Someone hacked my gmail

... or in any other way got access to it and sent (non critical) spam from it.

So first and foremost, if you got an unsolicited email from my gmail account this night, I do apologize. It probably only contains a link to a non existent document. If you can see any data / route / ip / trace in the email that could help me identify the source, kindly reply to me via this email.

I was under the impression that a) my google password is quite strong, and b) that I'm very selective with app or site I allow access to my gmail account.

The weird thing is the list of recipients they picked. It's a strange combination from people I've sent email to in the past, and people I follow on g+ (but did not send an email to).
They all exist in my gmail address book, and the only common denominator I found  so far is, that none of them have a phone number in the address book entry... apart from that I have to draw a blank.

I also found the original email (not only the non-delivery replies) in my sent folder, so I looks like the email has really been sent through my gmail account (and not only with my email in from/reply-to).

Of course in the meantime I not only changed my gmail password, I also reviewed the web-apps and services that have access to my gmail, and will go through the apps on my iPad and Android phone.

Again, sorry... If you have any data to help, just pass it on.

Thunderbird hack: Domain Specific Move

One of the most frequent actions in Thunderbird is to move a message that I received from a business partner or customer to a message folder for exactly this partner/customer. Same for messages I sent to them.

However, as you communicate with more customers and partners, the folder hierarchy will become more complex and I already need about 6 clicks to select the specific folder.

Sometimes I'm lucky and it is the most recently used folder, then I can do it with the "move again" function directly in the context menu; sometimes, it is at least in the recent folder menu, still 3 clicks.

WIBNI if TB could just remember that I always move messages from domain A to the folder X, lets say from "ibm.com" to folder "/Vendors/IBM" or something like that, and then present me with a one-click option on the menu.

So I wrote an add-on for this and called it "Domain Specific Move".
It does exactly what I described.

I find the most frequently used domain in the email (counting all from sender, recipient, cc-list).
If I already find a setting for this, I create an additional menu item in the move message menu for a move to this folder.

If not, I present a "learn" menu item, that lets you train the extension on where to put mails for this extension (i.e. register a folder for this domain). You pick the destination folder yourself. No magic included there.

Once I thus learned and stored the folder for this domain, I can - next time this domain appears - present the "Move to " menu item as above.

Configuration is stored in the preferences under "extensions.domainmove.".
Currently I have no options page for this, so if you want to change or remove an entry, you have to go to the prefs.js file or the about: dialog.

Yes, I know, filters can do the same; but when I select to manually run the filter, it will not tell me what exactly it is up to... The beauty of my approach (IMHO) is, that I see it on the menu and can decide otherwise, because not always does the folder registered for this domain really match.

In essence this is only a short cut with an educated suggestion. No behind-the-scenes magic.

Todos:

• more flexibility with domains with more than 2 parts (e.g. at.ibm.com should map to ibm.com if there is no at.ibm.com)
• unlearn domains (without going to the about: dialog)
• option for domains-to-ignore; currently I ignore non-specific domains as gmail.com, a1.net, gmx.at, sun.com, oracle.com [1].
• ignore "my" domain (see comment re oracle.com)

Available for TB3+ only.

I will polish the code and implement some of the above todos, then I will post the first beta.

--
[1] well for me as an former Sun and now Oracle employee, all emails contain either an oracle.com or sun.com address and this domain contains no information on where to archive the email.

Show sender's picture in Thunderbird 3

With Thunderbird 3 you now can store a photo to each contact.

Nice feature, but totally pointless without an option to actually display this photo next to the emails.

Now for the good part: there is an add-on to do exactly this...

Contact Photos :: Add-ons for Thunderbird

It looks if it can find the sender of the email in any of your address books, and there is a picture stored with this record. If so, it will be displayed in the message header. If not, a dummy picture is displayed.

You can control the behavior a bit...

I know the Mac folks will now brag that their Apple Mail software could do this for years... And you are right... It was overdue.

Now all we need is a way to easily collect those photos (with gravatars not being that popular). Since the address book in Thunderbird still lacks usability, there is of course no way to simple drag and drop images into the address book... Maybe I'll hack this...

Delete nor Not Delete

I noticed a strange co-incidence between Lightning (the Calendar plugin for Mozilla Thunderbird) and the crappy mail client of my Nokia 6233...

Both cannot delete the item you are currently viewing.
Strange.

In Lightning (and I guess in Sunbird as well), when you open an event (or todo item) you cannot delete this very item from the menu or toolbar.

There is simply no delete function.
Only in the various calendar views, but not on the item itself.
This annoys me, because here is exactly the place where you see and know most about the potential delete candidate... what better place to delete it ?
(btw: I already filed bug #392021 against it, but it does not move... maby I'll grab it myself one day)

Same in the email client on my Nokia 6233:Not that anything really works there... The 6233 does something I dubbed "POP over IMAP", since it uses IMAP as a technical protocol layer but only offers POP like features.

