Archiving Emails in Mail.app, there's an app for that.

If you are using Mail.app on OSX, this post is for you.

It's been well known to people that read my blog that I am an Inbox-Zero ninja, and generally pride myself on my ability to get through vast amounts of email quickly because of the system that I have refined over the past several years of experimenting.

Techniques in Archiving

One of the things about Inbox Zero is the ability to quickly move an email out of your "Inbox" and into another folder.  If you sort your emails that come into your Inbox by topic or subject or whatever, different folders may do good things for you.  For instance I have a folder where all Snort related email goes.  The three Snort mailing lists go straight to my inbox where I read most of them and then file them away using a keyboard shortcut.  Other Snort related mailing lists just go straight to this box, leaving me with only the important ones in my inbox.

Most listserver traffic of the 40 or so listservers that I belong to go straight to a "listserver" folder, where I can deal with it later.  You get my point.

But everything that I don't filter, is in my inbox, which usually nets me about 200~ emails a day that I need to deal with.  When I read an email I have possible outcomes.

• Delete it


• Archive it (if I need it later)


• Respond to it (if it takes shorter than 2 minutes to accomplish this task)


• Delegate it (if I am not the appropriate person to deal with "x" email)


• Make a todo to deal with it later.

Delete it

Duh.  I don't do enough of this.

Archive it.

This is the meat of the post, and kind of the point of writing this article.  I am a firm believer in leaving your hands on the keyboard if possible.  Learning the keyboard shortcuts in your favorite app will not only save time, but it also keeps your hands where you need to be doing work.  On the keyboard (instead of continually reaching for your mouse).  There are keyboard shortcuts for almost anything in OSX, and if you can't find it, or the menu command doesn't have a keyboard shortcut, you can make a keyboard shortcut to do what you want in Snow Leopard.  Heck, there are keyboard shortcuts in Gmail (learn em!)

Now, how do you do this in Mail.app, well there is a little app called "Archive" that will allow you to do this.

Archive.  Archive allows you to do exactly that.  Archive the email that you are presently on.  It creates a folder in your email accounts named "Archive", and when you mash the shortcut in your inbox, it puts the email that you have lighted in the appropriate Archive folder.  Simple, clean, done.

There is also Mail Act-On, which I've talked about before here, is a nice little app if you need to do more advanced things than Archive, but for 99% of you, check out Archive, it does what you need.

Respond to it

If I think it'll take less than 2 minutes to respond to the email that I am currently reading, I'll bang out a response.  I try to not bang out a "quick" response "just to keep the ball moving" as Kevin Rose says.  I try to write out a through response.  My point in doing this is to eliminate further email by providing any answers I can, by asking the appropriate question so that the response to my email is full of exactly what I need it to be, and so that people don't waste more time by me not wasting theirs with a "short terse banged-out email".

Delegate It.

Otherwise known as the "Forward" button.  I get a ton of email, not all appropriate for me to handle, some need to go to our web team, some need to go to our research team, but it comes to me, because I "handle" the email, as opposed to ignore it.  I don't mind being the conduit to which people communicate, at least I know things are getting done, and I have a pulse on what is going on.

Todo It.

If the email contains an action that I need to perform, but I can't do it right now, I have a keyboard shortcut that allows me to highlight a section of text, mash a keyboard shortcut, and Omnifocus will grab the hightlight-ed input that I selected and makes a Todo out of it, along with a link in Omnifocus back to the email that generated it.  (This is called "Clipping" for you Omnifocus nerds, get ON IT.)  I quickly set a context (email) and a due date.  Then I go onto the next email.  Everyday, I get to the bottom of the "Todo"s that are due that day, and that includes the thoughtful emails.

Matter of fact, writing this post about "Archive" was a Todo.

Let me go mark it done.

BTW -- Inbox Zero comes from Merlin Mann.  I'm not stealing his work.  It's insightful.  He rocks.  MerlinMann.com and InboxZero.com

Verizon to block outbound port 25 for residential customers

For those of you that have Verizon Home Internet (FiOS or other), Verizon is about to start blocking outbound port 25.

Why?

Why is Verizon blocking outbound port 25?

The majority of spam (unsolicited email) on the Internet is caused by malicious software viruses that take control of infected computers. These viruses direct the infected machines to send email through port 25. Verizon takes spam very seriously. Verizon blocks outgoing connections on port 25 to prevent infected computers from being used by spammers to send unsolicited email. Outbound port 25 blocking is a standard industry method to control spam.

For more information, click the link below:

Verizon | High Speed Internet - Your Attention Needed: Re-configure Your Email Settings to Send Email.

Inbox Zero is fail? Wrong.

Alyssa Gregory, blogger at sitepoint, clearly doesn't get it.

It = Inbox Zero, she says it can't be done.:

Merlin Mann, the de-facto creator of Inbox Zero offered a nice rebuttal, basically saying, "you clearly don't get it."

Then, Alyssa writes another post, basically saying "Uh, yeah, it still won't work."

Of course, this isn't my fight, it's Merlin's, however, as a devout follower of Inbox Zero, relying on it constantly as my day in and day out way of staying sane, I offered this rebuttal, which are basically my feelings about email.  (Which I doubt she'll post, but whatever.)  Here it is.

Merlin, you are still the man.

I believe you are still missing the point. The point in Inbox Zero is to become a “decider” and a “do-er” instead of an email processor. You receive email, you make a decision about it’s purpose, either A) Respond right now if it takes less than 2 minutes, B) If it takes longer than two minutes, Put it into a folder to reply later, C) Make a TODO to DO the thing that is in the email, and save the email, or D) Delete it.

Is the email that is sitting in my inbox right now, that I am staring at, actionable? Do I need to physically do something with the information that is front of me? Yes? Make to-do todo it, then DO it. No? Either file it, or delete it.
Follow this process until you hit ZERO emails in your inbox.
Then CLOSE your email. CLOSE it. And go DO the things that you made todo’s to, do.
Even if those todo’s involve answering the email that you put into a folder under “B", you need to DO them. Only check email about twice or three times a day, and you will be much more productive.
The point in Inbox zero is to process to ZERO, then CLOSE the inbox for the time being and GO CREATE. GO CREATE YOUR WORK BEING DONE.

Then, later, open it back up.

If Email Signatures Were Honest

Murray The Nut » Blog Archive » Signatures.

Very Funny.

