10. Filtering the Inflow
For the last several chapters we’ve looked at how to get information, such as alerts, notices, and updates about the topics in which you’re interested, flowing toward you.
It’s a little intimidating, isn’t it? You’ve set all these traps, now what are you supposed to do with all this information?
The RSS feeds can be organized in your RSS feed reader and kept until you’re ready to look at them. E-mail, on the other hand, has a distressing tendency to pile up and hinder you from getting to the information that you really want to deal with.
This chapter addresses the other side of information trapping—what to do when you get start getting the e-mails full of the information you wanted. Do you save them, filter them, or forward them onward? Do you hide under your desk? You’ve learned to make your queries comprehensive and manageable; now we’ll take the first steps to make the flow manageable as well.
I have a spectacular disadvantage in writing this chapter. There are billions of ways you could have your e-mail set up. You might use Outlook, Thunderbird, or Eudora. You might be using a corporate setup. There’s no way I can cover every possible e-mail permutation. For this reason, I’m going to introduce you to a free online e-mail service and teach you how to filter using that service. Because the service is compatible with POP forwarding, you can use it as an initial filter and still get e-mail to your regular mailbox. So you can think of this service as your first filter point for information trapping.
Introducing GMail
GMail (gmail.com) is a free e-mail service from Google. Now you may be wondering, “Why did Google, which is known for search engine technology, start offering an e-mail application?” You’ve got me. However, GMail does marry useful e-mail reading with excellent searching functions, as you’ll discover later in this chapter. It also offers an enormous storage limit—over 2.5 gigabytes, as of this writing, and increasing all the time.
GMail’s many advantages
GMail offers a huge number of advantages for information trappers:
• A lot of storage space. You won’t have to keep clearing out your old traps (unless you’ve set eight or nine thousand!).
• Great filtering capability. Keep the stuff that can wait, forward the important stuff to your wireless PDA or mobile phone. (There’s also some fun address kludging you can do, which we look at in a minute.)
• Spam-filtering. GMail’s spam and virus filtering is very keen—perhaps a little too keen—in that you’ll sometimes find something you wanted in the spam trap!
• Great searching ability. GMail offers a huge number of special syntax that lets you zero in on the information you’re seeking.
Keep in mind that you can also apply all the hints and tips I provide in this chapter to your own e-mail program, if it offers filtering like GMail does.
Getting a GMail account
GMail accounts used to be by invitation only. As of this writing, however, Google is offering GMail invitations to those who are willing to accept an invitation by text message. So if you’ve got a cell phone that can accept text messages, you can sign up at google.com/accounts/SmsMailSignup1.
If you don’t have a mobile phone, check and see if GMail is offering free accounts yet. If it isn’t, you can request a GMail invite (that will let you open a new account) by sending an e-mail to [email protected].
You can also check out 43things.com/things/view/70590 for a list of other folks offering invitations to GMail accounts.
Once you have an account and you’re signed in, your onscreen mailbox will look like Figure 10.1.
Figure 10.1. A lovely empty mailbox at GMail.
You see that the folders are on the left side. Beneath them are some labels—you’ll use those when you filter (more about that in a minute). At the top of the screen is a search box for both the Web and your mail, and, of course, in the middle of the page is where actual content appears.
If you’re used to using offline e-mail readers like Eudora, you might find the way GMail organizes messages a little odd at first. Instead of listing individual messages in a list, it gathers similar messages into a thread, and displays them in your inbox as one message. This means that many of your alerts and updates will gather into one message thread. There are other ways to group messages, as you’ll see a little later in this chapter.
One potential use of GMail is as a “jump-off point” for your information filtering. You set up all your alerts to go to the GMail account, and then you set a series of filters that moves the information into the appropriate places, such as to your mail account, to a cell phone, or even to the archives to be viewed later. You can also use this same idea if you have a group of researchers working on the same project. Simply set up your GMail account to accept all the information traps, and then filter them so that they forward to the appropriate people, after which they’re archived. That way everybody gets the appropriate information on what they’re working on, but at the same time all the information traps are being gathered and archived in one place.
