One of my biggest problems with Apple Mail (or GMail in the past) has been the inability to keep mail as unread until I'm ready to act on it. It's probably not the greatest GTD strategy to keep mail marked as "unread" in my inbox until I'm ready to process or address it, but I picked up the habit years ago as an Outlook and then Thunderbird user. I'm not sure if GMail ever remedied the issue with a Labs feature, but after a bit of googling-out-of-frustration today I found the Apple Mail plugin TruePreview from Christian Serving, LLC. It's free, quick, easy and works. After trying out a number of other hacks, I was so happy to come across this today and had to share in case there are any other wacko's out there who prefer to keep mail new until it's time to act.

I've had the "samharrelson.com" domain since 2006 and I've used it as the primary site of my personal blog since that time. I've also had my personal email there (along with a set of paid Google Apps which I've just recently moved away from). However, I started considering whether or not I could move my family to some sort of .harrelson domain that would stay in our family's possession, complete with backend storage for photos, files and memories. That would eliminate my/our reliance on corporations promising not to be evil or companies willing to brashly make decisions for me. Also, I'm looking to do something along similar lines with student blogs/digital portfolios in my 8th Grade Science class over at Griffin Science. Basically, I'd like to equip each student with a subdomain that would have either a Wordpress install or point to a blogging/site service of the student's choosing. So, each kid would have sam.griffinscience.com for perpetuity (if they'd like) but they'd certainly be able to have a copy of their work for the year. So, I came up with the harrelson.fm (on a Media Temple server) idea as sort of a test bed for GriffinScience as well as a way to scratch the indy itch I've had about my family's data. On Twitter, Margaret made the excellent suggestion that .fm could be short for ".family" which I think is just fantastic. If you check out harrelson.fm, you'll see links to Anna, our daughters (and my parents in the coming days). They've each got a large web disk that's triple backed up online and offline, an email account like sam@harrelson.fm and they can either have a blog/site install or go with a cname pointer (which is what Anna did). We also have a family calendar up (nifty Webcalendar install) as well as a family photo gallery and a shared file for docs, budgets, etc. I also get to admin my parents' email and sites/blogs (hope they do blog). I'm excited to see how this works and eventually how it works for GriffinScience. I'm a firm believer in having a central (and independent... corporate free) hub of presence on the web. Hopefully this will be my answer. Now if I can only get in on Dave Winer's Scripting2 experiment so I can take things to a whole different level of blogging and presence! 04e149af6db14524b6ce47d8b22e9b84

When GMail launched on April 1, 2004 I did everything I could to get a precious invite to the service. A few days later, my wish came true and I signed up with skyhawkscience@gmail.com. I then decided to switch over to sharrelson@gmail.com in 2005. That's been my primary "personal email" for the last five years until I started moving everything "back home." Here's the first email to that account (check out that sig quote): Now I'm forwarding everything from there into the sam@samharrelson email (which I plan to use until my atoms move on). It's been a slow process of downloading everything from GMail (via POP) into a secured spot but I'm enjoying creating my "Memory Theater" system full of DIY text files. Here's to the next five yeas of emails (on my own system).

I awoke to a few hundred bounced-back emails in my (Mail.app) inbox this morning. Yikes. It seemed to all be coming from my old primary personal email address (sharrelson@gmail.com) that I've been forwarding to my self-hosted account. So, I went to check that GMail account (I've moved my personal address off of GMail but many folks still email me there) and saw this: Yikes again. Good morning to you too, Google. Luckily, I had set up a few Verification Options so I could regain control of my account in case this happened. If you haven't yet, you really should. Just sign into your GMail (or Google Account) and go here. If not, you'll be faced with this, and I've heard that route is not always pleasant. So, I text myself, get my verification code, type it into the little box and get to pick a new password... I'm all set from there. The almost insulting part is the "Read some tips on creating a secure password" since I use an encrypted password via the awesome 1Password app (which I also have on my iPhone and iPad). It looked more like spoofing from the email bouncebacks I got. In other words, this wasn't an insecure password issue or me clicking on a phishing email (I haven't logged into GMail in a while since all the mail from there forwards to my self-hosted address). As GMail and Google apps continue to climb in market share, I'm wondering how frequently these stories will continue to pop up. Google isn't known for their "customer" service (I do pay for 200 gigs of extra storage for GMail and Picasa), which could lead to many headaches and potential brand damage. So, be smart and update your verification info beforehand. It can/will happen to you.

 

Not that I'm complaining since this is a developer release and all, but it is still interesting that your Wave account is so seperate from your main Google Account...

I wonder what the rollover process will be when Wave starts opening to the public on September 30?

Seriously folks, J and K. 

Sent from my iPhone