Great Anti-Email post

Jeff Atwood, blogger and coder over at Coding Horror, one of the many blogs I read, had this post up sometime last year, and I thought it was such a good post that I've recommended it to a couple friends, but I realized I never actually blogged it.

Jeff discusses a similar topic to what I've discussed in the past.  Checking email less often, shutting your email off for periods of time, turn off the "new message" ding.   All great points.

Go check out his post here.  Jeff, great job!

iPad, why it's interesting

Yesterday, as everyone -- including me -- expected, Apple introduced their first big foray into the tablet computing market (if you don't count the iPhone as a tablet) called the iPad.

Which, even I, as an Apple fan, has to admit-- is a stupid name.  iSlate, or even "Tablet" would have been better, but, whatever.  (Plus, Fujitsu owns the "iPad" trademark, so we'll see what it winds up being -- remember "iTV" changed to "Apple TV" at launch.

Am I interested in one?  Yes.  I am interested because it's just enough for me to NOT have to carry around my laptop bag anymore.  Potentially eliminating the need to carry anything outside of a jacket. (Using a jacket like the Scottevest line: http://www.scottevest.com/ -- which is just handy, all those pockets.)  90% of my work could be done a device like this, and I'm just happy about that.

I don't think people are overwhelmed by it right now in this iteration because people feel it's just a big iPod Touch.  Well, fine.  I have to kind of agree with that idea, but look at how far the iPod Touch has come along since it's release.  It's not about the platform people, it's the APPS.  We'll see what happens in 60 days before it's release.  We'll see what happens in a year.

There is going to be a completely different class of Apps developed for this thing.  I fully expect even people like Microsoft to develop a version of Office (or maybe use the online office) for this thing.

Think of the possibilities for a couple markets:

A) Schools.  Imagine school children, colleges, high schools, etc with this thing as a standard issue device.  Think of what is going to come about as far as accessibilities to text books, not having to carry them around anymore.  Think about taking your quizzes and tests online, doing your homework online.  The elimination of the wasteful use of paper is coming in a big way.

B) Medical application.  Think of a doctor being able to walk around a hospital, every patients records, xrays, results, insurance cards, everything.  Accessible with their fingers.  Think about the Doctors being able to make notes right into the patients online chart.

These are just a couple examples I can think of off the top of my head about the possibilities for a device like this.

Security

Now, how should we treat this device from a security perspective?  It's a mobile device, but it's not a phone, it can't make phone calls.  (Native phone calls, not through Skype.)  It's not a laptop, it's more mobile than that.

I would have to say that'd we'd need to treat this device as a phone.  For the most part, it's a platform that has near ubiquitous access to the internet.  Any Starbucks, Barnes and Nobles, etc.  Then with the cheap 3G access available on it, I think there is going to be a whole class of people (maybe the sub-20 year old demographic) that would use this as a computer.  They don't need anything else for the most part.  My wife doesn't need anything more than this device.  Will you be able to print from it?  Probably not, but that's really the only thing I see that needs to be added from a software point of view for this to replace most computers.  My parents would use this instead of regular computer, most people would, if all they did was process email and read web pages on it.

This is the perfect couch device, this is the perfect "train" or "plane" device. There are a ton of possibilities for this thing, not necessarily at launch, but in a year/two years from now, this may be the computing platform that we are all using.

I'm really only disappointed in one thing.  No face forward video camera for teleconferencing?  Hm.  Well, let's think of this thing sitting on your lap.  Ideally the camera would need to be up higher, level with your face, otherwise people on a video conference with you would be looking up your nose the whole time.  Yes of course you could prop it up, but that's not going to happen all the time.  That's really my only disappointment.

We'll see..

Bottom Posting

Recently was chastised for Bottom posting on a Mailing list, so I thought I'd write a few words about it.

I bottom (or inline post) mostly because I like the email to be a message. You read a message or a letter from top to bottom, from left to right. It wasn't until email clients started top posting (looking at you Outlook/Lotus Notes) that email was written in the top-posting format, forcing you to read an email backwards.

So I looked it up, basically looking at two different information stores.

Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style
RFC1855 -- http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt

These two places will define how to write email and how email should be written, on mailing lists, use groups, or any other email transaction.

The particular part to pay attention to is in RFC1855 --

"- If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you
summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just
enough text of the original to give a context. This will make
sure readers understand when they start to read your response.
Since NetNews, especially, is proliferated by distributing the
postings from one host to another, it is possible to see a
response to a message before seeing the original. Giving context
helps everyone. But do not include the entire original!"

Summarize the email at the top, and post below it. In other words, bottom-posting is the correct way to write email, as per RFC.

Instapaper is so great

I am not sure if Instapaper has apps for anything other than the iPhone, and I kind of doubt, if that exclusivity exists, that it will last any amount of time.

Instapaper is one of those new 2.0 companies that is web/app based. They provide you a free log in to their website, which by the way, by default, had no password. Past this login you get a bookmarklet, similar to the "readbility" bookmarklet I talked about earlier, which, upon use, allows you to turn any article you are reading into a saved article of sorts.

For example, earlier today I was reading an entry on a blog, it was rather long, and I wasn't going to have time to finish reading it as I was about to head out to go to the dentist.

So, with this combination of app/website, I tapped my instapaper bookmarklet, which takes whatever you are reading, and puts it up in the "cloud". Which, provided you then have the Instapaper app on your iPhone, can sync this content down to your mobile device.

Now, whatever article I was reading, just by tapping one button, is now formatted in nice big text on my iPhone, and I can take with me.

I don't know the size limitation of the file you can put on instapaper, I don't know, for instance if you can put a whole book up there or something, but for now, while I am in the dentists waiting room, I have articles to read instead of the weeks old copies of  "Newsweek".

Why don't I use something like Google reader? Well I can, except for those websites that shorten their rss feeds to force clickthroughs. It's another couple steps, who knows how it is going to be formatted, and who knows what kind of connectivity you are going to have.

Which, also by the way, is why I removed the "shortened rss" clickthrough thing for my blog. It annoyed me, so I figured it was probably annoying you.

False Alarm -- No more Thunderbird

Probably belongs in a tweet, but since I blogged about it here, I'll write it here.

Stopped using Thunderbird.  After it consumed 20 Gigs of space downloading my email, constantly kept my CPU at 80-100% and the hardware fan busy, consuming 500 Megs of RAM...  I ditched it and went back to Gmail on the web.

It did have some very nice features, however, basically, I am just over client email programs.

That is all, you may return to your regularly scheduled programs.


Please leave comments below.

Spam Increase lately?

