your email much more efficiently, even if it only saves you a few seconds. It’ll add up. Hopefully you can take my fairly broad folder system and adapt it to your usage. (No, it isn’t a new idea - I’m just stating it my own way. Inbox Zero is much more detailed…you don’t even know!)

Oh yeah, if you slack off for awhile, don’t worry about it. Just get back on track, m’kay? If it makes you feel any better, I’m slackin’ right now, and today would be perfect to get things back in order.

I’m switching from Gmail to using Mozilla Thunderbird since I found out my webhost has IMAP installed. I don’t need all that space for email anyway. Here goes nothing:

1. In Gmail, “Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded)”
2. When messages are accessed with POP, “archive Gmail’s copy“
3. Read “Why wasn’t all my mail downloaded?“
4. Configure Thunderbird for Gmail
5. Leave Thunderbird open to download all my email from Gmail’s servers
6. Setup Thunderbird for my server’s IMAP account
7. Create an archive folder on my IMAP account, so I have someplace to move the email I download
8. Set Gmail to forward email to my IMAP email account; disable POP email
9. Add a nice theme and some extensions, then enjoy!

After settling in, I’ve created some filters that’ll be moving messages to more distinct folders. I’m feeling comfortable now.

I don’t want to say why I’m doing this switch. There’s pros and cons to using a webmail app (like Gmail), IMAP, and POP. Fortunately, with my host, I have all three options. SquirrelMail isn’t great, but if I absolutely can’t use Thunderbird, it gets the job done until I get to one of my computers. Then when I connect, everything is just the way it’s supposed to be in my email account. In any case, if I’m happy, that’s all that matters, right?

Oh yeah, Gmail? It’s not goodbye - it’s more like, see ya later…

I was reading Lifehacker’s Special “Train others how to use email“, and my eyes were opened. What do I mean?

Edit the subject line - I knew that I should use subject lines that actually pertain to the email. It didn’t exactly occur to me that I should edit their subject line if they use a vague one. Then again, I think I don’t do that because within Gmail, the message thread will go into a different one.

Facilitate complete responses - I usually don’t write messages outlined in the article, but I suppose it’d help immensely if I wrote emails in that manner. I also don’t reply inline with emails. If it’ll help everyone, I suppose I should.

Respond after a few hours - This is perfect. I was probably making myself look better than I really could be by replying as quick as possible. I definitely think I set my bar too high with some coworkers, and actually, I think that’s why my boss replies to emails the way he does. *sigh*

Get outside the inbox - I have friends that sometimes have a lot of drama…over the internet. I think if they would’ve done things in this manner, where they call the person instead of continuing the battle over the internet, maybe the discussion would’ve been lighter.

Anyways, I won’t rewrite the whole article. If you use email, read it and be enlightened!

Have you heard of Spamgourmet? Pretty nifty! You can have a bunch of “disposable email addresses” without compromising your main one(s) to companies you’re not completely sure are trustworthy. Then, if you find out that the company didn’t give your email address away to 3rd parties (or hasn’t spammed you), you can always change your email address (if you had to create an account of some sort).

I’m going to adapt the method of writing short emails by simply keeping the message within the subject and ending with (EOM). Some people might not understand me at first, but they’ll figure it out and see that they won’t have to open the entire email. I haven’t heard of EOM until today. (Golf clap: 43 Folders, despite the fact that the weblog post had to do with Quicksilver)

Service Providers: “A list of most of the common SMS to email gateways. Great for building a tool that emails people on their cell.” Or you can better contact people without having to visit each service website. Most of my friends have Verizon Wireless, but a handful uses some others. Annoying, but hopefully not for too much longer. (Golf clap: Jon Gales)