August 2007, Week 2

ON COMPUTERS | BY BOB AND JOY SCHWABACH

Recent Columns
March 2008, Week 1
1. Now presenting.
2. Point of sale.
3. Internuts
4. Hide those pictures.

February 2008, Week 4
1. It says here in the encyclopedia.
2. What's the password?

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August 2007, Week 2

GOOGLE MANIA

THE GMAIL GOES THROUGH

We're both big fans of Gmail, and we'll tell you why in just a moment. But first we want to tell you the exclusivity is gone. You used to have to be "invited" to use Google's Gmail service. Invitations were even sold on eBay. But it's free and wide open now. So get it and love it at Gmail.com. Gmail

There are several great things about Gmail: One is that it keeps a record of all your mail. We mean "all" your mail, even spam and the stuff you deleted. That means that later on, when you strike your hand to your forehead and say "dummkopf," or something like that, "I know I threw out an e-mail about this six months ago," it will still be there. Every so often you might want to clear those old files out -- for neatness' sake, mind you -- but if you don't, nothing bad will happen. You can recover any of those e-mails if you can remember a single significant word in the content.

Now we come to the spam catcher. Gmail has the best spam catcher we've ever found. We get close to 300 spam messages a day -- apiece. Gmail catches 99 percent, and after 30 days sends them into the great beyond. At the moment, Joy has 8,115 pieces of spam in her folder, all destined for oblivion.

Other spam catchers are amateurs. Bob has an America Online account, which bills itself as a superior spam catcher, but seems close to worthless. It has cut out less than half the spam. You call that spam-catching? Every Nigerian between Lagos and Timbuctu seems to have the account name, and they all stand ready to transfer millions if only you will provide your bank code Gmail goes through

If you want to go behind the scenes and see how Gmail goes through (not really), you can go to Mail.Google.com/mvideo and watch three Bulgarian grandmas pass it hand to hand and a Taiwanese forklift operator carry it to a warehouse. (You can submit your own.)

NEW GMAIL FEATURES

You can collect mail from five other e-mail accounts. Any replies you send will look like they came from the original e-mail account.

The Gmail calendar is a button at the top of the screen if you sign up for it, and it lets you keep track of all your appointments, set reminder messages and add search results, like TV show times and dates. More on this later.

Package tracking. If you order something from online retailers, they usually send you a note when it is shipped and they include the shipper's tracking code. Ordinarily you would have to go to the shipper's Web site and type in the code to find out where the package is. But on the right of the Gmail screen there is a button that will automatically link to the shipper and track the package.

If someone sends you a PowerPoint file, you don't have to launch a PowerPoint viewer. Just click the "view as slideshow" button.

THE GMAIL CALENDAR

This is the top "wow." Along with keeping your appointments, you can search for events. Enter your U.S. city and state and you will be connected to a summary of every available online events calendar for that location. It also works for many cities around the world, and those lists are being expanded as well. Google Calendar

Click on something you're interested in and it will not only be added to your calendar, but all subsequent events in that category will be added to your calendar. Want to watch the World Series of Poker? All matching programs with their times, dates and channels for your location will be entered on the calendar. If you search on just "poker" as an event, you get a ton of listings, each with a brief summary line. (Some are events in neighborhood bars.) To find all this stuff, go to Google.com/calendar/gallery.

You can search public calendars by any keyword, by the way. Such calendars include public appearance schedules of the current presidential candidates, concert dates hosted by Atlantic Records and other companies, new DVD movie releases from Netflix, new TV shows and sporting events, updates on special travel deals, etc.

WHO PAYS THE PIPER?

How does Google get paid for providing these services? It sells ads, of course. The ads appear as remarkably unobtrusive short boxes of text along the right-hand side of your screen. There are no distracting pictures, just a few lines of text. Similar unobtrusive ads appear on screens when using the browsers from Mozilla, Firefox and Maxthon.

This contrasts remarkably with the ads we get with America Online, which come complete with flashing lights and automatic video sequences you can't turn off. Every single e-mail has an advertisement at the bottom, usually in motion. Many of the ads seem like spam -- like pitches to take out new mortgages, just when mortgage defaults have become a national problem. The ads are so annoying that Bob swears he will never patronize any company that runs a promotion on AOL.

WHO GOES THERE?

At StatCounter.com you can download a program that invisibly counts visitors to your Web site. The numbers will usually be much lower than what you get from other Web traffic analyzers. Differences in counts often arise because many users delete all cookies when they log off the Internet. When that user returns to the site later, they are counted as a new visitor.