Carl Hutzler's Blog

I use Gmail to host my carlhutzler.com email. It is free and very versatile. They have great spam fighting as well. But I started to get concerned about false positives with Gmail the other day when my buddy Tken said an email I just sent to him went to his spam folder (he hosts his domain on gmail as well).

Then yesterday I found out one of my client’s had responded to me about 3 weeks ago and her email went to my spam folder. Not that this is a big cause for alarm, one false positive (that I have noticed) in two years is not bad. But maybe there are more?

As one preventative step, I decided to look at my gmail address book (contacts) to see how many were in the list. Turns out I only had 75 contacts! But my local email program on my desktop had over 2000. Hmmmm. I guess Gmail does not “collect” addresses as I send them from my desktop email program (via SMTP). Or maybe there is a setting to allow that? I am not aware of one, but boy should they have it.

Anyway, I use Thunderbird for my email client and I did a quick google search and found a plugin called “Zindus” that will allow you to sunc (bi-directional if you like) to gmail from thunderbird. While the interface/set-up is a little clunky looking, it does work. After a little playing, I was able to sync my 2000+ contacts to Google. And it removed dupes as well!

This should help with spam reliability from people I already email regularly and will make using the Google webmail interface more versatile as I don’t have to remember everyone’s address if I am away from my laptop.

Oh, and I also found that you can now sign into AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) from within the Gmail web interface now. Bonus :-)