Since Gmail is so powerful and easy to use, and is accessible from any web browser, you might be thinking about making it your primary account. Although it would be nice if you could have all your old emails in your Gmail account for your reference going forward. Also it would be great if you could have them imported so that the date stamps, and all other email headers could be preserved.
It turns out, it is really simple to do. The trick is using the IMAP feature of Gmail. Here is how to import your emails from your current email client to Gmail. These steps assume you are using Outlook, but they should be pretty much the same for any other email client including Thunderbird, Entourage, Mac Mail etc. So let’s just get to the steps.
- Turn on IMAP in your Gmail account: In your Gmail account go to Settinngs > Forwarding and POP/IMAP > IMAP Access > Enable IMAP > Save Changes
- Using the settings for Gmail IMAP for your Email Client, connect to your Gmail account using a new IMAP account. Once you’ve this done, you will see your Gmail account with labels listed as folders in your email client.
- Now just highlight the emails you want to migrate to Gmail in your Personal folders and drag and drop them from your local account to the Gmail IMAP folders.
That’s it! The emails get moved to Gmail with all the header in tact. It might take some time for the action to take place, if you have tons of email to migrate.
Notes:
You can drag them to any folder (label you want) and you can also create new folders as you wish, which will become labels in Gmail. If you don’t want your old email to clutter your inbox, you can just drag them to the Gmail/All Mail folder which basically archives them and removes the Inbox label.
Another cool feature in Gmail is support for POP3 downloads from other accounts and additional SMTP accounts for sending emails. These can be configured under Settings > Accounts and can be good if you want to combine and consolidate other existing emails into your Gmail account. If you want to go all the way there is even a labs feature called Multiple Inboxes that can add a new column with configurable filters to the right side of your Gmail Inbox.
It was a very lucky night for me last night at the Carcass reunion tour at the House of Blues.
The night started out with Finnish guys Rotten Sound which put on a solid performance. Next Aborted picked up and man those fellas really sounded good live, one heck of a pit frenzy. Chatted with some old school and new school fans in and around the show during the breaks. Saw Shane from Napalm hanging out at a T-shirt booth with a sign behind him saying “Don’t Ask Stupid Questions” which was pretty hilarious.
After Aborted 1349 went on which I had never seen live before. They use face makeup and are pretty fast for a black metal band. Suffocation presented a nice change in the pace of the pit and I have to say that was the only band that I actually understood what the singer was saying when talking to the audience between songs. They really grinded up the crowd when the played Infecting the Crypts.
Then finally the moment of truth, after a 30 minute setup period. CAR CASS CAR CASS chants started. There was a very creative intro with a formal sounding lady’s voice with a British accent reading a very morbid script. Really cool stuff, I wish I had that script or hear it again. Then for the first time in more than 15 years Carcass came out and they played one heck of show. Last time I had seen them was with Death (RIP) and Pestilence back on 10/05/1990 at the legendary Country Club (used in the Boogie Nights movie) in Reseda, which is no more. I can’t say enough about how truly good Carcass was last night. Truly a legendary band with a classy performance. Bill Steer, Michael Amott, Jeffery Walker, and Daniel Erlandsson (deep resume) subbing in for Ken Owen who is out due to a brain hemorrhage. My prayers and best wishes go out to Ken. They played lots of their classics like “Incarnated Solvent Abuse” and “Exhume To Consume” and amazingly done. I would say the sounded even better than they did last time I saw them live.
So the lucky part was at the end when Daniel came out and threw out his drum sticks and one landed almost perfectly vertically and between my two feet. This was with about 50 other people trying to get it with their hands up in the air. I was so happy!! Here’s a photo of it, I will cherish it for ever.
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Long live the English Death Grind core Kings Carcass. I’m predicting this tour will somehow influence them to create a new album once they get back home. They are playing tonight at the Grand Ballroom in San Francisco. Don’t miss it! It might be the last. Here are a few shots I took last night with my phone.
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More old school death metal is on the way, Obituary are set to play HOB next Wednesday 9/24/08. I will try to make it there.