Address construction in GMail
Now let’s talk for a minute about what’s going to go into your mailbox. You’ll be receiving alerts, updates, notifications about changed pages, and so on. The good thing about these types of e-mails is that they’re computer-generated. What’s so great about that? They have patterns that you can filter on. But before we get to the filtering part, let’s first look at how you can control the address where the alerts are delivered.
What? You have only one address on GMail? No you don’t. Even if you don’t have more than one account, you have far more than one address.
In fact, you have practically an infinite number of addresses, thanks to GMail’s plus-addressing and dot-addressing capabilities. For simplicity’s sake, stick to one or the other. I recommend the plus-addressing.
What plus-addressing means is that you can append a text string to your e-mail address, and GMail will deliver the e-mail to you. So if your address is [email protected], you can use a plus sign (+) to put a string between informationtrapping and @gmail.com, like this:
And you can even use several plus signs in a row, like this:
That may be a silly example, but what it shows is that for every service from which you get an alert, such as GoogleAlert, Trackle, Watch That Page, and so on, you can set a unique address using plus-addressing. Which makes filtering very simple: as soon as the filter hits the address, it performs the action you specify. (And incidentally, if you start getting spam to one of those addresses, you’ll know where it originated and you’ll be able to dump those e-mails right into the bit bucket.)
For some reason, if you go into your GMail account and try to send yourself an e-mail using plus-addressing, it won’t work: the e-mail will bounce. So if you want to play with this feature, be sure to send yourself an e-mail from outside the GMail system.
Of course, filtering won’t work every time. Sometimes you’ll be looking for keywords. Sometimes you’ll be looking for where an e-mail came from. And sometimes alert services (like Google’s e-mail alerts) don’t support e-mail addresses with plus signs in them. In these cases, you need to look at more of GMail’s filtering options.
Filtering with GMail
Before you get into the filtering, take a look at the e-mail you want to filter. What can you filter on? For example, Google Alerts have “Google Alert” in the title and the keywords for which you’re searching. EZBoard notifications come from EZBoard.com. In those cases, you can filter on the Subject and the From lines. And, of course, if you created a unique e-mail address with plus-addressing, you can filter on that as well. Keep an eye out for patterns in the header; they’re easy to manage.
To access GMail’s filtering, choose the “Create a filter” link in the fairly tiny type at the top of your page. A screen displays that looks like Figure 10.2.
Figure 10.2. The first step in using GMail to construct filters.
Note that here you’re only specifying what to filter for. What happens when the filter is activated is for the next panel.
If you’re filtering by From or To addresses and don’t want to filter on an entire address, search for the strings on either side of the at sign (@). For example, if you’re filtering on [email protected], you could filter either for theexample, or example.com.
If you want to filter by subject line, bear in mind that you don’t have to have the words in the same order as the subject line. So if you want to filter on the subject Google Alert - Monty Python you could filter for Alert Google Monty Python and it would match.
You can also filter for the presence or absence of keywords, and whether or not the e-mail has attachments. (I have yet to find this feature useful for information trapping, but I do find it useful in this age of viruses that come in attachments. If you’re very nervous about receiving attachments, you can have a filter that moves any e-mails with attachments straight into the trash.)
Speaking of match, notice the Test Search button at the bottom of the filter setup screen. If you click this button, it will run your search against your current inbox and show you what things match your search. I recommend doing this early and often. Test your filters as you’re building them, and you won’t get any unpleasant surprises later!
I recommend keeping your filters as simple as possible. If I’m getting a Google alert for autism developments, and the Subject header is Google Alert - Autism Developments, I might only filter for the words Google Alert Autism. If that’s my only Google Alert (extremely unlikely, but possible), I would filter only for Google Alert. That’s because the simpler my filter is, the less likely it’s going to break because of the title changing, the subject getting cut off by the mailer, or some other odd happening.
If you set up enough e-mail alerts, your filters will break at some point. However, if you match the minimum amount of information to make the filter work, your filter has less chance of breaking.
Once you have a filter set up and you’ve tested it, you want to click the Next Step button. A page displays showing you the actions that can happen once an item hits a filter (Figure 10.3).
Figure 10.3. You can choose any of the five actions shown here.