As I posted on the Internet Storm Center this morning:

Thanks to a reader (Thanks Bob), who wrote in this morning asking if we have seen an increase in spam lately, I can personally confirm that yes, I have seen more spam in my inbox lately.

Bob sent us a couple interesting graphics, the first being a graph of how much of a spam increase there has been recently:

Secondly another graph he sent in was an interesting correlation.  It was how many viruses have been blocked by ClamD.

As I said, I've noticed a big increase in spam lately in my own personal email as well.

What about the rest of the readers?  Have you guys experienced similiar?

Please leave comments below.

Spam Increase lately?

As I posted on the Internet Storm Center this morning:

Thanks to a reader (Thanks Bob), who wrote in this morning asking if we have seen an increase in spam lately, I can personally confirm that yes, I have seen more spam in my inbox lately.

Bob sent us a couple interesting graphics, the first being a graph of how much of a spam increase there has been recently:

Secondly another graph he sent in was an interesting correlation.  It was how many viruses have been blocked by ClamD.

As I said, I've noticed a big increase in spam lately in my own personal email as well.

What about the rest of the readers?  Have you guys experienced similiar?

Please leave comments below.

Rambling on Productivity and Email (Part Three)

The Calendar

The essential part of any productivity system is the calendar. Managing your time for your projects is probably one of the most vital portions to getting anything done. Without disruptions, without the cruft of the day, you can focus on your problem.

The essential problem with any environment is poorly set expectations. If you think you are going to be able to have your coworkers and boss read your mind, you are grossly mistaken. They don't know that you may be behind on a certain project, they don't know that you may need more time with whatever it is you are working on. They know what you tell them. In most big corporate environments, one of the ways they can find this out is by looking at your calendar.

I use Google calendar for my organizational skills, because that's what I have integrated into my system, its what our company uses, and it works. However, these ideas should work perfectly for your Microsoft Exchange calendaring system (or whatever calendaring system you happen to use).

Set aside some time

Begin by setting aside some time, usually Monday and Friday, to yourself. This is your time to be able to get things in the proper order and organize your thoughts into a coherent structure. I like Monday and Friday because Monday allows me to plan for the week, Friday allows me to review any last minute details that MUST be done this week, cannot wait for Monday, and gives me time to knock them out.

Obviously the times to do this on Monday are first thing in the morning. On Friday I like to set aside the hour of 3-4. I call this "Review Time". There are no meetings scheduled during this time. This is your sacred time to balance your thoughts. As David Allen says in his seminars on GTD, anything that goes on your calendar is a contract, a hard bet, a commitment. The calendar is sacred. Don't put things on your calendar you "might" do. Put things on your calendar that you are going to do. If you aren't going to do it, make it a "Todo", file it under "someday", and take a look at it in your daily review time.

Right now, go to your calendar on Monday and Friday and block off an hour to yourself, go ahead, we'll wait here.

During this time on those days, you do exactly what I stated above, and see if it helps. I find it useful to set aside, just a half hour, right after lunch to see where I was at for the day, review my To-do list, and then accomplish everything that needed to be accomplished for that day.

Do your best to schedule

You will be surprised how well this works. I ask people, even my wife, to her greater annoyance, anything that I need to be at or participate in, needs to go on my calendar. I need to remember it, and I need to be there. My calendar is how I schedule things and is my organizational tool. My Google Calendar is synced between my desktop and my iPhone, and the web (so my wife can get it). If it's not on my calendar, either I don't know about it, or I can't be there (I've declined). Make sure it's on my calendar and we'll be good. Force your coworkers to be the same way. Stick to the time limits.

Scenario: Some guy comes to your desk.

Them: "Hey Bob -(you)-, Do you have a few minutes to talk about project x?"

You: "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm in the middle of something right now, let's set aside a few minutes to talk about that this afternoon (tomorrow, friday). Can you send me an invite for that at 3?"

Bam. Interruption gone, scheduled time to talk about project x, and you move on with what you were talking about. This isn't perfect. Sometimes you'll have to deal with little interruptions.

Wow. Talk about a perfect example. Seriously. Right after I finished the previous paragraph I received a phone call. Wanting to schedule a furniture delivery. Now, had I not answered the phone, it would have went to voicemail and I then I could have called them back at my convenience, scheduling the furniture delivery time at on my terms.

However, when it comes to furniture delivery, the sooner you book the delivery date, the faster you will get your stuff. So I took the call. I sat down in front of my Google calendar, blocked off the date that my furniture will be delivered. They say they are going to call the day before with the exact 3-hour window of delivery time, which is slightly annoying, but I'll deal with it. Now I know on that furniture delivery day, I will be available.

Back on topic, even though that really wasn't a deviation. Wife just called. Of course I had to take that call.

Scheduling YOUR time is on YOUR terms. Sometimes you can't help it and you have to work around other people's schedules, so you have to be flexible. But don't be flexible once you put things on the calendar. People are expecting to meet with you, you are important enough to have a meeting with and talk about a dedicated subject. Don't disrespect another persons time by saying you'll be at a meeting and then not showing up. If you have a conflict, decline the meeting.

The tricky part is the "maybe" response to a meeting invite. If have to respond with Maybe, and I try very hard not to, I write an email and explain why I replied with maybe. If the person can possibly reschedule for a more convenient time for both parties, then that is fine, however, give the person you are responding to the common courtesy o understand why you replied with Maybe. Then, maybe, then can move the meeting to a mutually beneficial time.

Example: I have a meeting at 1pm that usually runs over. If you send me a meeting invite at 2pm, I'll respond with "Maybe" -- by the way, Outlook calls this "Tentative". Then I'll write you an email saying something like this:

"Dear Bob,

I apologize for having to respond to your meeting invite with "Maybe". I have a meeting at 1pm that sometimes runs over time. If there is another time you'd like to push the meeting to, say, 2:30 or 3pm that same day, that would be good with me as well. I have an opening on my calendar at that time.

Thanks in advance,

Me"

Meetings that run over time are evil. If the time is going to run over, schedule a followup. Or ask the meeting attendees if they can stay, or need to go. If anyone needs to go, let them go. Don't disrespect their time. They didn't disrespect yours by attending your meeting.