I don’t know about you, but I’m really tired of trying to read those reCaptcha messages when going through TicketMaster sales screens. But hey at least they are helping a non-profit build an internet library which is great right?
As if it is not bad enough that they have a pretty annoying and unusable multi-step, multi-page ticket sales process, recently they are starting to give out some borderline non-sense captcha validation images. How many people would just say “forget it” and leave? Well not many, since TM is an undocumented Monopoly for ticket sales in my opinion. Pretty bad user experience overall. I would love if they at least put the reCaptcha page on the same page as the ticket search form to cut down page loads. Better yet, make the whole process an ajax based system so you never have to leave the order page. It sucks to go through a blinding reCaptcha page and then get the dreaded “You’re Screwed” all sold out page. Just tell me right upfront: “Hey Don’t bother, no seats are available mr!” and don’t waste my time. I mean I have to pay an inflated ticket price + order processing fees + convenience fees + delivery fees. Can we at least get a convenient to use website?
I went ahead and did a 2 minute reshuffling of the order form for TicketMaster and this is what I came up with. Just put all forms on one page and got rid of the clutter. Progress bar and search results would appear on the same page.
I noticed also that there are now TicketMaster hosted auctions and scalping services on site. Wonder how far they have to push the envelope before regulators are forced to step in.
Looks like the long awaited web 2.0izing of the del.icio.us website is finally here. Very sleek and sexy is my first impression.
Take a look at some of the older user interfaces to get a sense for how del.icio.us has evolved until now. Aside from the new look there are new features as well. The delicious dev team has supposedly completely rewritten the code base, to allow for a more scalable and spry tool.
New features:
Navigation: New simple CSS tabs with onclick drop down menus make is simple to find your tasty bookmarks. The navigation structures seems to borrow from Flickr. Search also comes with a simple drop down option list to find stuff in your bookmarks, network or everyone.
Bookmarks: You have Title view, regular view and Full View options here. View your popular bookmarks to filter the good stuff and filter down more by choosing fresh only.
Sidebar: is updated to show a relative set of tags related to your left content pane.
Action Box: This light blue box in the sidebar shows the common tasks for the given page.
Search URL: This is a reverse search for bookmarks and pulls in the ones with the given URL along with tags used for that URL by each user, broken down in chronological order. You can also view the notes added by each user to the given URL.
Settings: The settings page is laid out with all the actions listed on one page, similar to a sitemap.
Forums: There is a support forum that looks more like a categorized list of links than a forum. I like the non-cluttered design. Reminds me of Drupal.
As in the past their API is still available for developer consumption.
The concept of collapsing margins is very simple but to fully understanding its behaviors in CSS can be tough at first. When 2 or more vertical margins hit each other, they are combined (collapsed) to form just one margin. The largest of the margins is the one rendered in the flow. The formula in theory then, for the bottom or top margin of the adjoining boxes will be:
margin-top | margin-bottom: max( marginbox 1 ... marginbox n)
When it comes to the real world there are 3 major categories of margin collapsing. So let’s figure out how these 3 types of collapsing work and how to tame them.
1) Adjoining boxes of sibling elements:
The bottom margin of an in-flow block-level element is always adjoining to the top margin of its next in-flow block-level sibling, unless that sibling has clearance.
<div>
<div>content</div>
<div>content</div>
</div>
While margin collapsing is great for written text such as paragraphs and headings etc., it can get somewhat tricky if you’re trying to get pixel perfect spacing between your boxes, so there might come a time when you want to disable margin collapsing. Take a look at these examples that suggest ways of uncollapsing your margins.
2 child boxes inside a parent box, all 3 boxes have 20px margins, parent has 1px border to avoid ancestor collapsing
2 child boxes have their top and bottom margins collapsed. Therefore the middle margin is 20px and not 40px. Most of the time this is what we want.
2 child boxes inside a parent box, all have 20px margins, parent has 1px padding to avoid ancestor collapsing
2 child boxes are this time floated left and cleared. Additionally clearing divs are added for Internet Explorer support. This method gives us 40px in the middle by disabling margin collapsing of the two siblings.
