In which I consider handing my whole life over to Google.

[rsadelle]

As you probably know, I have switched to using Gmail. I've been using the web interface when I'm at work or when I need to search for something (let me tell you, full text search of email is the best feature of Gmail), and SeaMonkey's Mail component via IMAP at home. Part of this is just that I don't like change, and this way I don't have to change my way of doing things. Part of it is that I can have multiple email addresses (I have more than I care to admit to) in one client.

Using the two interchangeably is generally working well for me; however, there are two things that are minor inconveniences:

Gmail treats my folders as tags, which is fine. If I move an email from my inbox into a folder, Gmail applies the appropriate tag. The problem comes when I try to do it the other way around: if I apply a tag to a thread in Gmail, when SeaMonkey syncs with Gmail, it interprets the tag as applying to every message in the thread and moves them all - including my sent items - into the folder, which is not how I have my folders organized. My folders are organized by who sent the message, so I don't want emails from Person B in the folder labeled Person A. During the day, I read/respond at work, and then move things into the appropriate folders when I get home, which is doable but adds an extra step. As far as I can tell, you can't apply a tag to just one message in a conversation. Perhaps my folders are simply an outdated way of managing email and I need to just give them up. (Aside: SeaMonkey also has tags. Applying them to a message does nothing in Gmail.)

One of the other ways I deal with my email is to keep things in the inbox until I've dealt with them. This works fine in SeaMonkey. The problem with this in Gmail is that i keeps the whole conversation in the inbox and has everything but the most recent message collapsed, which means I have no idea which message has the link I was going to click on. If there are just a few messages in the thread, it's not a big deal, but the current fic recs thread has 31 messages in it - only one of which has the link I haven't read yet. (This becomes even more problematic with epic threads that are close to turning over again.) Hmm. I suppose I could copy the email to the starred folder in SeaMonkey and have that work. This seems inconvenient to do. Maybe if I did it in Gmail early on, before it got buried under other things in the thread.

I suspect the real answer to all of this is some variation on "email: ur doin it rong."

One more random email thought, not related to Google: I'm still in the habit of signing my emails, and not even with an auto signature. I actually type out "Ruth" at the end of every email. I've noticed that hardly anyone does this anymore, which kind of makes sense since you know who the email is from anyway. Quaint old habit or sign that I haven't fully moved into the digital age?

In addition to increased use of Gmail on the web, I've been using Google Docs a lot more. (Again, because I can use them at work. I am, in fact, typing this very entry into a Google doc at work.) Before, with things I was sharing with people, I had my text document on my local computer (because I like writing distraction free with Dark Room [and it's too bad their screencap is green text on a black background, because you can actually set it to be whatever colors you want]) and then I copied whatever I'd written that day into the Google doc. Now I have several things in Google Docs without a local copy on my computer. It's making me mildly nervous not to have a copy that's not held by Google, but it's also easier not to mess with copying and pasting. I'm mostly just rambling about this point, but I am curious: what do you do about writing? Google docs, Word, text editor of some sort, something else?

Comments

[megyal]

let me tell you, full text search of email is the best feature of Gmail Word. Actually, I used it today to check if certain students had sent in work.

ME: You didn't send in your work.
STUDENT: I'm sure I did?
ME: GMail says you didn't.
STUDENT: *breaks under the strain* OK I DIDN'T

I use GoogleDocs mostly. I don't like having a lot of stuff on my computer, and I find it's not too distracting for me!

I sign my emails too, mostly. Sometimes, I even go the full hog and start with "Dear so and so" and end with "Yours faithfully". I think it's nice.

[rsadelle]

I have a lot of stuff on my computer, years and years worth of writing. Only the things I'm actively working on go in my My Documents folder, and everything else gets shuffled off into another folder where they're not in my way.

I usually just use my name, but I got an email the other day that was signed "Love, [Name]," and it was lovely.

[icanbreakthesky.livejournal.com]

When I'm starting an email conversation with someone I'll use an opening and a closing (often with my fannish account just to establish what you can call me) but I don't usually keep it up unless the other person does. (One person I used to email would sign things "Best, X" or "Yours, X" and I thought it was so...quaint I started doing it too, but I only remembered after she did it.) Most of the time emails feel like conversations you're in the middle of rather than proper correspondences. When I'm emailing my aunts and uncles newsy update emails I always sign them "Love, X."

Google docs is sort of my favorite thing on the internet. I've been using it since my computer crashed and I lost the first novel I ever completed. It was a really shitty Nanowrimo novel so it wasn't a loss, but yeah. One of my roommates is an IT guy and I seem to remember him giving me the impression that Google is really unlikely to lose your stuff, but I'll ask him about it tomorrow. He's good about explaining stuff.

I love how clean Google docs is, and it's great for fic because I know how it's likely to copy and paste. I've been writing stuff in Word and copying it over there for the sake of closing my fucking browser and actually writing, but I hate the way the apostrophes and quotation marks are always formatted curved when I copy it out of Word, and there's always an extra two line breaks when I copy something from a Google doc that's been copied from Word. There's probably a way to fix it, but it's just a general annoyance rather than something I'm willing to put effort into altering.

I do like Word 2007 now that I've figured out where everything is in it, but I love how Google docs automatically saves stuff. I wish I could work offline in Google docs, when I'm stuck somewhere without internet I hate writing in a doc I already had open and getting messages about how there was a problem saving. Do you get that?