Out of Office

I personally am not a fan of the "Out of Office" message. It's a bad security practice. Especially for the security and network personnel. It allows someone sending you an email to know that you are not in the office right now, and right now would be an excellent time to attack the network. Instead, I like to use the calendar for this. Block the time you are going to be Out of the Office out as "Out of Office". I believe in Outlook, they color the "Out of Office" time differently, purple I think. Of course this only works for people in your domain, (exchange wise), or people that have access to your calendar, (say, Google Calendar). But, I believe this to be a more secure and more polite way of handling your Out of Office. If it's important, someone will schedule a call, talk, or meeting, but you have to train your coworkers to do this. If it's not important, you'll get back to the email when you get back. Besides, if it's THAT important, they should just pick up the phone and call you.

I write these articles to give you a broad overview of what works and how to structure it. You have to apply it to your own life and situation. This method doesn't work for everyone, but it sure does work for me.

I just want to echo something that Merlin Mann has said. I hate that the default meeting time in an hour. I wish you could change that in some way. In Google Calendar, iCal, and in Outlook, the default meeting time is an hour long. I want to be able to say the default meeting time is 30 minutes. If I want to expand it, I can. But blocking a whole hour of my time? Working approx 8 hours a day, that's not very much time. Anyway, sorry, pet peeve.

Please leave comments below.

Rambling on Productivity and Email (Part Three)

The Calendar

The essential part of any productivity system is the calendar. Managing your time for your projects is probably one of the most vital portions to getting anything done. Without disruptions, without the cruft of the day, you can focus on your problem.

The essential problem with any environment is poorly set expectations. If you think you are going to be able to have your coworkers and boss read your mind, you are grossly mistaken. They don't know that you may be behind on a certain project, they don't know that you may need more time with whatever it is you are working on. They know what you tell them. In most big corporate environments, one of the ways they can find this out is by looking at your calendar.

I use Google calendar for my organizational skills, because that's what I have integrated into my system, its what our company uses, and it works. However, these ideas should work perfectly for your Microsoft Exchange calendaring system (or whatever calendaring system you happen to use).

Set aside some time

Begin by setting aside some time, usually Monday and Friday, to yourself. This is your time to be able to get things in the proper order and organize your thoughts into a coherent structure. I like Monday and Friday because Monday allows me to plan for the week, Friday allows me to review any last minute details that MUST be done this week, cannot wait for Monday, and gives me time to knock them out.

Obviously the times to do this on Monday are first thing in the morning. On Friday I like to set aside the hour of 3-4. I call this "Review Time". There are no meetings scheduled during this time. This is your sacred time to balance your thoughts. As David Allen says in his seminars on GTD, anything that goes on your calendar is a contract, a hard bet, a commitment. The calendar is sacred. Don't put things on your calendar you "might" do. Put things on your calendar that you are going to do. If you aren't going to do it, make it a "Todo", file it under "someday", and take a look at it in your daily review time.

Right now, go to your calendar on Monday and Friday and block off an hour to yourself, go ahead, we'll wait here.

During this time on those days, you do exactly what I stated above, and see if it helps. I find it useful to set aside, just a half hour, right after lunch to see where I was at for the day, review my To-do list, and then accomplish everything that needed to be accomplished for that day.

Do your best to schedule

You will be surprised how well this works. I ask people, even my wife, to her greater annoyance, anything that I need to be at or participate in, needs to go on my calendar. I need to remember it, and I need to be there. My calendar is how I schedule things and is my organizational tool. My Google Calendar is synced between my desktop and my iPhone, and the web (so my wife can get it). If it's not on my calendar, either I don't know about it, or I can't be there (I've declined). Make sure it's on my calendar and we'll be good. Force your coworkers to be the same way. Stick to the time limits.

Scenario: Some guy comes to your desk.

Them: "Hey Bob -(you)-, Do you have a few minutes to talk about project x?"

You: "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm in the middle of something right now, let's set aside a few minutes to talk about that this afternoon (tomorrow, friday). Can you send me an invite for that at 3?"

Bam. Interruption gone, scheduled time to talk about project x, and you move on with what you were talking about. This isn't perfect. Sometimes you'll have to deal with little interruptions.

Wow. Talk about a perfect example. Seriously. Right after I finished the previous paragraph I received a phone call. Wanting to schedule a furniture delivery. Now, had I not answered the phone, it would have went to voicemail and I then I could have called them back at my convenience, scheduling the furniture delivery time at on my terms.

However, when it comes to furniture delivery, the sooner you book the delivery date, the faster you will get your stuff. So I took the call. I sat down in front of my Google calendar, blocked off the date that my furniture will be delivered. They say they are going to call the day before with the exact 3-hour window of delivery time, which is slightly annoying, but I'll deal with it. Now I know on that furniture delivery day, I will be available.

Back on topic, even though that really wasn't a deviation. Wife just called. Of course I had to take that call.

Scheduling YOUR time is on YOUR terms. Sometimes you can't help it and you have to work around other people's schedules, so you have to be flexible. But don't be flexible once you put things on the calendar. People are expecting to meet with you, you are important enough to have a meeting with and talk about a dedicated subject. Don't disrespect another persons time by saying you'll be at a meeting and then not showing up. If you have a conflict, decline the meeting.

The tricky part is the "maybe" response to a meeting invite. If have to respond with Maybe, and I try very hard not to, I write an email and explain why I replied with maybe. If the person can possibly reschedule for a more convenient time for both parties, then that is fine, however, give the person you are responding to the common courtesy o understand why you replied with Maybe. Then, maybe, then can move the meeting to a mutually beneficial time.

Example: I have a meeting at 1pm that usually runs over. If you send me a meeting invite at 2pm, I'll respond with "Maybe" -- by the way, Outlook calls this "Tentative". Then I'll write you an email saying something like this:

"Dear Bob,

I apologize for having to respond to your meeting invite with "Maybe". I have a meeting at 1pm that sometimes runs over time. If there is another time you'd like to push the meeting to, say, 2:30 or 3pm that same day, that would be good with me as well. I have an opening on my calendar at that time.

Thanks in advance,

Me"

Meetings that run over time are evil. If the time is going to run over, schedule a followup. Or ask the meeting attendees if they can stay, or need to go. If anyone needs to go, let them go. Don't disrespect their time. They didn't disrespect yours by attending your meeting.

Out of Office

I personally am not a fan of the "Out of Office" message. It's a bad security practice. Especially for the security and network personnel. It allows someone sending you an email to know that you are not in the office right now, and right now would be an excellent time to attack the network. Instead, I like to use the calendar for this. Block the time you are going to be Out of the Office out as "Out of Office". I believe in Outlook, they color the "Out of Office" time differently, purple I think. Of course this only works for people in your domain, (exchange wise), or people that have access to your calendar, (say, Google Calendar). But, I believe this to be a more secure and more polite way of handling your Out of Office. If it's important, someone will schedule a call, talk, or meeting, but you have to train your coworkers to do this. If it's not important, you'll get back to the email when you get back. Besides, if it's THAT important, they should just pick up the phone and call you.

