Feature: Getting Things Done with labels and filters in Gmail 2.0 – Geek.com
Joel Evans over at Geek.com details how to use the new features of Gmail to implement the Getting Things Done (GTD) system with Gmail.

New URL features can make your e-mail productive again – Ars Technica
New linking feature in Mac OS X Mail and in Gmail documented by Ars Technica and John Gruber.

Easily Transfer Emails from Hotmail to Gmail Via Outlook Connector – Digital Inspiration Technology Guide
How to move your Hotmail email to Gmail via Outlook.

Gmail Tip: Import Messages into Gmail via IMAP – Dracoware
"Here’s a quick overview of how to get all of your old emails into Gmail as painlessly as possible (and one way that preserves dates!)."

image by Flickr user zenera

Coming on the heels of Yahoo’s unlimited storage announcement, these announcements seem sort of silly. However, no one really seems to know what “unlimited” really means. I’m sure that users of Hotmail and Gmail will be happy with these upgrades.

Google Storage

Google is now offering paid upgrades for both Gmail and Picasa.

• 6 GB for $20 a year
• 25 GB for $75.00 a year
• 100 GB for $250 a year
• 250 GB for $500 a year

While on the pricey side, if you are a user of these services (especially Picasa) having storage like this is certainly worthwhile.

While I’m an avid Flickr user, having a backed up version of my photos online is invaluable.

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Hotmail Upgrades

Hotmail has joined the free upgrade party by offering 5 GB of storage for free on their service, bringing them into the number two spot for overall free storage space.

Hotmail has been evolving as it is rolled into the Microsoft’s Windows Live initiative. With lots of new features (which we’ve talked about in the past) and new storage capacity, Hotmail is looking better and better.

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Two recent posts by Bennett Haselton on Slashdot illustrate the problems with the approach that Goodmail and Hotmail have for certifying senders. Bennett’s take is that if you are the little email list owner, small time email marketer or have the wrong political views, you could be shut out of this brave new world of pay-per-email. Most of the little guys can’t or won’t pay fees to be “certified” by either company.

Who do you trust?

As someone who uses email to manage both my personal and business life, the question I have to ask myself is, “Can I trust my ISP to make decisions for me about who can reach me?” Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that question. I do believe that they want to decrease the amount of spam their users receive, but I think this is the wrong way to do it.

Boxbe differs from both Hotmail and Goodmail in two fundamental ways. With Hotmail and Goodmail, the money collected goes to your ISP and they alone determine who can circumvent their spam filter. With Boxbe, the bulk of the money goes to the person who receives the email, and it’s the same person that ultimately controls who reaches their inbox.

Conflict of interest

From a business perspective, Goodmail must seem like a great idea. If someone came along and said, “Hey, we can curb your spam problem and you can make money while you’re doing it,” I could see how it might be hard to say no. But at some point that misalignment of interests is going to play itself out.

The EFF put it best with its position on Goodmail and the whole notion of pay-per-email:

Goodmail reduces the incentive for ISPs to improve spam filters, much less to give end users more control of the filters. It increases the incentives for ISPs to overblock, since they make money when more senders sign up for Goodmail.

Bottom line: they decide who can send you email while at the same time they solicit “protection money” from senders willing to pay.

How Boxbe fits in

So, we’ve got a different philosophy about how this should work. If you’re a Boxbe member, you know we don’t think that payment to bypass a spam filter is a bad thing. It’s our raison d’être.

We believe people should have choices in who they receive email from. More importantly, we believe if money is going to change hands to reach you, you should get most of it. It’s your inbox, you decide who you can trust.

image from Flickr user srish

Robert’s tips center around Microsoft Outlook which he has been using since 1990 and include

• Keeping all Outlook .PST files under 2GB in size to optimize speed and prevent crashes.
• Removing infrequently used .PST files.
• Renaming or appending frequently-used folders to appear at the top of the list.
• Responding to fewer e-mail is the holy grail.

We’d love to help you with your email overload problem, Robert. We’ll talk soon about some work we’re doing with Outlook.

Congrats to the Hotmail team at Microsoft for deploying the new version of the Hotmail service to users and removing that beta tag. Following are links to the details of the launch.

Windows Live Hotmail launches
After a year long beta, Windows Live Hotmail launched yesterday with a whole bunch of new features including 2 gigabytes of storage, Outlook-like design, auto-completion and more.

Rebuilding Hotmail from scratch
A fascinating look at the rebuilding of the Hotmail service.

Windows Live Hotmail vs Gmail
Pete Cashmore over at Mashable compares the new Windows Live Hotmail to Gmail. Is it time to switch? I won’t ruin it for you as we are platform agnostic here at Boxbe.

Other links: Webware, Techcrunch, eWeek.

Undelivered e-mail an offshoot of spam-prevention
John Agsalud of the Honolulu Star Bulletin reports on the increase in false positives in spam filtering systems (FYI, a false positive is a message incorrectly identified as spam).

This battle of good versus evil has been going on for years. Unfortunately, the bad guys have improved their stock so much that the good guys are starting to have a difficult time fighting back. The end result? The good guys’ software is becoming more error-prone and mis-identifying messages as spam when they really are not.