I hate Gmail though. I love Yahoo mail just because I think it's prettier. I don't organize my messages at all so I just prefer the set up for reading messages. It looks like Outlook but it works a million times better. (Oh god if I could shove Outlook off a cliff I would.)

[rsadelle]

Ah, yes, the name thing. I suppose that can be very helpful in fandom! (I think I learned your name from Twitter in the first place.)

Yeah, I think Google is unlikely to lose things, but still. I'm a control freak. I like to have control of my stuff! I do have an external hard drive that my computer backs up to automatically, but it's still onsite (i.e., on top of the desk my computer is under), so it will still be a disaster if my house burns down or somesuch.

You can make Word use straight quotes - it's in the options somewhere. Or you can find and replace in Google Docs at the end. I don't have a laptop or wireless, so I'm pretty much never without internet access for reasons of a dropped signal. There is a way to use Google Docs offline, but at the time I looked into it, it wasn't compatible with SeaMonkey. I know at least one of my friends uses it. The problem for me is that if I have my browser open, I will do something other than write, especially for my novel. It's much better for me to be able to close things for the purpose of focus. (And I don't want my novel on Google Docs, which is somewhat irrational since I've been emailing what I've written to someone else every day, which means Google has it via email.)

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

I have a feeling I know what the answer to this is going to be before I even ask it, but I'll ask anyway: Can you set up an IMAP client on your work computer? If you can, the nice thing is that even if you receive new messages at work, they'll still appear on your home computer (whereas if it were POP, new messages that appear at work wouldn't appear at home, and vice versa). Then, at least, you'll be working with the same interface in both places.

Regarding salutations, I always sign personal e-mails. The more formal (or perhaps "less personal" is more appropriate) the e-mail, the more likely I am to use a signature and nothing else. So, for example, on the various listservs I'm a part of, I sign with a signature, since I'm sending a message into the ether to be viewed by whoever chooses; I'm not actually writing to someone specifically. If I'm responding to a personal e-mail, though, I always sign my name. When I was working as a professor, though, I would always sign with the same formal signature to everyone (name, title, department, e-mail, website, etc.) just in case (though if you ask me to elaborate on what "just in case" means here, I'm not sure I'll be able to give a straight answer...). But my point is, I think, that the traditional salutation hasn't gone out of style, it just has its own place. I'm by no means certain that others have the same sense, though...

[rsadelle]

Even if I could, I wouldn't. I don't want my email on the computer at work. That's such a privacy issue for me. I actually switch to private browsing to check my email (which is as much about having Firefox not remember my username - our work Gmail account starts with the same two letters, and I would always be choosing the wrong one - as it is about privacy).

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

Ah. I thought that perhaps you might have a work computer where each user has a separate login identity (a different user account), so that when you're at the work computer, what's on it is private. Oh well. I'll be interested to hear if you find a solution.

[rsadelle]

Yeah, even then, that would be a Bad Idea. Company owned computers are very much not private, even if they sometimes provide the illusion of it.

[schuyler.livejournal.com]

I have handed my whole life over to Google. I always have the GMail window open, whether at home or work, and I have labs installed so that it also displays whatever Google Docs are new or pending, my calendar, contacts, etc. Plus, I have the Google phone, so everything syncs up and I don't have to think about it. I just use Google's tagging system, and I prefer to have all of the messages in a conversation together so that I can follow the thread. If you go into advanced search, you can have it pull up everything from a certain address, and then it collapses everything in the threads that aren't from them, if you remember that I sent a link someplace or suchlike.

[rsadelle]

Yeah, I keep thinking that my issue is that I am just out of date and should just switch over to the new way of doing things. The biggest issue for me with always having a Gmail (or Google Docs) window open is that if my browser is open, I will end up doing things other than writing. Like now. I was going to work on the novel, and then I opened my browser again and am answering comments instead of writing. This is admittedly not a technical issue.

[allegram.livejournal.com]

I don't have a auto signature, I usually sign my e-mails when they feel like letters, the rest of the time (especially when it's back and forth comments, more like delayed instant messaging) I often don't. It's funny you should mention this I realized the other day that when I am doing the back and forth thing, I use a signature to indicate that I'm done with the conversation. Like I was doing some questions/answers with a vendor by e-mail and we weren't signing off since it was quickly back and forth, then we had a couple of closing e-mails, thanking the other for their help, letting them know they'd answered all questions, and when I got tired of that I sent my last one with a signature....
I use googledocs as my back up for lots of things, but mostly it's a resource I underuse and I think later when I'm away from the comp and want to use it, "darn". It's thru no lack of trust I've had so many computers go down under me that I have more faith that google will have my stuff than that I will, mostly I don't really like the googledocs composition interface, so I don't like to put together large things in it, and after I do them in word I forget to upload them unless I'm feeling paranoid about losing it...

[rsadelle]

I do have an external drive that my computer automatically backs up to, so I'm not overly worried about my computer dying and losing everything. I mostly write just text (and write my own html code for formatting of things that are going to get posted to LJ), so the interface isn't as much of an issue for me.

[lakeeffectgirl.livejournal.com]

Like Sky, I have handed my life over to Google. (Our phones are essentially run by Google.) Sometimes I am wary of having GDocs keep all my writing, but at the same time, something could go wrong no matter where I keep it.

[rsadelle]

That is true! If I'm going to start using Google Docs more, I need to find a way around the problem that I will end up doing things other than writing if I have my browser open.