I write these articles to give you a broad overview of what works and how to structure it. You have to apply it to your own life and situation. This method doesn't work for everyone, but it sure does work for me.

I just want to echo something that Merlin Mann has said. I hate that the default meeting time in an hour. I wish you could change that in some way. In Google Calendar, iCal, and in Outlook, the default meeting time is an hour long. I want to be able to say the default meeting time is 30 minutes. If I want to expand it, I can. But blocking a whole hour of my time? Working approx 8 hours a day, that's not very much time. Anyway, sorry, pet peeve.

Please leave comments below.

Rambling on Productivity and Email (Part One)

I know I have written many articles on productivity as it relates to Email and GTD before. Check out some past articles here, here, and here. In fact, that last article is my most hit and read article on my blog, in the (almost) five years I've been blogging.

Recently, with a lot of various changes within my personal lifestyle, such as getting the iPhone 3GS, consolidation of email addresses, and generally trying to establish a workable workflow in life, I've been putting the touches on how to process email and generally work with things in life more efficiently. I'll try and write a series of articles on this, so I don't bore you with one big long one.

First, and probably the most interesting as far as I think, is how I process email.

So, my corporate email is Gmail. My company moved our Email hosting solution to Gmail a bit ago, foregoing the traditional take on keeping email in-house, backing it up, using IMAP or Exchange, having people manage it. etc.. It saved our company a ton of money by doing it, and I find that things are much more efficient now that our email is hosted in Gmail.

First off, almost everyone in the computer industry has a Google account now. It's a hard pressed experience to find anyone that doesn't have a @gmail.com account now. I know a ton of companies that their actual email domain (such as ours) is gmail's engine as well. So it's a familiar interface. There was a bit of learning curve with some of our personnel when we first moved to Gmail, but so far it's been great, and if you are a business with the flexibility and need to reduce the amount of machines and backups and people that you are currently maintaining, I'd seriously consider taking a look at Gmail for your corporate enterprise.

Anyway, back to productivity...

Accounts and Consolidation

All my email accounts forward to one account. One. I virtually have about six email accounts for various things (such as emails originating from this blog), but all of them are forwarded to one account. This makes consolidation of email and processing much easier. In Gmail under "Settings", and then under the "Accounts" tab, you can put all your email addresses you have under here and it will be able to "Send mail as:" for all of the accounts that you forward to your one account. Below the accounts you are specifying are two radio buttons.

"Reply from the same address the message was sent to"

or

"Always reply from default address"

If you want to have all your email coming out of your one "consolidated" account always be that single address, leave the bottom radio button checked, however, if you want your email to be allowed to be sent as the address that it was received on, check the top radio button. This will allow all of your email to be addressed from the proper account when you reply or forward.

Labels

Gmail has abandoned the traditionalist thought of "putting email into folders", and after a while so did I. Now, for those of you (like me) that were used to their email coming into the inbox, and then having a series of filters, either in Outlook or Mail.app, as you would read in my previous articles, to put those emails into folders, Gmail is a bit different. Instead of sorting things into "containers", you may have one email that is "tagged" with different containers. These tags and containers are called "Labels". Think of an email like a piece of paper. You can label this piece of paper with several things to remind you where to find this paper. So, let's say it's work related. You might tag it with "Work". What if it's a receipt? But it's also work related? You might tag it with "Work" and "Receipt", and maybe "Expense Report". The email doesn't exist in multiple copies, it's just labeled additional things.

There are two types of labels in my opinion. Types that I call "Straightfoward" and "Dynamic". (You won't see those terms in the interface, I just made them up.) Straightforward for me, is a static label. For instance. Anything from the domain "Sourcefire.com" is labeled as "Sourcefire". This can be considered a static folder, or Straightforward label.

Then I have another type of label that I call "Dynamic". This label spans across "folders" and labels. An example of this is, "Customers". Any email I get from a customer, I label as "Customer". These emails probably exist in about three other labels (receipts, to-do, Sourcefire, etc) but are also tagged as "Customer" so I know where to immediately go find an email from a customer.

Filters

Filters are a way of automatically performing different actions on emails. Applying labels, deleting them, marking them as read, skipping the inbox, etc. I talked about some of the things you can do with filters in this post. So I encourage a read of that. I use Filters as "How can I possibly get this email out of my inbox in the most efficient way possible if its something that I don't have to read right away".

For instance. I belong to about 20 or 30 listservers of various natures. Computer listservers, Apple listservers, Gmail listservers even. Things that interest me, things that I like to read or participate in. (This nets me about 1000 emails a day) But you know, these aren't things that need to be dealt with immediately. Sometimes, ever. The Listservers that aren't as important bypass my inbox directly. Read the above post on how I do this, and you'll see.

The point of this is, the email that I don't need to DEAL with right away gets put away.

When an email hits my inbox, I have one of three actions that I do with it.

1) Read it, Reply to it.

2) Read it, Make a Todo out of something it contains.

3) Read it, Archive it.

That's it, either write them back, make a Todo, or get rid of the email. I don't keep things in my Inbox. Inbox Zero is what I attribute this to. I follow the principle of "if an email takes less than two minutes to respond to, do it. Do it right now." If I think I'll need to write a long winded response, or I'll need to look something up in order to get a proper response to your email, I flag it as a Todo, and I Do it when I get done the inbox process. If I need to forward it, I do it. If I read it, digested the email, and it contains no action, I archive it. I'll write a blog post later on Todos and how I process those.

Another key thing if you follow my advice for email consolidation with Gmail is -- keyboard shortcuts. Seriously. You have got to learn these things. Go into your "Settings" in Gmail, and enable the Keyboard shortcuts. Go back to your inbox and Hit "?". Question Mark. You will get a nice on screen display with all the shortcuts that are available in the Gmail interface. It will take you about two weeks to master these, but after you do, you'll be flying through email. Almost too fast. Make sure you actually read what you are doing. Sometimes I'll make the mistake of checking off several emails at a time and archiving them. Accidentally archiving one I needed to deal with.

