How I Overcame My Email Checking Addiction & You Can Too.

Does anyone close their browser after checking their email nowadays? Gmail even has a lab feature which reveals the number of unread emails on the browser tab.

Gmail - I can't live without it & can't live with it :)

Now, if you have short attention span like me, you really struggle to ignore the email as soon as you are notified of its delivery.

I have tried many ways to make myself stop checking my mail every few minutes & truth be told, I don’t receive more than 2-3 ‘useful’, ‘worth dealing with’ emails in a day. The point I am making is that all the above really make for unproductive, disappointing & not to forget distracting time.

It all happened by accident. I have had a ‘love it’/ ‘hate it’ relationship with Firefox for years & now with the latest releases, I am almost truly in the ‘love it’ crowd. It is just an amazing browser. (I am not going to go on a tangent & share why I think Firefox is superior to other browsers in this post).

One of the strong points about Firefox is the availability of add-ons (extensions) & one of my favourites is Firebug. No self-loving, self-respecting developer could/ should/ would live without it.

Unfortunately, Firebug also slows down Firefox. So, one day, in a Eureka moment, I thought, why not create separate profiles, one for the ‘Web Development’ work & the other for normal surfing. The idea being that I will only install the add-ons relevant to each profile, i.e. Firebug in ‘Web Development’ profile & as an example, ’Read it Later’ in ‘Web Surfing’ profile. Following the same logic, The ‘Web Development’ profile is not to be used for emails, web surfing & other than work related searches. Vice Versa, ‘Web Surfing’ profile is only for surfing & not for web development.

I did a quick Google search & it turns out that Firefox 3.6 used to have a profile manager already built in & Mozilla stripped it out of Firefox 4.0. A quick second search resulted in a link to a separate Mozilla program which helps you set-up multiple profiles within moments. And a wonderful program it is, very easy & you don’t ever have to install it. Just download, extract & run! Awesome.

Here is a quick walkthrough of how to set it up.

Download it from Mozilla FTP.

Extract the files & run the profilemanager.exe

Create a new profile by clicking on the 'new' button on the top left menu.

Just enter a profile name, I'd recommend leaving the other options as are.

And that is it. Now, instead of using the Firefox icon, use the 'Profile Manager' exe file to start Firefox.

It is worth mentioning that each profile will need its own add-ons installation & even if you previously had add-ons installed, you will have to install again. Though, that does not take long does it? :)

Search Engines, Yahoo & Google.

Search Engines. The highways to exotic information destinations. The bumpier the highway, more effort the car has to make & later the destination one gets to while smoother and broader the road, lesser the time it takes to get to your peace.

Many years back when all of a sudden Google became all the rage, I too tested it out and liked the journey, its massive highways accommodated all of my journeys. That was that and since then, I never looked or searched for another Search Engine, why look for another route when you are perfectly content with your current journey time and traffic etc? (Well, one answer is because we all are in search of perfection and Google is hardly perfect, but I wont, that’s besides the point…)

Anyways, Google became Google, that is, massive, selfish, shareholder’s interests driven organisation and like many people out there, I thought it is time to look at the alternatives. Yahoo, an organisation older than Google came to mind and I decided to try it out. The idea being that I will use Yahoo primarily (as much as possible) for my searches and only if Yahoo fails to provide the relevant info, will I go back to Google.

Well, this experiment has been running for well over half a year and I am almost ready to call it an end. The number of times I have had to go back to Google to get the results I wanted is ridiculous. I have lost count of the number of times. Whats even worse is that in spite of having spent half a year, I still did not get comfortable with Yahoo’s font and results layout, Google knows psychology, Yahoo does not.

And frankly, it all makes sense. I mean, Google is Google because it does what it offers well. Gmail is the best email service out there, even Outlook pales in comparison, though I have a special place got Yahoo Mail in my heart. I love Yahoo Mail and its ease of use and functionality. Please do not even get me started on Hotmail… what a sorry state it is in.

So, unfortunately for me, its back to Google as my default search engine. I am hold on to Yahoo on my laptop and try to keep using it but I wonder to myself, for how long?

Spam!

Hurrah for less spam! I have an email account with all three major email services, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. Actually, come to think about it, I even had two email accounts with Lycos, anyone still remember them?

Anyways, I mostly use Gmail and Yahoo Mail services now. I cannot stand Hotmail as they truly have the worst interface of all the services out there in my opinion. Hotmail have acknowledged this and made a press release a few days back about withdrawing the top ad banner position in the near future, another hurrah for that! But, I feel its a bit late for me, while I will hold on to my hotmail account, I use it only for the sake of historic (redundant?) connections.

On the other hand Gmail and Yahoo Mail are just so much more useful accounts. I hardly get around 10 spam emails a day and even they are confined to the spam section. Yahoo Mail suffers a lot more. Until a few days back, I use to get around 100 emails just in my spam folder! All a sudden, my Yahoo spam counts fell to 3 emails a day! I looked this up and it turns out that a spam ISP called McColo was knocked offline by the authorities. Yeay!

You really have to wonder what people like these spammer are like. They get the education (and we are not just talking about high school, they go on to learn to program and devise new ingenious ways of designing spam) and yet at their basic core, they are the most worthless creatures on Earth. Oh well, lets not go there further.