Options include the following:
• Skip the Inbox. Drop it directly in your archive, bypassing the Inbox and putting the message in the All Mail inbox. Handy when you want to keep an eye on a certain subject, but you’re not interested in immediately reviewing every item that comes your way.
• Star It. Put a star on it so that it grabs your attention and also moves it to the Starred message list.
• Apply the Label. Labels are for dividing up messages. Think of them as message folders, or as tags for your e-mail. From this action list, you can also generate new labels. I recommend one label per topic.
For example, maybe you’re monitoring PubMed and Google News for autism. You’re more interested in the scientific research from PubMed. So you’d label both of them autism, move one to the archive, and star the other one so that it gets your attention.
Yes, you can apply multiple actions to one filter. You can’t do two things that would cancel each other out, such as move it to the archive and then move it to the trash, but you can move it to the archive and apply a label, for example, or apply a label and then forward the mail to a different e-mail address.
• Forward It. Forward the e-mail to a specified address. Note this is not the same as using a POP client to download your GMail—we’ll cover that momentarily.
• Delete It. Throw it away!
With regard to information trapping, filters are probably GMail’s most important feature. But there are other settings on GMail you may want to tweak, especially if you want to download your e-mail.
POP downloading and other GMail settings
To access GMail’s other settings, click the Settings link on the upper-right of your mailbox. A page of settings divided into tabs displays (Figure 10.4):
Figure 10.4. GMail offers several tabs of settings.
• The General tab is mostly cosmetic. How many Conversations do you want to see per page, do you want e-mail snippets showing or not, etc.
• The Accounts tab lets you use a different From address on your e-mail (you will have to verify that address before you can change it).
• The Labels tab lets you generate new labels, rename labels, and remove labels.
• The Filters tab lets you filter your messages (we’ve looked at that already).
• The Forwarding and POP tab lets you either forward all your e-mail (and either archive or trash GMail’s copy) or download your e-mail from GMail (and either trash or keep GMail’s copy). Note that you have to enable POP forwarding before you can use it. It’s disabled by default.
Should you enable POP or not? If you’d rather keep your e-mail archived on your own computer, either for security reasons or because your own e-mail program has a more sophisticated filter, you should probably enable POP and then delete your messages from GMail. If you instead work from several different computers and never know where you’ll be getting your mail next, make sure you’re not using POP and are just accessing your mail from the Web.
You know your situation better than I do, so take a few minutes and adjust the GMail settings in the way that works best for you. From there we get into serious stuff: saving, moving around, and deleting messages.
Forwarding, archiving, and deleting messages
How do you know what to forward, what to archive, and what to delete? And how do you keep all that stuff you want to save without going crazy?
Forwarding
Here’s how I handle it: For e-mail that I consider important, I set up filters to forward those messages to my cell phone, while keeping them on GMail so that I can act on them later. That way, when I’m not in front of a computer, I can keep a heads-up idea in mind of things I should really address immediately. I don’t try to answer all my mail from my phone—I use it just as an alerting service. Of course, if I’m monitoring something for friends or clients, I usually end up forwarding a lot to them, too, although I wouldn’t do this via a filter without their permission.
You should be a lot more conservative about forwarding to other people than forwarding to yourself. You know how much information you can handle. On the other hand, you don’t want to flood your Mom or best buddy or client with a bunch of information they don’t have time to review.
Archiving
GMail offers you over two gigabytes of storage. There’s no real reason for you to throw anything away. That doesn’t give you carte blanche to just dump your messages in there every which way. Use the organizing feature GMail offers: Labels.
Labels are located on the left of the main page. You can edit them from there or from the Settings page. You can also use filters to automatically apply labels to certain e-mails as they’re coming in.
I strongly urge you to take a little time and think of an organizing theme for your labels now. If I were monitoring several topics, I might create a label for each topic. If I were just monitoring one topic, I might either put everything in one label or break out my labels by the services I was monitoring (Google Alerts, Watch That Page, and so on). It doesn’t matter what you choose as long as it makes sense to you and you can apply it consistently as you generate filters.
