It’s a hard to solve. Hopefully we can put behind the quest for the ‘perfect desktop’ and start building tools for the free digital citizens again.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments
Post tags: audio, collaboration, contacts, email, free software, productivity, skype, thunderbird, tools, Video

This morning I played around with The Email Game, a web app that expands Google’s Gmail client with a couple of interesting features. I like the concept of ‘Boomerang‘ and the countdown for each email-related action. If you have a Gmail account I suggest you to give it a try. I won’t be using it (my gmail account is for spam only and a few mailing list) but I hope that some of these ideas end up in one of the email clients I use on my GNU/Linux desktop.

The Email Game – Conquer your Email from Baydin Inc. on Vimeo.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2011. | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: client, email, inbox, innovation, usability

We’re pulled to anything that provides instant gratification, even when we know we’d get a bigger reward for delaying. We’re also quick to respond to any excuse to stop working on something that is difficult and requires high concentration.

That all seems correct. My argument for less email at work focuses on discovering of information within the corporation. Now I only need to cure myself from the email addition and finish writing my piece

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2010. | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: addiction, email, hbr, microblog

I downloaded and installed OfficeReader directly from the phone’s browser, but of course all other options are valid. Check the FAQ if you can’t install or run it (I had to allow your phone’s operating system to run unsigned apps).

PS I took the screenshots with the free software Screenshot application (GPL license but the install screen says ‘freeware -not to be sold’ ?!?).

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments
Post tags: attachment, boycott, campaign, email, fsf, funambol, mobile, odt, officereader, open document format, open standard, openoffice.org, push, symbian

In my talk at OSCON I described location based advertising as one of the most important features to enable free (both gratis and libre) mobile email for the masses. Imagine a world without annoying billboards, where the ads are displayed on your cell phone but only giving information that are both coherent with what your tastes and relevant to where you are. Say you’re lefthanded and you’re walking close to one of these shops: wouldn’t you love to know that instead of watching half naked women on billboards?

The Leftorium

Before we get to location based ads we have to start building experience and knowledge, learn how to deal with privacy issues and so on.’  Fire Eagle allows to start from simple things, like adding elementary location information to Funambol email client. Using Fire Eagle APIs it should be fairly simple to add at the bottom of the email something like “Sent from <current location known to Fire Eagle>”. In the future, Funambol email client could also read the location data from GPS or network cells and update the status on Fire Eagle, automatically. We’ll need a simple way to add bogus location, though, so that all messages to the BigBoss will appear as coming from the office, even if you’re surfing. That’d be cool

Is anybody interested in adding this feature to Funambol email client? Let me know.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2008. | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: community, email, funambol, geospatial, gis, location based, mobile email

I had to redirect a few thousands email messages from a mailbox archive to the new Funambol Forge discussion system.’  Evolution allows redirect as does also Mail.app, so I thought it would have been banal: CTRL-a to select all messages, menu / redirect and that’s it. Wrong: both applications cannot apply the command to more than one message at the time.’  Scripting the action seemed too much work, so I reverted to using mutt, the email client that sucks less (as its motto says). Load the mailbox (mutt -f mail.box) select/tag all messages (hit the key T), apply the command to all tagged messages (hit the keys ;b), write the destination address and wait for smtp to do its job. After a couple of hours the postfix server was done. The past archives of Funambol mailing lists are in the archive of the new Forge. Great: the new discussions are ready to roll, on Monday.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2008. | Permalink | One comment
Post tags: community, email, forge, funambol, mutt, redirect

What is really annoying me though is the separation of all web activities from the files on the disk. Is an email related to a project and a client?’  Why are bookmarks and web pages so difficult to retrace? I would like to find such information grouped in the project folder, available on my disk, tagged properly. I don’t like Google’s idea to move everything online and keep my files there, out of my hands and off my disks.

I look forward to see the new Mozilla Thunderbird. They seem to start on the right foot: it’s not just an email, it’s messaging.

The name Mozilla Messaging is supposed to indicate that it’s focusing on the Internet messaging and communications space as a whole, not just e-mail.

My hope is that within a short time frame Thunderbird will innovate messaging as much as Firefox did in the browser world.

Mozilla Thunderbird Gets Its Own Company @ ENTERPRISE OPEN SOURCE MAGAZINE

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2008. | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: email, gui, messaging, mozilla, non-profit, thunderbird