Peter's Blog

Do you know that you can use any suffix with your GMail address as long as it’s preceded with “+” sign? So if your address is johnsmith@gmail.com, you can tell people to send emails to johnsmith+friends@gmail.com and it would still reach your mailbox. Now you can create several filters using “To:” field and your mails would be in order. When you’ll be signing to some online service, for instance a forum, you can use johnsmith+forum@gmail.com and filter all spam using single rule. It’s really useful. Try it!

I’ve been invited to test threadsy.com which is some kind of aggregation site which combines your mail, Facebook and Twitter (and more) accounts into one data stream. After some troubles with creating my account (it’s still in testing phase, so it can happen) I’ve added my Gmail, Twitter and Facebook accounts into it and begin to play. It’s pretty impressive. Everything is divided into two streams. One on the left called “inbound” consist every message which is posted directly to you. Left stream, called “unbound” is everything posted by your friends which is not addressed directly to you. You can post comments to Facebook posts directly from the stream, you can “like” them as well. You can post your post from it either and it’s possible to post both to FB and twitter simultaneously. It saves some time. But two things are pretty awesome:

1. When you’re posting link on FB, Threadsy will shorten it for you.

2. When your link points to a movie (for instance on YouTube) then threadsy would embed it into post. I know that FB is doing it as well, but it’s not always working, at least for me. Threadsy is handling it pretty well.

What I don’t like about it is that when I’ve first launched bottom of the screen was truncated so I was unable to see everything, that’s why I’ve missed option to invite ten more people to test Threadsy. And support suggested me to follow them on Twitter, because they’re posting invites there from time to time. Lame!
Anyway, I’m happy with this new service for now. Time will show if it’s really so good.

I’ve recently switched from hosted Exchange account to GMail and had about 100 of contacts in my Outlook data file. Too much to enter manually, but luckily GMail is offering import function using CSV files. Yuppi I’ve said. But it was too soon to celebrate victory. It came out that my Import/Export option in Outlook File menu is grayed (disabled). Have no fear Google is here, I’ve said and started searching. Unfortunately without results. I was mad and still don’t want to enter everything manually, so I’ve left it as is (only few most important contacts on my GMail account).

And today the resolution came to me suddenly (I believe that I’ve finally rested a little, so my brain started to work), there is Polish software company (CodeTwo) which is developing very useful tools for MS Exchange. I was using their products many times. So I’ve visited their website and found what I was looking for. CodeTwo Outlook Export ladies and gentlemen it is. It’s great, but tiny tool, which gives you ability to export every data from Outlook to CSV. And even let you give custom names to the fields you’re importing (useful when you’re using localized version of Outlook (as I did) and want to import exported data to app which doesn’t support your local names). After few minutes of adjustments I’ve gained full list of my contacts on my GMail account. Happy!