In commenting on David Strom's column Ten years of email, I said,

I've long ago switched from POP to IMAP, but cannot imagine having to rely on Internet access to read or manipulate e-mail. I'd love for you to talk about the changes that doing that requires. I just cannot imagine.

Of course, I have used Google's mail (gmail). But, I never linked it to my avolio.com email, except to forward email to my gmail account to my avolio.com account. E-mailing back and forth with David convinced me to try it, but I wanted to do more. Dave is almost always connected. So, he just uses Google's webmail interface. It suits his needs and he likes the interface. I like using Apple's mail application (cleverly called "Mail"). So, I decided to use it to read Google Mail and go one step further: to have my avolio.com email hosted on Google.

My avolio.com email was hosted by a "true friend". Google, with Google Aps, gives clear directions for setting up a Gmail account for a domain. In fact, you can start immediately using it, even before MX records are changed through temporary gmail email addresses. The MX record change took about 10 minutes, because Google automates it's side and my domain records are run, as I mentioned, by a true friend. That is to say, email to "username@avolio.com" started showing up on username's email box on Google. Coolness! It was working. (Now, almost nothing in DNS-land is immediate; information needs to propagate. So, I did check my old server location some that transition day.)

Set up on the Google side was easy and I set it up to be an IMAP server. (The major benefit is that it is stored on my client and on the server and I can access it from anywhere on the Internet.)

The next step was to set up my Mail application. Before I did anything else I backed up my email.

Google recommends setting for Mail and the Internet has many comments about the "best" settings. These are mine and my reasons.

• I set the incoming and outgoing servers to be as Google instructs.
• I set the IMAP Mail Prefix to be "[Gmail]" (This is under Advanced for the Account in Mail.)
• The Trash mailbox showed up under my account in Mail. I selected it, went to Mailbox, and Use this mailbox for... Trash. I made similar settings for the Google Spam mailbox (use for Junk) and Sent.
• I don't store drafts on the server.
• I store Sent messages on the server.
• I have Junk processing enabled. I do this so that the Junk mailbox shows up. Mostly, Google does a great job of Spam catching. When it doesn't Mail might. When it doesn't, I can click on the Junk button and off it goes.
• I set "Move deleted messaged to the Trash mailbox" and Store on the server. (I know Google has this store everything forever, but there are some things that I want to delete: notices from the library when my requested books are waiting, Facebook notifications, "Send this to all everyone you know" email, etc.

I started moving IMAP mailboxes from my old account to my new (Google-based) account. I found that I needed to move one mailbox at a time. I have a lot of mailboxes and folders of mailboxes (see MailFolders, and I found that while the Lables were being created on Google (more on that in a minutes), not all mail transferred. This should never happen, but it did. I am not sure if it is a client or server problem.

A word about Google mail and storage. Google mail stores all the mail in one big mailbox called All Mail. It uses labels to organize email messages. So, when one "archives" a message, Gmail removes the "Inbox" label; it stays in All Mail. If I have a message in mailbox "Accounting," it is labeled "Accounting." (See Labels.)

There was one thing that really bothered me. My PowerBook now has 2 copies of every email message. Gmail doesn't; Mail does. Here's why. When I move a message from my Inbox to, let's say, "accounting," the files associated with that email message get moved in my directory hierarchy; the file(s) get moved. Gmail sees this as one file with 1 or 2 labels. When the client syncs with the Gmail IMAP server, I will end up with 1 copy in the place I moved it and an additional copy in "All Mail." Because the client sees the message in 1 mailbox and it sees another message in All Mail. It has no way to link them. Hence, 2 messages on my PowerBook.

This really bugged me. Until today. What changed? Nothing. I just said, "Oh, what the heck." Disk space is cheap, and my email takes up less than 1G of disk space. I still delete some mail rather than keeping everything. I have started Archiving mail, which in my Mail application means moving it to "All Mail." Eventually, my local storage may become a problem. But, not today.

I mentioned Dave Strom's help. Check out a video he made How to become master of your domain for less than $20 a year in which he touches on some of the things to do. Consider buying his other video tutorials. (This one is free.)

I'm relatively new to FaceBook. I got a FaceBook account a few months ago in order to be able to download a song from a friend's band. (I had a Myspace account briefly for the same reason, but abandoned it after I started to get friend invitations from girls who only had first names.) Yeah, I felt that maybe I was too old for FaceBook.

I was, and am, surprised at what a time sync it can be. But, I generally check it out once or twice a day (early morning and then evening). And I am trying not to obsess with following every potential link to every comment or tag in a photo. On the other hand, it's an easy way to keep tabs on "friends" and I have found that some people prefer writing on "Walls" (which are pubic) to sending private email. I wonder if it is the feeling of community: we're all sitting around in the same coffee shop or family room and overhearing each other's conversations, etc.

