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Could Gmail be used as a spam filter for any e-mail account? The answer is yes, it can. And here’s how!

Want a new look for your gmail account? Then visit this site to learn how to skin your gmail account.

GMail already supports RSS feeds (without attachments unfortunately) and that if used incorrectly can indeed be a security vunerability.

However, these are locally hosted, user created RSS feed based off of SSL POP access to a GMail account. Where’s the security vunerability there if that RSS feed is never posted online? The beauty of this, it’s not meant to be posted online - its a feed of YOUR GMail that you can plug into iTunes or any other podcatcher and automatically get mp3s sent to your GMail account added to your mp3 player. A corollary to that is you could post this feed online and let other people subscribe to your GMail inbox, but that’s not the point of the story.

The Google supplied GMail feed does not support attachments, so this is more of a notification rather then a podcast client.. BUT this is a suggestion a POP3 to RSS translation. Googling for a solution led to a page where someone had clearly already thought of this idea back in FEBRUARY. Interestingly enough it was while getting the Mailfeed PHP script to work with GMail that led to them.

It’s an interesting idea but with a few issues with it though…

• If the email account was known, then there’s nothing to stop anybody else from inserting their own stuff into your “feed” by simply emailing it to your gmail account. This could be worked around with a clever combination of labels and/or filters though.
• GMail’s built-in RSS feeds, at the moment, require a password to access them. So anybody getting your feed (if it was direct through GMail) has your account password.
• GMail’s feed doesn’t convert attachments to enclosures, so using their RSS feed is a dead end anyway.
• Making a POP3 to RSS converter would be possible, however you still need to:
1. Host that RSS locally.
2. Provide enclosures which allow listeners to get the content, which they can’t do if you leave it on the GMail account. So the bandwidth problem isn’t solved there. In the case of distributing podcasts through GMail- if listeners were subscribed to their GMail accounts and you sent an email to 100 listener’s GMail accounts, your bandwidth is just for uploading the podcast one time. It’s like a podcast e-newsletter. Whatever program/script we develop to do this would need to separate different incoming podcasts somehow.
• If you want to make an RSS feed for your own account which supports enclosures, thus letting people send you audio to listen to via a podcast client, then that would be possible, but given the setup of GMail, it’s the only real useful thing you could do with this idea. Once you have hundreds of people doing that, you could potentially just gmail them all your podcast, and therefore, bandwidth is just the cost of you uploading your podcast once to GMail, google takes care of the rest.

Mix in a little GMailFS and if you email out a podcast with the subject of GMAILFS: foofilename.mp3 [foosize;a;1] then GMailFS users will automatically download the file to their GMail Drive. Now its just a matter of dumping these files automatically into an mp3 player. Perhaps a script to generate an RSS feed off the files in the GMail Drive? It doesn’t have to be RSS neccesarily either here, but most podcatchers understand RSS enclosures so it’d be an easier way to interface them.

If someone wrote a program that did all of this using GMailFS or equivalent perhaps they should call it Poodcatcher

Here’s some solutions:

Solution 1) Email files to GmailFS users with the subject of GMAILFS: foofilename.mp3 [foosize;a;1] and the podcasts will automatically be available on everyone’s gmail drives. GmailFS download.

Solution 2) Use Gmail POP access plus a script that converts POP mail to RSS like this one or this one.

Scott Villarosa posted about how to get Gmail to find specific downloads on BitTorrent websites using RSS feeds.

Now thats pretty cool!!! It is obvious how this would be of benefit to the user.

That’s a pretty cool trick - for non-Azureus users. For Azureus users, there’s already have “2″ RSS programs for downloading new torrents.

Gmail has many hidden features which can be utilized and thanks to some illustratious people, Gmail tips can now be shared with all. In an effort to provide easier access to Gmail Tips, they have been posted on “GmailTips.com” web site. Some of these Gmail Tips may be outdated, but they represent the entire collection. A nice list with informative content about gmail and cool tips on usage etc.

Cool tips though on the Gmail thing. So I guess my rage get’s pacified somewhat. This site has some lovely tips, too bad I’m too lazy to read them all. Google never stops giving! GMail Tips?? What is tips about them? Mostly things that you already know..

What’s with all these Gmail tips… there’s at least one a week. This fella forgot (or doesnt know) to put my favorite tip of all, storing attachements greater than 10mb, up to 20mb, and soon with the help of xmail you will be able to store even larger than 20mb attachements.

Google has a big problem on its hands: Gmail users are developing ad blindness. Ad blindness results when people get accustomed to ads and stop noticing them.

