Hacking Gmail

When you receive an e-mail from an address that doesn’t end in @gmail.com, Gmail looks at attachments for file extensions known to be executable (such as .dll, .exe, .vbs, and so forth), so if someone sends you one of these file types, their message will bounce back. This goes for files within ZIP archives as well—Gmail looks inside these for executable extensions and the e-mail bounces back to the sender if it contains any. Gmail doesn’t look inside other archive formats, such as RAR or ACE, so you might want to use one of these formats instead of going through the hassle of the following workaround. To get around this annoyance, you can use the same trick that has been used for years. Simply tell the sender to rename the extension of the file to something Gmail will allow (such as .jpg), and when you receive the file, rename it back to the type it really is (for example, change file.jpg to file.exe).

Like most desktop applications, Gmail actually allows you to mark a group of items without having to select each one individually (by mark, I mean to put a check in the checkbox next to an e-mail when you are presented with a list of e-mails).With Gmail, if you’d like to select a group of consecutive messages without marking each one separately, you simply need to check the first on in the list, and then hold down the Shift key and check the last one you want to include in
the group of marked messages—the two e-mails you checked and all of the e-mails between them will now be marked. You can use the same method to unmark e-mails and to star or unstar them. Note, however, that this might not work in all browsers.

Mozilla Extension Gmail Notifier
Technically, this will work on any platform that can run Mozilla-based browsers, but I’ll put Doron Rosenberg’s Gmail Notifier browser extension here. Although it doesn’t provide the same level of interface as a taskbar-based application, for people who spend a lot of time in their web browser, the Mozilla extension is very convenient.
You can find the extension at http://nexgenmedia.net/extensions/.

Mac OS X
OS X users have a choice of two applications, both very similar to each other, and doing pretty much the same thing: placing the mail notification in the menu bar at the top of the screen.

GmailStatus
Carsten Guenther’s GmailStatus (http://homepage.mac.com/carsten. guenther/GmailStatus/) is a good example. It displays new mail counts for the Inbox, and each individual label you might have set up, adds a hotkey to launch Gmail in your browser, supports Growl notifications (see http://growl.info/ for more on that), and gives a hotkey to write a new message in Gmail.