The reason I attribute some of my workflow process to the iPhone 3GS is, this is the first iPhone where the Gmail web app wasn't a complete dog in terms of performance. Prior to this version of the iPhone using the Gmail web app worked just fine, don't get me wrong, but it was slow enough to just tick me off enough to not want to use it. Now with the iPhone 3GS, the processor is faster, it executes javascript faster. It's become my replacement for the built in app on the iPhone now. (Oh yeah, and cut and paste helps a lot too when trying to put stuff into a ToDo list.)

Until next entry...

Please leave comments below.

Rambling on Productivity and Email (Part One)

I know I have written many articles on productivity as it relates to Email and GTD before. Check out some past articles here, here, and here. In fact, that last article is my most hit and read article on my blog, in the (almost) five years I've been blogging.

Recently, with a lot of various changes within my personal lifestyle, such as getting the iPhone 3GS, consolidation of email addresses, and generally trying to establish a workable workflow in life, I've been putting the touches on how to process email and generally work with things in life more efficiently. I'll try and write a series of articles on this, so I don't bore you with one big long one.

First, and probably the most interesting as far as I think, is how I process email.

So, my corporate email is Gmail. My company moved our Email hosting solution to Gmail a bit ago, foregoing the traditional take on keeping email in-house, backing it up, using IMAP or Exchange, having people manage it. etc.. It saved our company a ton of money by doing it, and I find that things are much more efficient now that our email is hosted in Gmail.

First off, almost everyone in the computer industry has a Google account now. It's a hard pressed experience to find anyone that doesn't have a @gmail.com account now. I know a ton of companies that their actual email domain (such as ours) is gmail's engine as well. So it's a familiar interface. There was a bit of learning curve with some of our personnel when we first moved to Gmail, but so far it's been great, and if you are a business with the flexibility and need to reduce the amount of machines and backups and people that you are currently maintaining, I'd seriously consider taking a look at Gmail for your corporate enterprise.

Anyway, back to productivity...

Accounts and Consolidation

All my email accounts forward to one account. One. I virtually have about six email accounts for various things (such as emails originating from this blog), but all of them are forwarded to one account. This makes consolidation of email and processing much easier. In Gmail under "Settings", and then under the "Accounts" tab, you can put all your email addresses you have under here and it will be able to "Send mail as:" for all of the accounts that you forward to your one account. Below the accounts you are specifying are two radio buttons.

"Reply from the same address the message was sent to"

or

"Always reply from default address"

If you want to have all your email coming out of your one "consolidated" account always be that single address, leave the bottom radio button checked, however, if you want your email to be allowed to be sent as the address that it was received on, check the top radio button. This will allow all of your email to be addressed from the proper account when you reply or forward.

Labels

Gmail has abandoned the traditionalist thought of "putting email into folders", and after a while so did I. Now, for those of you (like me) that were used to their email coming into the inbox, and then having a series of filters, either in Outlook or Mail.app, as you would read in my previous articles, to put those emails into folders, Gmail is a bit different. Instead of sorting things into "containers", you may have one email that is "tagged" with different containers. These tags and containers are called "Labels". Think of an email like a piece of paper. You can label this piece of paper with several things to remind you where to find this paper. So, let's say it's work related. You might tag it with "Work". What if it's a receipt? But it's also work related? You might tag it with "Work" and "Receipt", and maybe "Expense Report". The email doesn't exist in multiple copies, it's just labeled additional things.

There are two types of labels in my opinion. Types that I call "Straightfoward" and "Dynamic". (You won't see those terms in the interface, I just made them up.) Straightforward for me, is a static label. For instance. Anything from the domain "Sourcefire.com" is labeled as "Sourcefire". This can be considered a static folder, or Straightforward label.

Then I have another type of label that I call "Dynamic". This label spans across "folders" and labels. An example of this is, "Customers". Any email I get from a customer, I label as "Customer". These emails probably exist in about three other labels (receipts, to-do, Sourcefire, etc) but are also tagged as "Customer" so I know where to immediately go find an email from a customer.

Filters

Filters are a way of automatically performing different actions on emails. Applying labels, deleting them, marking them as read, skipping the inbox, etc. I talked about some of the things you can do with filters in this post. So I encourage a read of that. I use Filters as "How can I possibly get this email out of my inbox in the most efficient way possible if its something that I don't have to read right away".

For instance. I belong to about 20 or 30 listservers of various natures. Computer listservers, Apple listservers, Gmail listservers even. Things that interest me, things that I like to read or participate in. (This nets me about 1000 emails a day) But you know, these aren't things that need to be dealt with immediately. Sometimes, ever. The Listservers that aren't as important bypass my inbox directly. Read the above post on how I do this, and you'll see.

The point of this is, the email that I don't need to DEAL with right away gets put away.

When an email hits my inbox, I have one of three actions that I do with it.

1) Read it, Reply to it.

2) Read it, Make a Todo out of something it contains.

3) Read it, Archive it.

That's it, either write them back, make a Todo, or get rid of the email. I don't keep things in my Inbox. Inbox Zero is what I attribute this to. I follow the principle of "if an email takes less than two minutes to respond to, do it. Do it right now." If I think I'll need to write a long winded response, or I'll need to look something up in order to get a proper response to your email, I flag it as a Todo, and I Do it when I get done the inbox process. If I need to forward it, I do it. If I read it, digested the email, and it contains no action, I archive it. I'll write a blog post later on Todos and how I process those.

Another key thing if you follow my advice for email consolidation with Gmail is -- keyboard shortcuts. Seriously. You have got to learn these things. Go into your "Settings" in Gmail, and enable the Keyboard shortcuts. Go back to your inbox and Hit "?". Question Mark. You will get a nice on screen display with all the shortcuts that are available in the Gmail interface. It will take you about two weeks to master these, but after you do, you'll be flying through email. Almost too fast. Make sure you actually read what you are doing. Sometimes I'll make the mistake of checking off several emails at a time and archiving them. Accidentally archiving one I needed to deal with.

The reason I attribute some of my workflow process to the iPhone 3GS is, this is the first iPhone where the Gmail web app wasn't a complete dog in terms of performance. Prior to this version of the iPhone using the Gmail web app worked just fine, don't get me wrong, but it was slow enough to just tick me off enough to not want to use it. Now with the iPhone 3GS, the processor is faster, it executes javascript faster. It's become my replacement for the built in app on the iPhone now. (Oh yeah, and cut and paste helps a lot too when trying to put stuff into a ToDo list.)

Until next entry...

Please leave comments below.