Now, knowing Google, you might suspect that GMail has a very good search offering. And it does. Knowing that, you may wonder why it’s important to organize your mail. Can’t you just search for what you want after the fact?
To search for what you want, you have to know what to look for, and sometimes you just can’t remember the right keyword. In this case, you have to browse through your e-mail until you find what you need. If you’ve organized your e-mails as you go, however, this is so much easier. There also will be times when you don’t need to search but just need to browse through the e-mail to get a sense of what you’ve got. Having the mail organized into discernible topics makes it easier. And organizing your e-mail means that making sure it stays pruned and limited is less important.
Deleting
I’m not saying never delete any e-mail. There always will be times when you come across a false positive or a bit of junk or something that will otherwise have nothing to do with your e-mail. But GMail’s amount of storage means that, if sufficiently organized, you can store and easily move through huge amounts of information. Two gigabytes’ worth of text is an awful lot of text!
Of course, you won’t always find what you’re looking for by browsing. That’s when you’ve got to search.
Searching
With GMail, the best way to search is using the Advanced Search form. It doesn’t take up a lot of room, it’s easy to understand, and there are a couple of features that make it easier to search from the Advanced Search form. Look for the “Show search options” link at the top of your mailbox page next to the query box.
The Advanced Search form looks like Figure 10.5.
Figure 10.5. GMail’s advanced search options.
As you can see, the form is pretty straightforward. You can search by the To and From headers, by subject, and by what words are and aren’t in the message. You can also search by date and whether or not the message has attachments. The drop-down menu lets you limit your message to a particular part of your e-mail, including labeled e-mail! This is just one more reason to make sure to organize your messages; it makes them much easier to search.
Let’s consider a searching strategy for your messages. Because you’re most likely going to be searching titles and snippets that have been e-mailed to you from alert services, you want to take a more general approach to the search than you would with a full-text search engine. However, you should take advantage of the special syntax whenever you can to help narrow your search. Are you sure it was a Google alert? Include Google in the subject. Are you sure that it had the word “green” in it? Search for the word green. Use as many of the small clues as you can remember, and then remove them one by one, because your memory may not be exact.
If you’re used to using client-side e-mail programs such as Eudora or Outlook, GMail will take a little getting used to at first. But if you move around a lot and access your e-mail from several different computers, I think you’ll appreciate the ability to access GMail from pretty much everywhere. The filters and spam filtering are very useful, too.
GMail has attracted a lot of interest in the online community, both for its affiliation with Google and for its large storage capacities. Many developers have made their own useful tools and gizmos to use in association with GMail. Some of these you might find useful; let’s take a look.
A GMail Toolbox
Lots of outfits have come up with various GMail tools to help extend or change the GMail experience. Some of these tools are offered by Google, but most of them are not. The following are just a few of the tools you can add to your GMail experience, and a couple of Web sites that will keep you up to date on new ones:
• GMail Notifier (toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/). This tool sits in your system tray and pops up a little notifier whenever you get an e-mail. Created by Google, GMail Notifier must be downloaded. It requires either Windows 2000 or XP or Mac OS X 10.3.8 or later (including Tiger).
• GMail Loader (marklyon.org/gmail/). Maybe you like GMail so much you want to switch ALL your e-mail to it. And now maybe you’re wondering how you’re actually going to do that. You’re in luck. The GMail Loader will work with several types of e-mail programs and get them into GMail. This is a downloaded product; you have to be fairly computer-savvy to work with it.
• GMail Drive (viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm). What’s the point in having over two gigabytes of storage if you can’t use it? GMail Drive lets you treat GMail like another drive on your computer. You have to be somewhat Windows-savvy to use this add-on.
• GMail Preview Bubbles (persistent.info/archives/2005/08/20/gmail-preview-bubbles). If you use Firefox and Greasemonkey, this is the extension for you. This Greasemonkey extension displays a popup “bubble” of message content when you mouse over it. If you need to quickly scan through messages, this tool provides a very cool way to do it.
• gMailto Bookmarklet (sippey.typepad.com/filtered/2004/06/gmailto_bookmar.html). Bookmarklets, small bits of JavaScript in bookmark form, perform all sorts of handy functions. This one gives you a one-click way to open an outgoing message in GMail. Surfing around, see something interesting, and want to e-mail a friend about it? No problem! That’s what this bookmarklet is for.
