whats the plot

so i usually always pop my gmail mail, especially after i heard the paranoia about how google was closing accounts at random and people were losing insane amounts of email. but recently, i suffered a hard drive reformat (courtesy of windows, which attempted to format my entire hard drive rather than a partition because my hard drive was over 160 gb and win2k can’t read more than that, so it named the drive corrupt), i only had email up through the 4th of january popped from my gmail account.

however, i couldn’t find an easy way to pop the email that i had lost between january 4th to today. i tried many things – i tried resetting the pop option to allow downloading of already downloaded mail in the settings, and this worked for some subset of messages and eventually ceased to work (i got ~1100 messages the first time, ~400 the second time, then ~200, and so on, but eventually it stopped getting new ones).

finally, i found a solution – first, delete anything in your deleted folder. then, select all the messages you already have (for me, anything older than 1/4/2007) by doing a search for “before: 2007/1/4″ (not sure if this only works for inbox and sent or whether it also searches the archived mail, but you can just use “show search options” and search for messages that way too just to be sure). take these messages and delete them. then goto settings, and under forwarding & pop, set gmail to download messages that have already been downloaded. now goto your email client, hit download, and you should get just the subset of messages that you didn’t trash.

you can then goto the trash can, select all conversations and move them to inbox (be careful, don’t accidentally empty the trash!) now this will cause a problem – you’ll find your chats and your sent mail that has no replies to it also in your inbox (which frustrated me). the solution? goto the inbox, do a search for label:chat – select all the messages and hit archive. then go back to the inbox, do a search for messages from: me, and mark all those as archived. then go back to the inbox one more time, do a search across all mail (including archived mail) for messages to: me, and hit “move to inbox.”

and that should do it!

i saw this yesterday when i clicked on the gmail tab to read some new mail. click the image for a readable version of it.

and no, i haven’t custom added any rss feeds to gmail… it means, “know Allah’s marvelous/magnificent plan for your life…” thanks google!

this is a priceless tip that could prove useful to some of the gmail users out there…

peace. not much going on here. i posted some of the pictures i took in atlanta up, but i ended up deleting some of them on accident. so there are only a few on there, but you can see them on the photo galleries.

google launched sms.google.com – seems like something pretty useful and neat.

gmail rocks – i still got some invitations if anyone wants one.

i upgraded to the newest wordpress version that was released yesterday…

that’s all for now…

peace. first off, i want to just point out that not all the pictures on the photos page are pictures that i took. for instance, most of the moving to penn pictures were taken by jawwad, so i wanted to give him credit here.

i have more gmail invitations if anyone wants any — everytime i give some out, they give me more invitations again…

about blog comments, i got my first piece of “comment spam” a few days ago — essentially, i got an email asking me if i wanted to authorize a fishy comment… and sure enough; it looked like it was generated by a script or something; similar to those spam emails. so maybe since no one comments (except like one person who posts his own little blog under mine), i should remove the commenting ability off the site…

anyhow, that’s all for now.

peace. i got 6 gmail invites, if you want one, leave a comment with your name and email address, first 6 comments get it.

pictures of various trips and things coming soon ™. insha’Allah.

argh, yesterday was quite a day. first off, i deleted all the numbers on my palm pilot accidently (i hard resetted the palm, and thought that when i sync it, the program would send the contacts and calendar info back to the palm… but i was mistaken). so after spending time and restoring an old backup and updating it, i then proceeded to accidently delete my entire mp3 collection. argh.

patrick o’leary from gt was nice enough to give me a gmail invite. its pretty cool, i think i am going to start using it. here is a screenshot:

interestingly enough, yahoo raised everyone’s quota to 100 mb too… i wonder where that leaves hotmail with its nice, generous, 3 mb storage.

update: i just saw this on slashdot, there’s also an indian company that’s giving out free 1 gb email accounts.