Freedom and Understanding

(From an email list, someone wanted to know how to block services like MobileMe on the network. Normally I’d offer the advice on how to do it, but this time the first question I asked was “Do you local users have Admin to their own boxes?” To which the answer was “Yes.” -- I edited it to make more sense as a blog post. This is a post intended to provoke discussion, obviously my suggestions and things won’t work everywhere and in all scenarios and an all networks. Keep an open mind.)

We are in a new world, a mass world full of mobility. Take the iPhone. This is a computer, a computer I carry in my pocket, but none the less a computer. I could feasibly get away with leaving my laptop at home the majority of the time with the amount of things that I can get done on my phone. Laptops sales have increased significantly in the past few years, people are buying less and less desktop computers. Laptop speeds have caught up with desktop speeds, and things are much more convenient now.

Blackberries were that way, but the iPhone really sealed the deal. Of course now we have a plethora of devices coming out claiming to be “iPhone killers”. The Palm Pre, the things from LG, the Blackberry Storm, but there is still nothing that can touch the iPhone. You put an OS this powerful in a box this mobile, and viola, you have a mobile computing platform. And the solution to a lot of life's little problems. Why doesn’t Apple make a netbook? Wake up, they already have.

I absolutely could not get away with not being able to have MobileMe (or Google, whatever you use) sync my contacts, calendars, bookmarks, etc from the desktop up to the cloud and back down to my phone. I could not function if I didn't have realtime push for all of that kind of stuff. How would I know about that meeting that I just got invited to five minutes ago? Cause you know, no one is going to actually pick up a phone and call you about it (sarcasm).

What are the users doing that they need these sync services? Is what they are doing enhancing productivity or making their life easier? Probably. Is it a security risk? Can it be mitigated without destroying it?

I don't see a reason why not. The time has come for us a security professionals to stop nuking that which we don't understand/want to deal with, and start understanding why things are being used, how they are being used, and does it help? Instead of destroying everything, let’s figure out services and techniques that will provide our users the level of, well, not only training, but the level of convenience that is useful to them.

There are all these great companies out there starting great businesses to solve companies and life's problems, and attitudes like "we need to stop them" -- for no good reason -- just don't fly anymore. It just doesn't make sense in this day and age. Heck the Army even allows people to go to Facebook and Twitter now. Yes, they can click on bad things and people will download bad things and put them on their machines, but you know what, they are going to do it anyway, they will find a way around your control. Instead of inhibiting them, enable your users. I am not saying let them do what they want, or unblock everything. I am saying, let’s find solutions to their problems, instead of saying “no” all the time.

Yes there are security risks, but there are security risks in everything, right?

How can we make our users lives easier, more productive, and efficient without sacrificing security?

Make sure IT operates and conforms to the company policies, and you will have a much happier and much more productive workforce.

Freedom and Understanding

(From an email list, someone wanted to know how to block services like MobileMe on the network. Normally I’d offer the advice on how to do it, but this time the first question I asked was “Do you local users have Admin to their own boxes?” To which the answer was “Yes.” -- I edited it to make more sense as a blog post. This is a post intended to provoke discussion, obviously my suggestions and things won’t work everywhere and in all scenarios and an all networks. Keep an open mind.)

We are in a new world, a mass world full of mobility. Take the iPhone. This is a computer, a computer I carry in my pocket, but none the less a computer. I could feasibly get away with leaving my laptop at home the majority of the time with the amount of things that I can get done on my phone. Laptops sales have increased significantly in the past few years, people are buying less and less desktop computers. Laptop speeds have caught up with desktop speeds, and things are much more convenient now.

Blackberries were that way, but the iPhone really sealed the deal. Of course now we have a plethora of devices coming out claiming to be “iPhone killers”. The Palm Pre, the things from LG, the Blackberry Storm, but there is still nothing that can touch the iPhone. You put an OS this powerful in a box this mobile, and viola, you have a mobile computing platform. And the solution to a lot of life's little problems. Why doesn’t Apple make a netbook? Wake up, they already have.

I absolutely could not get away with not being able to have MobileMe (or Google, whatever you use) sync my contacts, calendars, bookmarks, etc from the desktop up to the cloud and back down to my phone. I could not function if I didn't have realtime push for all of that kind of stuff. How would I know about that meeting that I just got invited to five minutes ago? Cause you know, no one is going to actually pick up a phone and call you about it (sarcasm).

What are the users doing that they need these sync services? Is what they are doing enhancing productivity or making their life easier? Probably. Is it a security risk? Can it be mitigated without destroying it?

I don't see a reason why not. The time has come for us a security professionals to stop nuking that which we don't understand/want to deal with, and start understanding why things are being used, how they are being used, and does it help? Instead of destroying everything, let’s figure out services and techniques that will provide our users the level of, well, not only training, but the level of convenience that is useful to them.

There are all these great companies out there starting great businesses to solve companies and life's problems, and attitudes like "we need to stop them" -- for no good reason -- just don't fly anymore. It just doesn't make sense in this day and age. Heck the Army even allows people to go to Facebook and Twitter now. Yes, they can click on bad things and people will download bad things and put them on their machines, but you know what, they are going to do it anyway, they will find a way around your control. Instead of inhibiting them, enable your users. I am not saying let them do what they want, or unblock everything. I am saying, let’s find solutions to their problems, instead of saying “no” all the time.

Yes there are security risks, but there are security risks in everything, right?

How can we make our users lives easier, more productive, and efficient without sacrificing security?

Make sure IT operates and conforms to the company policies, and you will have a much happier and much more productive workforce.

iPhone 3.0 and CalDAV

Bottom Line up Front -- Caldav and the iPhone 3.0 OS are awesome. Here’s how to make it work for you.

Finally Caldav actually works with Google. Let me back up.

You’ve read my posts talking about how to sync your calendar between MobileMe and Google Calendar using BusySync. But what if you could cut BusySync out of the middle? Even though it’s pretty quick (at max a minute), what if you could properly function with Google’s calendar via CalDav?

First things first, I have two requirements for my calendar:

I can have my calendar pushed to me at all times.

I can have access to my wife’s calendar on my phone

My wife’s calendar is on Google Calendar. That being said, here we go...

