I was wondering how the geekrant.org domain name propagated so fast. Turns out since September, DNS updates have been happening about every five minutes, instead of twice a day.
We also got a quick path on getting indexed by Google, courtesy of using Google’s AdSense, which evidently bumps you to the top of the indexing queue so they can serve more relevant ads.
Speaking of Google, for people in the US, there’s now Google via SMS.
Just so you don’t think Gmail is perfect… It displays most HTML mail okay, but see how it displays replies from its own invitations:
Gmail, everybody’s favourite web mail, well except maybe for Charles Wright, has just updated with new features.
What’s New at the Gmail help centre tells us that now there is a Gmail notifier (a small windows app that lets you know when new mail has arrived along with its sender and subject), searching contacts has been made easier, you can forward mail to another account and you can save drafts.
Interestingly the mail forwarding feature is ‘free during the test’ which makes me wonder what other premium features are being planned for Gmail.
UPDATE
I’ve just installed Notifier and it has the option to set Gmail as the default sender of email for when you click on mailto: links. Pretty neat if you’re a heavy Gmail user.
Ooooooooooh. Seems Age IT writer Charles Wright isn’t too keen on people disagreeing with him. In today’s Age he writes about Hotmail’s cancellation of free WebDav (Outlook/Outlook Express) access (bastards!) and mentions in passing that Fastmail.fm is great (so I’ve heard) and that it’s better than GMail, which has “no spam protection to speak of.”
Oh. Coulda fooled me. So I left a comment on his blog, mentioning that actually GMail does have spam protection. He replied reckoning yeah but it only catches about 30%. I replied saying it was catching most of mine. This apparently inspired a followup blog entry making note of overzealous Google-lovers writing to him if he criticises the company.
Well, what can I say. I’ve been using GMail for some months now, and feeding it mail addressed to one of my oldest and most spammed email addresses (dbowen at custard dot net dot au, circa 1997). GMail catches most of them. I just logged in after being away for three and a half hours (gasp!) and it’s caught 18 spams — no false positives, none slipped through into my Inbox. It’s not always this good, but I have no major complaints.
Maybe he looked at GMail early on, when the filters weren’t as good. Or maybe he attracts a higher class of spammer than me. Dunno. But it works for me.
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By the way, anybody want a GMail invitation? They keep giving me lots, and although I’ve tried giving some away via GMail swap sites, they keep on coming back. Leave a comment with your email address in the email field (it won’t display publicly, but I’ll see it).