I like gmail ads… Since they are kind of humorous, I find myself occasionally scanning through them just to see what is there. They may soon have a problem, but I think they are doing a pretty good job with the ad plan overall. I don’t block google ads, they aren’t invasive or anything. Image ads, yes, flash ads, for sure. But not google ads.

The weird part is, I don’t even notice them anymore like the article says. They are very ineffective but if I have to click on them to keep my free Gmail I will. If everyone blocks ads you won’t get any more free stuff. No free news websites, no free email… You pay for the stuff by being exposed to the adds.

To be honest I don’t know how they make money with problems like that. Marketdroids have to realize that ad blindness happens everywhere. The vast majority of people don’t come anywhere NEAR filling their Gmail quota. And those so lazy that they never delete their inbox, and never download the large attachments to take it off the server are going to be too lazy to check ads. (Let’s face it, no one is approaching the 1 Gig limit without several e-mails with attachments of several dozen Meg each.)

What I don’t understand is if they want to go with a “slot machine” style system, why NOT offer money awards. If you click on the “winning” ad, you get 10 cents or something like that. It goes into your account, and when you accumulate a certain amount (say $10-20) you are sent a check. Or even better for Goggle, rather than give cash, give them a gift certificate toward a purchase at one of their advertisers. Say Best Buy was an advertiser. Then, when they accumulate $10, they can use that towards a Best Buy purchase. That would be great for Google, since it would cost them less than $10. And everybody wants cash. Whereas very few people care about getting an extra terabyte of storage space. If you have a contest where only 10% of the users will benefit from the prize, you are not going to get much response.

Regarding the concept of the random rewards, I think no one really needs that much storage, I send files all the time with multiple megabytes but i am still only using 13% of my storage. Cash incentives/gift certificates is a great idea. I wouldn’t mind if there was also a chance to win new gmail features either.

The problem is that by offering an incentive for clicks on ads, their advertisers suffer. If all you are doing is clicking with no interest in that actual product or service, then you are costing them money. And that will make them stop using Google AdWords.

The author is not suggesting that Google offers incentives to click on ads. He is suggesting that sometimes instead of an ad is a message saying that they won something. The user will click on that (which is not an ad), and claim their prize. The point is that if people knew that they could get rewards, they would have an incentive to look at the ads (not to click). If they saw something that they liked, then out of their own free will (and receiving no incentive) they would click on the ad.

Targeted ads are certainly more effective. What I think they need is better targeting, really. Adwords are not particularly effective because people mass spam the words. It was basically luck that the hotel was advertising there (or somebody else was). With better content recognition and better targetting of ads to content, they could be particularly effective. It’s just that the AdWords concept seems flawed, even if it is more effective than normal ads.

Hopefully Google will go innovative, not aggressive.

Anyway, if you still are irritated with the ads and viewing thru Firefox, here are a couple of ways to block it.

• AdBlock for Firefox
• Adblock does block google ads but if not get greasemonkey and google for the css script that will remove the ads.
• On Safari, you can get PithHelment and block all of Gmail’s ads.
• Add this to your userContent.css to block Google ads.

  /* Remove ads from Google search results */
  @-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.google.com/) {
  table[width=”25%”][align=”right”][bgColor=”#ffffff “] {
  display: none ! important
  }
  }

  /* Remove ads from Froogle */
  @-moz-document url-prefix(http://froogle.google.com/) {
  td[valign=”top”][width=”20%”][align=”right”] > table {
  display: none ! important
  }
  }

  /* Remove ads from Gmail */
  @-moz-document url-prefix(http://gmail.google.com/gmail) {
  #rh table[class=”metatable”] {
  display: none !important;
  }
  #rh div[class=”c”] {
  display: none !important;
  }
  }

  /* Remove ads from Google Groups */
  @-moz-document url-prefix(http://groups-beta.google.com/) {
  /* Remove ads from Google Groups message detail view */
  table[id=”rn”] {
  display: none ! important
  }
  /* Remove ads from Google Groups search results */
  table[width=”200″][align=”right”] {
  display: none ! important
  }
  }

One of the little-known freebies Gmail offers is a portable SMTP server to send mail from any network for any email address. This site shows how it’s done.

Isn’t this all available in Google’s own documentation telling you how to set up GMail with a third party e-mail client? Although its useful, but no real secret. It’s not like Google was trying to hide it.

GMail offers an extremely powerful system of filtering e-mail messages. By using a combination of GMail tags and filters, you can create an extremely useful personal organizer system right in your inbox.

Here is another great article on a “Getting Things Done” system in GMail.