I have to have my calendar pushed to me at all times because it’s quite frequent that I am invited to a conference call, or a meeting, you know, after it started, and I need the dial in or meeting details RIGHT NOW. I don’t have time to find a computer, log in, check the calendar (or wait for it to sync). So my solution was, I need push calendar. Fine, BusySync and MobileMe was a near perfect solution for that. I say near perfect because when I received an invite on my iPhone I couldn’t accept it, deny it, maybe it..etc.. I could do that on my iCal, but not on my phone. The only option that allows you to do this is Exchange integration with the iPhone. Well I don’t have an Exchange server. Wait, didn’t Google drop that on us awhile back? Yes, yes they did.

http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html

So I went into my Calendar settings on my iPhone 3.0 software, disabled calendar syncing with my MobileMe account, and added a new account, Exchange this time, following the directions laid out here:

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740&topic=14252

Okay, Done. Instantly my calendar started pushing down to my iPhone. I can send events from here, I can invite people, I can be invited.. etc.. instant awesome.

Okay, but what about subscribing to my wife’s calendar?

Well, she uses Google Calendar, so now with iPhone 3.0, you can subscribe to a calendar via .ics file or, via caldav. So I subscribed to her calendar via caldav. Only you can only have one Exchange account. Not worry, Apple fixed that too:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/how-to/#calendar.subscribing-to-calendars

I went in and subscribed to my wife’s Google calendar via Caldav, and now, I have both calendars fully synced to my iPhone at all times. Good stuff.

Well, I wasn’t done. Google a long time ago enabled access and the ability to integrate iCal with CalDav. I wrote before on this blog that it wasn’t ready.

But it seems Google may have fixed some issues.

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99358#ical

Enabled me to set up Google Calendar, to which I needed to test it. So I set up an invite for several of my coworkers for a meeting, and lo and behold, when I added the invites, it presented me with a question “Check availability”. Since my coworkers and I all use Google Calendar, I was able to view the availability of my co-workers right in iCal, make an appointment when they were all free, and guess what? When I clicked Send? It didn’t send an iCal .ics invite from my Mail.app, GOOGLE sent a Google calendar invite from the server. From the SERVER. Of course, when people responded “yes” iCal updated, my phone updated, Google Calendar updated, all instantly.

The only (and I do mean ONLY) hiccup I noticed in this whole thing is, when I am typing names for invitations in the meetings, the names don’t automatically fill in from my address book. Neither locally, or on Google Contacts. Leaving me to type the entire email address out. However, I noticed an interesting side effect. I CAN type a group name (Local address book Group Name). That will populate everyone.

So, I still have my Contacts being pushed down to me via MobileMe, because I don’t like how Google Contacts auto adds people you correspond with into your address book, well, I don’t mind that, but it pushes these “new” people down to my phone and my address book on my computer, leaving me to then have to clean them all up. And that’s just annoying.

Hope you enjoy. I’ll try and post back in a couple days to let you know how everything is working with my new set up and with iPhone 3.0 in general.

Overall though, so far, iPhone 3.0 seems speedier, and can’t wait for MMS.

iPhone 3.0 and CalDAV

Bottom Line up Front -- Caldav and the iPhone 3.0 OS are awesome. Here’s how to make it work for you.

Finally Caldav actually works with Google. Let me back up.

You’ve read my posts talking about how to sync your calendar between MobileMe and Google Calendar using BusySync. But what if you could cut BusySync out of the middle? Even though it’s pretty quick (at max a minute), what if you could properly function with Google’s calendar via CalDav?

First things first, I have two requirements for my calendar:

I can have my calendar pushed to me at all times.

I can have access to my wife’s calendar on my phone

My wife’s calendar is on Google Calendar. That being said, here we go...

I have to have my calendar pushed to me at all times because it’s quite frequent that I am invited to a conference call, or a meeting, you know, after it started, and I need the dial in or meeting details RIGHT NOW. I don’t have time to find a computer, log in, check the calendar (or wait for it to sync). So my solution was, I need push calendar. Fine, BusySync and MobileMe was a near perfect solution for that. I say near perfect because when I received an invite on my iPhone I couldn’t accept it, deny it, maybe it..etc.. I could do that on my iCal, but not on my phone. The only option that allows you to do this is Exchange integration with the iPhone. Well I don’t have an Exchange server. Wait, didn’t Google drop that on us awhile back? Yes, yes they did.

http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html

So I went into my Calendar settings on my iPhone 3.0 software, disabled calendar syncing with my MobileMe account, and added a new account, Exchange this time, following the directions laid out here:

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740&topic=14252

Okay, Done. Instantly my calendar started pushing down to my iPhone. I can send events from here, I can invite people, I can be invited.. etc.. instant awesome.

Okay, but what about subscribing to my wife’s calendar?

Well, she uses Google Calendar, so now with iPhone 3.0, you can subscribe to a calendar via .ics file or, via caldav. So I subscribed to her calendar via caldav. Only you can only have one Exchange account. Not worry, Apple fixed that too:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/how-to/#calendar.subscribing-to-calendars

I went in and subscribed to my wife’s Google calendar via Caldav, and now, I have both calendars fully synced to my iPhone at all times. Good stuff.

Well, I wasn’t done. Google a long time ago enabled access and the ability to integrate iCal with CalDav. I wrote before on this blog that it wasn’t ready.

But it seems Google may have fixed some issues.

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99358#ical

Enabled me to set up Google Calendar, to which I needed to test it. So I set up an invite for several of my coworkers for a meeting, and lo and behold, when I added the invites, it presented me with a question “Check availability”. Since my coworkers and I all use Google Calendar, I was able to view the availability of my co-workers right in iCal, make an appointment when they were all free, and guess what? When I clicked Send? It didn’t send an iCal .ics invite from my Mail.app, GOOGLE sent a Google calendar invite from the server. From the SERVER. Of course, when people responded “yes” iCal updated, my phone updated, Google Calendar updated, all instantly.

The only (and I do mean ONLY) hiccup I noticed in this whole thing is, when I am typing names for invitations in the meetings, the names don’t automatically fill in from my address book. Neither locally, or on Google Contacts. Leaving me to type the entire email address out. However, I noticed an interesting side effect. I CAN type a group name (Local address book Group Name). That will populate everyone.

So, I still have my Contacts being pushed down to me via MobileMe, because I don’t like how Google Contacts auto adds people you correspond with into your address book, well, I don’t mind that, but it pushes these “new” people down to my phone and my address book on my computer, leaving me to then have to clean them all up. And that’s just annoying.

Hope you enjoy. I’ll try and post back in a couple days to let you know how everything is working with my new set up and with iPhone 3.0 in general.

Overall though, so far, iPhone 3.0 seems speedier, and can’t wait for MMS.