Nostalgia of the Mind

Sooooooooooo, I figured i would share my Gmail setup with the world. Because my printer doesn’t work ($51 for an ink catridge??? WTF!) I just email stuff to myself and print it all out at school. Because I email so much, I use a quasi-tagging system, which, combined with Gmail’s mad mail searching abilities, allows me easy access without having to borrow through the perhaps hundreds of documents I’ve sent to myself over the years. Also, you can use GSpace (firefox extension) or Gmail Drive (shell extension) for similar functionality, but I already have enough extensions, and Vista is slow enough as it is, without more shit crap running. More after the jump.

Tip #1: Create a contact for yourself. That means creating the contact “Me” (or “I” for the grammatically astute) and registering the email as your Gmail account. That way, you just type in “me” and press enter, and then you have your email address typed in. Doing this fifty times, you see how much speedier typing the email is.

Tip #2: Create a tag system to YOUR liking. Yes, you can customize it (a wee bit). Basically, you type in the category or the title(not unlike the organization on WordPress) in the subject line. This is so, if you label it, you know what the hell it is. Then, you just type in random tags into the message body, and attach the document. For example, if I wanted to archive (upload and tag into Gmail) a document on an interview about the Cold War for History, I would have as a subject line: “Cold War Interview - History.” you could also just have “History,” or just “Cold War Interview.” It’s up to you. For me, I use the first one. Then, in th message body, I might have sophomore, 2007-2008, school, history, cold war, or any of a number of other informative, searchable tags. That way, If I want to find that treatise on the existence of fecal matter in the 4th dimension, I just type in treatise, or fecal matter, or 4th dimension, or even WTF (I think I tagged it as such).

UPDATE: Tip #3: Use colors for quick access. I didn’t realize this until a friend pointed out to me. Next to any label in the “labels” sidebar, there is a little discolored box, which, when clicked, shows a box of various colors, including different text colors and highlight colors. I don’t like the highlights very much, but the changes in text color really help to differentiate between labels, which are almost as good as tags.

Only a few tips, but it’s great to use. Hope you, the solitary reader, found this enjoyable and informative. (The learning, IT BURNS!!!).