Google’s contact management interface in Gmail has been pain. ful. ly. s.l.o.w. in the past , but it worked, and it was smart enough to know who you communicate with the most and update your chat list accordingly. In fact, as long as you didn’t ever access contacts directly, all was well in Google-Happy-Cloud-Computing-Land.
Now, thanks to other apps that need contacts like Voice* and Wave, access to these across the GoogleVerse** has spawned the need to just pull the contact manager out into its own app, namely, Google Contacts. And, like Mashable points out, Google Contacts is adding a much-needed “de-dupify” feature that tries to merge your contacts down to size when import/export, syncing and auto-contact management madness ends up bloating your contact file.
If only New Year’s Resolutions were so easy.
In trying the feature, I admit merging my 1600+ contact list didn’t work after repeated tries and script timeouts in firefox. I am sure it will improve.
* I don’t know why, but accessing contacts in the Google Voice interface always seems to work quicker than from gMail.
**Um, this is an off-the-cuff contraction of “Google” and “Universe”, not Google’s latest poetry or scripture-reading app.
Rahhb Apps, Tools, mobile cloud, cloud computing, contact management, contacts, gmail, google, googlevoice, googlewave
I have a gmail account that is the nerve-center of my digital communication empire, but I also have two GoogleApps domains (one for M|REC and the other for mMEdia) and a client of mine has their email hosted on GoogleApps, too.
When I am juggling between accounts, I have a few options:
- Send mail from one (or multiple) accounts.
I have taken great pains to arrange each of these accounts so that I can send email from my @gmail account via each of the other ones (except my client’s, for obvious reasons). While this adds some convenience, it is tedious to setup, and then I have certain copies of some messages in one place, with others in other places. More about that in another post–or not. This also used to tack on the unprofessional “on behalf of” header until they revealed how to avoid it just recently by configuring gmail to send the mail through your other domain’s SMTP server.
Fair warning: Try doing this if you want, but that sound you just heard was at least one other reader’s head exploding. Do not try this at home, or in the presence of small children or endangered species.
- Configure Firefox to ask you when you click a “mailto:” link how you want to send the mail.This is a totally awesome example of why FireFox makes IE wimper and cry for its mommy(ies?). Follow the link over to LifeHacker to see the code you need to drop into your address bar to configure not only Gmail to launch from a mailto: link, but any Google Apps domain.
For me, I ran through this step-by-step configuration once for each of my accounts: Gmail, MREC, mMEdia and my client. Now I have a long list of options that pop up gleefully when I click a “mailto:” link and I no-longer have to wait the 196 seconds for Outlook to sieze my computer on loading only for me to shut it off.
The trick is to not commit any of the options as the default, then everytime you click a “mailto:” link, you will get the option screen to choose. Note that you can also launch Outlook or Thunderbird or another desktop app, too, allowing you to flow between even more personalities.
Somewhere, my therapist is smiling.
Lifehacker: Configure mailto: links to launch in Gmail or other GoogleApps for Domains accounts
api Tools Apps, firefox, gmail, hacks, ie, internet explorer, lifehacker, tweaks