There also, I cannot delete the mail I'm currently viewing. I have to go back to the inbox and delete it from there. Crappy.

Vacation vs email

After a 2 week vacation (a "near offline experience") I managed to reduce my business email inbox from 450 unread items to 17... Those 17 I really have to act upon.
(And I'm not talking to email I receive from a maillist, or other inboxes like Flickr, Friendfeed, Google Reader, ...)

Which means that in 2 weeks time I have <4% meaningful emails ?
Ok, I've read about 80% of the emails - at least the subject and the first couple of lines - on my Palm through my bluetooth/6233/gprs connection. But that was trouble enough.
a) VersaMail on the Palm T|X does not successfully delete emails on the (IMAP)Server, not matter how often you tell it to...
b) Neither das the Nokia 6233 built-in email client; though it says it does IMAP and it from a pure protocol level does it of course, it simply only offers POP functionality, though; i.e. retrieve, mark-read on the server (always on retrieval, how annoying) , but no delete.
c) more and more emails tend to be HTML, so neither the Palm nor the Nokia is a good interface to read them - unless you can get actual information out of a "Your email-reader does not support HTML...."

Time to get an iPhone or Blackberry ???
Or are the above stats (<4%!) telling me, I should not even bother with mobile email anymore (after I successfully have worked with it (and implemented it earlier myself) since 1999...
My god, that was last century ...

Thunderbird - Display mailer icon

Cool Thunderbird extension to display an icon according to the senders mailer agent: DispMUA.

So those Outlook users can now be easily spotted.

"Service provider" starts with "Service"

What does a "service provider" actually think, when they have a planned (!) mail outage for about 12 hours without prior announcement?

And then, why can't they configure the IMAP servers properly for that period of time, so that the do not complain about my password but just say that the service is down (which they can)?

And - while we are at it - what can they possibly mean with "Web 2.0 user interface" ?

So clueless...

IMAP for Gmail is finally really here.

Yes, now it does work. As the gmail blog pointed out it would take a couple of days for everyone to have it.

Since this night I have IMAP, too. And against my belief, I discovered it through configuring a Gmail account with IMAP in Thunderbird and wait for the error message to vanish.

So here's the proof:



And I also found the confirmation on the gmail blog here.

You actually get each Gmail tag as an IMAP folder, and the default/system and a special folder/view called "Gmail" with the

• All Mail
• Drafts
• Sent Mail
• Spam
• Starred

views in it. Looks like this in thunderbird.

Nice.

IMAP for Gmail ! ... please hold

So the IMAP support in Gmail is not just a rumor but actually there, as the official gmail blog reports.

However, not everyone has is right now as they admit in the fine print:

(Psst. If you don't see the "IMAP" in the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab, then check back soon. We are giving it to users as fast as we can).

So, I'll be checking back soon, i.e. daily...

IMAP for Gmail ?

TechCrunch reports that Gmail [is] Apparently Enabling IMAP Support.

That'd be cool...

It's true, they talk about it in their help on how to enable IMAP, but it is not yet there in the application.

I wonder if and how the map tags to folders ??
Or just a "plain"

• Inbox
• Sent
• Draft
• Spam

structure...

Then I'd finally have my local copy of Gmail in Thunderbird really in sync with the Gmail service, something POP3 simply cant do.

Lets (wait and) see.

Thunderbird 2: Display Images

Yet another cool feature in TB2:
When an incoming mail contains images on the web (i.e. images not embedded into the message but rather on any arbitrary web site) Thunderbird in previous version as well as in v2.0 blocks the images per default.
This is to protect the end user from inadvertently and unknowingly sending information to malign websites.
Only if you deliberately click on "Load Images" those images will be loaded.

Now TB2 comes with an additional feature which looks like this:

The upper part has always been there, whats new is the
"Click here to always load remote iamges from some-mail-address".
If you click it, you will never see this message again for this very sender... instead images will always be loaded for mails from this sender, because you trust him, and declare your trust within Thunderbird.

This info is actually saved in the address book entry of the user.
You'll notice a new field there:
"Allow remote images in HTML mail."
This will be set by clicking on the above link. Obviously you can also do so manually...

I wonder if I want this option on a domain level... I guess not.

Thunderbird 2: Intelligent reply

Usually (in TB until 1.5+) when you replied to a message that you sent yourself, the TO: field in the reply would contain your account, and the original recipient would be in the CC.
In TB 2 when you reply to a message you sent yourself, the TO: will be filled with the original recipients.

E.g. you find a folder in you SENT folder (most usually) with
TO: foouser@someorg.tld
FROM: myself@someorg.tld

In TB until 1.5+ hitting reply would yield:
TO: myself@someorg.tld
CC: foouser@someorg.tld

In TB2 you get:
TO: foouser@someorg.tld

This is most definitely more likely what you intended.

Great work...