2 child boxes inside a parent box, all have 20px margins, parent has 1px padding to avoid ancestor collapsing
This time we give the 1st child box a display of inline-block which is supposed to make its margins not collapse. While this inline-block behavior works like a charm in compliant browsers, unfortunately it does not work in IE7.
2 child boxed inside a parent box, all have 20px margins, parent has 1px padding to avoid ancestor collapsing
Finally this we use a display of inline-table on the first child box. This behavior works in IE7 and FF2 and above. Although inline-table does not break out of collapsing in IE7. You may also try overloading both properties on the element as a fail safe like: display:inline-block;display:inline-table;
So it seems the only way to break out of collapsing that works in both IE and FF is our second example by using floats and clear combined. You might have noticed the above 4 boxes themselves also have 20px margins which have collapsed to form 20px margins within our 3 adjoining sections in the middle.
2) Adjoining boxes of ancestor elements:
The top or bottom margins of contained elements will always collapse together to form one margin. If the element’s margins are collapsed with its parent’s top margin, the top border edge of the box is defined to be the same as the parent’s. Below is the sample HTML and diagram and explanation of how to avoid this.
<div>
<div>content</div>
</div>
Remember that collapsing only happens if the margins actually touch one another. In this case the inner box’s margin ends where the outer box’s margin starts, therefore they are touching. One easy way to avoid this type of margin collapsing is to add either vertical borders or vertical padding to the parent box. Take a look at these examples:
2 nested boxes, both have 20px margins, parent div has
no border or padding. Note how the margins of both boxes collapse. The parent box takes over the margin of the child.
You might be wondering, so why does the margin stick out of the outer div instead of being applied to inner div? Remember that the height of containers are calculated based on the the height if their children, and a block level element’s height is measured from its top border edge to its bottom border edge. So the outer div only honors the content height of its children when calculating its own height, and since margins are already collapsed, the inner margins will appear to protrude out of the parent.
2 nested boxes, both have 20px margins, parent has a 1px border, which disables the collapsing.
2 nested boxes, both have 20px margins, parent has a 1px transparent border for an invisible solution.
2 nested boxes, both have 20px margins, parent has 1px padding again for making it less visible in our UI.
2 nested boxes, both have 20px margins, parent div has its overflow hidden. Great: Now we don’t have to add 2 extra pixels to our layout, but note that this method only works with ancestors.
nested boxes, both have 20px margins, parent div is floated left. Works great if you are capable of using floats in your current flow.
3) Self collapsing boxes:
Empty block level elements result in a special case of margin collapsing. Their top and bottom margins actually touch each other and they basically self destruct based on the rules of margin collapsing. According to the W3C: An element’s own margins are adjoining if the ‘min-height’ property is zero, and it has neither top or bottom borders nor top or bottom padding, and it has a ‘height’ of either 0 or ‘auto’, and it does not contain a line box, and all of its in-flow children’s margins (if any) are adjoining.
<div>
<div>content</div>
<div></div>
<div>content</div>
</div>
3 child boxes inside a parent box, all have 20px margins, parent has 1px borders to avoid ancestor collapsing
there are 3 child boxes inside, but the middle child box collapses on itself, and then the surrounding 2 boxes collapse on its margins again, so the end result is that our empty box is not visible and basically does not affect the flow at all. Empty block level elements are often used for DOM manipulations and Ajax data storage and now we know why they don’t affect the layout.
Another obvious way to break out of collapsing is changing the display to absolute. Finally, note that the margins of the root element box in any document never collapse. There are a few rules for negative margins when it comes to collapsing. I will try to write another post on this later.
I’ve created a demo page here with the above examples.
References and Acknowledgments
W3C Box Model Collapsing Margins,
Andy Budd No margin for error,
Research Kitchen CSS Autoheight and Margin Collapsing,
Complex Spiral Uncollapsing-margins,
La Chatte Noire tests: block formatting context, display:inline-block and margin collapsing