• GMail Tools (gmailtools.com/). GMail Tools is a blog that keeps up with the latest tools and tricks—and sometimes available invites—for GMail.
• GMail Tips (http://gmailtips.com/). Whether you’re new to the world of Web-based e-mail or just want to learn how to use GMail as efficiently as possible, you’ll appreciate GMail Tips. It offers over 40 tips on how to use all aspects of GMail more effectively. If you want more in-depth instructions on how to make the most of GMail, this is the place. Wow, a whole chapter on GMail!
Other E-Mail Options
Of course, maybe you’re not interested in using GMail. Maybe you don’t think it’s that great. Maybe you’re not interested in Web-based e-mail readers. Maybe you want to try something besides GMail. I don’t want to leave you out in the cold, so let me make a few suggestions.
For the most part, you have two e-mail options—Web-based (everything happens on the Web, so it doesn’t matter which computer you’re using or what operating system it’s using) and client-based (the e-mail program sits on your computer and therefore you have to be at that computer to access your e-mail). Sometimes a solution can be both, especially if you use different computers between work and home. You can access your mail via the Web, and then come home and download it to your computer.
Web-based e-mail
Gmail isn’t the end of all available Web-based mail services. In fact, it’s barely the beginning. Several search engines and many, many independent companies offer Web-based e-mail. Take a look at Yahoo’s mail offering, and then check with your ISP.
• Yahoo Mail (mail.yahoo.com). Yahoo doesn’t offer as much storage as GMail does (as of this writing, it has only 1GB of storage) but it does offer spam and virus protection, as well as the ability to send Yahoo Alerts to your cell phone. And while you can only set up to 15 filters, you can block up to 500 addresses.
• Your ISP. Check and see if your ISP offers the ability to read mail online—most of them do. Your ISP’s home page should let you know whether it offers this feature. Often it’s linked from the front page (Figure 10.6).
I find this useful for when I’m away from home and I’ve just got to check on something. I go to a secure computer, log in to my e-mail, log out, and feel secure in the knowledge that I haven’t deleted my e-mail—I’ve just looked at it. The message I looked at will still be there when I go to my main computer later and download my mail.
Figure 10.6. EarthLink lets you check e-mail from any computer.
Client-side e-mail
It seems that the most popular client-side e-mail reader is Outlook, based on the number of tools that are developed for it. But there are other readers available as well:
• Eudora (Eudora.com). One of the granddaddies of e-mail programs, I’ve been using it for well over ten years. It has integrated protection against spam and phishing, and a fairly powerful set of filtering tools. The downside is that it’s less popular than Outlook and has fewer people developing for it.
• Thunderbird (mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/). If you’re already using Mozilla or Firefox, you may want to take a look at Thunderbird, brought to you by Mozilla. It’s a free, open-source program and, like Outlook, it has a lot of developers writing for it. You can get an idea of what extensions are available for Thunderbird at addons.mozilla.org/extensions/?application=thunderbird.
• Pegasus (pmail.com/). Though the Pegasus mail program is not as well-known as other e-mail programs, it’s still fifteen years old. Pegasus is an excellent choice for older computers and operating systems that might not be able to handle the latest and greatest e-mail clients. It also has an extremely powerful filter system, and it’s free. If you want very strong filters or you want an e-mail client that gives you more opportunity to look under the hood, Pegasus is for you.
Moving On. . .
Obviously, finding and setting up the information streams you need is the first part of information trapping. But the second part, which we’ve gotten into with this chapter, is management. How do you organize what you find? How do you make sure it gets your attention? When do you delete it (or should you ever delete it)?
Your e-mail box will be an important part of managing the information as it flows to you. Though Gmail is a free service, it offers a variety of filters, features, and add-ons that will help you track, and keep, the information you want.
But when you use a Web-based or client-based e-mail service, you’re sitting in front of a computer. What do you do when you’re on the road, with no laptop, no WiFi, nothing but your phone? If you want to learn how you can be an information trapper on the go, see the bonus chapter beginning on page A1.