I’ve recently been converted.

No, I’m not talking about religion here. (Who knows why I would ever want to blog about religion, anyway!) I’m actually talking about something much more relevant to most of us in this day and age: e-mail.

I’m sure that many and relate themselves to me when I talk about how, during the past school year, I really didn’t do much to keep my e-mail under control, and I found myself having an inbox full of stuff dating all the way back to last September. By the end of June, I had over 1500 messages in my inbox, and I didn’t even remember what most of it was.

Well, one of my goals this summer was to get my life better organized (both in the real world and the computer world), and e-mail was certainly a major target for getting my life back in order. And lo and behold, I found my inspiration in the July 2008 issue of Macworld, which featured a three-part article by Joe Kissell called Empty Your Inbox (part 1, part 2, part 3), which was heavily based on the Inbox Zero philosophy by Merlin Mann. I delved into the Macworld article, Merlin’s video presentation and Merlin’s own set of blog articles surrounding this novel idea of getting your inbox down to nothing.

And after reading and watching, surprising as though it may seem, I’ve successfully implemented Inbox Zero into my life this past month, and now could hardly imagine going back to letting my inbox fill up. (I’m still going through the last few transitional growing pains of adjusting to a new paradigm for my e-mail, but a lot of this stuff is finally starting to become instinctive.)

While you can go check out this info for yourself, here’s my summary of what Inbox Zero is all about, and how it works.
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Tags: data detectors, e-mail, inbox, Inbox Zero, Macworld, Mail, Merlin Mann, OmniFocus, organization

I’ve blogged about how Apple has really ramped it up against Microsoft Office with iWork ‘08. That is, they’ve ramped up against Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. But what about Outlook/Entourage? Well, Apple also has its return weapon for Entourage, which is the combination of Mail, Address Book, and iCal, and in Leopard, Apple has added even more to these three applications to increase the competition. But are these enhancements worth their weight in gold? Well, Address Book hasn’t seen any significant new features, so I’ll ignore it this go-around. iCal’s Feature Presentation will happen later this month, which means today’s focus is on Mail.
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Tags: Address Book, calendars, data detectors, e-mail, Entourage, features, HTML, iCal, iPhone, iPod touch, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, Mail, managers, newsfeeds, notes, Outlook, productivity, review, RSS, Safari, stationery, Stikkit, sync, templates, to-dos

You know that WordPress is really getting popular when government uses it. Indeed, the elections office for my own San Mateo County recently (as in a few months ago) launched a blog right on WordPress.com, called Inside Elections: The Blog Behind the San Mateo County Vote, which offers a number of insights behind everything that happens behind the scenes before voting day (which was today, by the way; the polls just closed a few minutes ago). Want to get inside tips on how those new eSlate voting machines work? Want to learn how all those sample ballots and voter by mail ballots are processed? Did you know that if you’re voting by mail, you can track & confirm the receipt and processing of your ballot, or that in San Mateo County, you could have voted on Saturdays October 27 and November 3 as well as today?

Bravo to our County Elections Office for adopting blogging, which can help us, as citizens, understand the process better. It’s one of those things that makes me more proud to be from San Mateo. Now I’m off to start tracking the election results…

Tags: ballots, Blogging, elections, eSlate, Mail, San Mateo County, tips, voting, WordPress

Hallelujah my prayers and feedback comments from the last eighteen months have FINALLY been answered! Google has just launched IMAP access for Gmail, bringing the revolutionary service into the 21st century, finally, and I’m just so excited that at last I’ll be able to enjoy fully synced up access between the Gmail web interface and my Mail client. I am happy happy happy!

Only one problem now. I’ve still got 113 message in my Mail.app account, and if I end up replacing the POP sign in with the IMAP sign in, what will happen to all my old e-mails? Hmm, I’ll have to figure this one out after I get back from Long Beach…

UPDATE 10/28: I’m going to have to take all of that back. Gmail’s IMAP integration is rather clunky and ended up causing more problems than it solved. I’m back to using Gmail POP, which I’ve kind of gotten used to.

Tags: announcements, excitement, Gmail, Google, IMAP, Mail, News, prayers