I am finally giving it a shot

After considering blogging for at least two years now, I finally decided to give it a shot. And here it is, my own personal weblog. In the end, I have joined the still tremendously growing community of people sharing their thoughts, opinions, findings and not least their private lives on the internet.
What of those do I want to share here? What will this blog be about?

'Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.'

Although bearing this Japanese proverb in mind, I must admit that I did not have a clear vision of the motivation for this blog at first. I just wanted to blog. Full stop.

I will eventually blog about all things I consider noteworthy. In order to give you a rough standard of what to expect here, I do not intend to blog about my private life too extensively. Everybody looking for some gossip satisfying their stalking appetites, that's not the blog you want to spend to much time with!
Do you want to read about e.g. nifty tools, software and/or gadgets? You might be right here. I will try to cover this topic from time to time.
Furthermore, I will give my two cents on things that bug me and need to be talked about.

Cheers, Benny

P.S.: Happy New Year to everyone!

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

GMail goes IMAP

Have you been using Gmail for a while now? Have you been totally blown by their fully functional yet simple Web UI?

I have! And I am still loving it! Yes, I must confess that I am a Google addict (despite the sword of data exploitation dangling over my head)...

However, I started to miss a handy and easy way to integrate it with my existing desktop applications. Somehow, it felt awkward to use the web interface although being at home - at my own computer. It just didn't feel like home.

'Hey, there's POP!' you might want to throw at me. But, I do not like POP! Why? Because it is POP! Name one person that is fully satisfied with one-way data synchronization when there is the possibility of having more? POP does simply not meet my requirements. I want to access my inbox when being at work and being at home.
But, I do not want to read all the mails again, which I have read at work just to work on them again (marking as read, archiving, folder structure and so on and on).
I was kind of disappointed when I realized that Gmail did not offer me something like IMAP. Having a two-way synchronization of my mails would be the solution to my problem.

Some of you might have already heard the news. Gmail is now offering also IMAP. However, this feature could not yet be accessed in all accounts. E.g. the German Gmail accounts (ending with ...@googlemail.com) have been lacking this option in their settings section. Whether Google is intentionally restricting this feature to US (or non-German) accounts or not, is not known to me.
A friend of mine recently found out that this feature was suddenly available when changing the language settings to English. Yet, I am not sure if this was either a coincidence or a bug.
Please keep me updated on that (post comments) if you know more than me!
Ok, to cut a long story short: it works now! At least for me!

So, now that IMAP was available for my Gmail account the remaining was: 'Which app does support all those revolutionary Gmail features best?'
All I have dealt with so far was Outlook! I doubted that Outlook would be instantaneously capable of e.g. dealing with the bunch of labels I have defined in my Gmail web interface.

On lifehacker.com I found out that the answer to my question was another product of the Mozilla family: Thunderbird.
I have so far not got around playing with Thunderbird. The only time I tried out Thunderbird did neither last too long nor left a good impression. But that might have been influenced by the recurring waves of nausea caused by POP.

So, I sticked to the comprehensive How-To on lifehacker.com and I was blown again! Thunderbird is the ultimate Gmail IMAP client ideed. Have a read on lifehacker and tell me your experiences.

Cheers, Benny