Ramesh Bhaskar

As of this posting (May 29th 2008 4:51 PM), Google is down and has been that way for probably the past 45 minutes as I’ve noticed it. I Yahoo’d to find out any news about Google going down, but to no avail. I decided to then write to Techcrunch/ReadWriteWeb, because they are people who have sources to obtain such information (at least far better than what I can). Probably will be up on their blogs in a while.

What I wanted to point out is, we are so Google dependant that in the time it was down, I had no way to contact either blogs to let them know it is down (although I think they already do know it, since a lot of their work requires some kinds of research and they would most probably be using Google for it).

As of now, I can’t get access to my feeds, my e-mail, my notebook, orkut, or regular good old search. Is this time to start Yahooing or Liv(e)ing? What is surprising though is that even though Gmail is not working, GTalk is, and it even reports the number of e-mails I have unread.

Update (May 29th 2008 5:05 PM): Google is back up but behaving very erratically.

Update (May 29th 2008 5:30 PM): Google seems to be back up and at it.

I’ve been looking around for a small application that would sit in my taskbar and update me whenever new mail comes in. I don’t know how I missed it, but Google themselves have a tiny application (which seems like a portion out of gtalk) called Gmail Notifier. Small useful application.

Gmail Notifier: Download

I am amazed at the fact that Google can crunch billions of pages and return your results in fractions of a second. This seems almost impossible, but it does seem to turn up your results. The results are good, by far the best results returned by any other search engine (in terms of relevance). Have you ever wondered what those number shown on the screen are?

Out of curiosity I ran a search query for the term “facebook” which returned 164,000,000 results (0.06 seconds). If you keep running it a couple of times, those figures change. Here’s what I got on a couple of runs:

164,000,000 results (0.06 seconds)
164,000,000 results (0.18 seconds)
164,000,000 results (0.13 seconds)
164,000,000 results (0.09 seconds)
164,000,000 results (0.05 seconds)

None of them seem to take too long and the number of results is consistent (rounded off I’m guessing)

What’s surprising though is if you go through all the results you end up with 54 pages of 10 results each which amounts to 540 results. Well it does give you an option to “repeat the search with the omitted results included”. So I did and I got 100 pages with 10 results per page which makes it 1000 results. Also by including omitted results I get 150,000,000 results (0.22 seconds).

Am I missing something here or should the number of results after including the omissions be more than if I did exclude them? It also seems to take longer to search, which is understandable since people wouldn’t normally venture out after 58 pages of results. In fact, if its not within the first 10 pages (if you are patient), you tend to re-phrase you search query in hopes for more targetted results.

What I’m unable to figure out though are what do those enormous numbers mean if it isn’t returning that much information? My only guess is that it represents the number of times the keyword occurs in all the pages they have indexed (or some union/intersection if multiple keywords exist). To me it sounds misleading to say that there are that many “results” when I can’t actually see them.

This is more of a generic setting than a setting for Gmail, however, since I started using IMAP only after Gmail offered it I’ve realized it only now. If you use the Archive+Label combo in Gmail to replicate the feeling of folders then you might have noticed after you’ve set up IMAP in Thunderbird that all the mails that come to your inbox show up with a nice count (n) in brackets. On the other hand, none of the mails which get automatically archived and assigned to labels get displayed.

Its only when you click on a particular label does it tell you if any new mail has arrived. This gets annoying when you have quite a few labels. So as an update to my previous post, I found this setting and thought I would mention it here if anyone else wanted to know.

In order to get the unread message counts on all your labels go to “Tools->Options->Advanced->Config Editor” and type in “imap” into the filter box.

The first setting you see is “mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new” and it is set to false. Double click it to set it to true. Restart Thunderbird and do a “Get Mail->Get All New Messages”. Now if there are any unread mails in any of the labels, it will display them as well (since it has now checked all the IMAP folders you are subscribed to.

I recently made a post on how to configure Windows Live Mail Beta (client) for Gmail’s new IMAP offering. I wasn’t very comfortable with the application and wanted to give Thunderbird a try (again). Although Foxmail has been my primary e-mail client, it does not support IMAP.

The first step is to follow the instructions at the Gmail Help Center for setting up Thunderbird as you IMAP client. Once that is done you still have to configure your folders to map accordingly Gmail.

When you follow the steps at the Gmail Help Center, you end up with a folder list like the following:

The [Gmail] folder has sub folders containing the your actual primary set of folders of your Gmail account (Inbox, Starred, Sent Mail, Drafts, All Mail, Spam & Trash). All your labels are shown as folders outside of this. There is an easy method to map your primary folders correctly to Gmail’s, but doing so will deprive you of access to your labels (which show up as folders in Thunderbird).

So the cleanest way to map the folders is to do the following:

1. In Thunderbird select Tools->Account Settings and select the account that you are using for Gmail IMAP.

2. Select Copies & Folders under that.

3. Sent Mail: Choose ‘Other’ for the “When sending messages, automatically: ” and from the drop down select “AccountName”->[Gmail]->Sent Mail

4. Drafts: For drafts as well, choose “Other” and from the drop down select “AccountName”->[Gmail]->Drafts

5. Spam: Select “Junk Settings”, check the “Move junk messages to”, select “Other” and from the drop down select “AccountName”->[Gmail]->Spam

This fixes most of your folders. The only remaining one is “Trash” and fixing this folder is a bit cumbersome, but it is worth it. By default Deleting a message does not send it to your Gmails “Trash” folder, instead it sends it to Thunderbirds Trash folder. The way IMAP is set up is that Thunderbirds Trash folder is mapped to [IMAP]/Trash on Gmail. So here are your options

1. Let it remain as is and you will have an extra label called [IMAP]/Trash in Gmail, under which all your deleted mails will reside.

2. If you want your deleted mails to be removed from your inbox, but still exist (in your ‘All Mails’ section) then map your trash to ‘[Gmail]/All Mails’

3. If you want your deleted mails to be removed from your inbox, and actually be trashed then map your trash to ‘[Gmail]/Trash’

(1) requires no further action on your part, but (2) & (3) are essentially the same thing, only differing in folder names.

So here’s how you go about fixing your trash folder:

1. Close Thunderbird

2. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\<windows_username>\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\<profile_name>, where <windows_username> is your windows logon and <profile_name> is the current Thunderbird profile you are using.

3. Open prefs.js in your favorite text editor and search for a line that says user_pref(”mail.server.server#.directory-rel”, “[ProfD]ImapMail/imap.gmail.com”);

Here server# refers to your server number. Basically we have to find out which server number is being used for our Gmail IMAP

4. Just below that line, add an additional line that says user_pref(”mail.server.server#.trash_folder_name”, “[Gmail]/Trash”);

5. Startup Thunderbird again and your Trash folder below the Inbox should no longer be there. Instead it will use [Gmail]/Trash. If it does show up, then restart Thunderbird a couple of times until the Trash folder below the Inbox goes away. I have no clue why this happens, but this is a quirk I’ve noticed.

Now anything you delete would go to the actual Trash. If you wanted it archived instead of trashing it, specify [Gmail]/All Mail as the trash_folder_name.

Thunderbird should now be configured to properly work with Gmail’s IMAP.