I was thinking of these things when something from writer Kevin Kelly came up on my radar (news aggregator) screen. He talks about something he calls " Friendability." (I think there must be a better word. I'm trying to think of one that doesn't cause hurt feelings or insult.) He's asking the question, "Are all these 'friends' really friends?" Here's his breakdown:

• Friend: Most of the people that Facebook calls "friends" I call Acquaintances.
• Actual Friend: Someone whom I've had a meal with, or has visited my home.
• Real Friend: Someone who would drive me to the airport at 6 am.
• True Friend: Someone who would get me out of jail.

This all reminds me of a song or two from my formative years. The first, is a Simon and Garfunkel song, "Old Friends" (you can look up the lyrics in the Internet), about the old men they saw in NYC neighborhood parks. The song ends, "Old friends. Memory brushes the same years. Silently sharing the same fears."

It also reminds me of Harry Chapin's song, "Let Time Go Lightly," that has the bridge, "Old friends, they mean much more to me than the new friends, Cause they can see where you are, and they know where you've been."

I have some old friends.

And, finally, I am reminded of the unattributed quote, "A good friend will help you move. A really good friend will help you move a body."

I actually have a few really good friends. And they know who they are.

In a recent posting, David Strom, who might be trying to rejuvenate sales for his very excellent, but old, book he co-authored with Marshall Rose, Internet Messaging: From the Desktop to the Enterprise , discusses Ten years of email. I recommend reading it for the history, for a sense of how far we've come, and to be disappointed that we've not progressed further. Then check out my Secure E-mail Collection

I commented the following to David's post:

I've long ago switched from POP to IMAP, but cannot imagine having to rely on Internet access to read or manipulate e-mail. I'd love for you to talk about the changes that doing that requires. I just cannot imagine.

It has been a bad week for removable storage for me. I had problems with back-ups on my FireWire drive, I talked about in Time Machine is Working Again (which turns out okay, as you can tell by the title. :-)).

Podcast trouble.
The other day I noticed that some of the podcasts on my iPod weren't working. That is to say, they would play for up to 20 seconds and then stop. I tried fast forwarding past that point. No joy. So, I did what Apple always says to do. I did a soft reset. Still no good. Music played fine, but podcasts would not. Now I know that they are handled differently, so I wasn't surprised. Just annoyed.

So, I went to the next step. And this was an error—my first mistake. (We'll come back to what I should have done later.) The step I took was to click "Restore" in iTunes. This restores the iPod to its factory settings. No worries. I have all the songs backed up in multiple places. So I did it. And I connected it again to iTunes to have it restore all my settings and music. I plugged in the iPod.

Problem with the iPod?
I saw this:

Arrg. Not good at all. I looked and looked on the Internet. I listened to my iPod as it spun up and failed. "Oh, no!" I thought. "Another failed iPod!" (I had replaced the disk in this 20G iPod last year with a 30G disk.)

I have a 10G iPod Nano. So, I figured I would have to use it and swear off iPods. So, I plugged in the Nano. And... (you are head of me here, aren't you?). Same error. Whoa. Hmmm. My iPod has a USB cable and a FireWire cable. Try the FireWire.

Bad cable.
Success! It was restoring! The iPod's USB cable was bad! (I knew the USB port itself worked, as I use it for other things, such as synching my Palm handheld.) So, another early mistake. I should have tried the FireWire cable or another iPod USB cable.

While it was restoring, I checked something I should have checked way earler: what do the podcasts sound like played in iTunes?

They had the same problem. (Again, not all, just some.) I'd start a podcast that said it was 45:34 in length and it stopped after 34 seconds or so. Again, I had not moved through the correct, diagnostic sequence.

So, why the bad podcasts? I think I now knew. Recall, as I mentioned above, I previously reported on probems with backups to my FireWire drive. Recall, Dave Nanian of Shirt Pocket had pointed to problems from other devices plugged into the FireWire drive, especially an iSight camera. I asked Dave, "Any background as to why having another device plugged into the FW port of my FW drive would cause this?" He replied, "It's mostly the iSight. It's bus-powered, and gets into weird states where it starts causing the voltage on FW to go completely nuts, which causes other devices to generate errors."

I think that this was the cause of some flakiness in some of the podcasts. With the exernal iSight unplugged (where it will stay until needed), I re-downloaded the podcasts. No problems.

Lessons learned.

1. See if the problem is the same in iTunes as on the iPod. The iPod's data is only as good as what iTunes gives it. I would have switched from looking at the iPod to looking at the data in the iTunes library.
2. Try a different cable if you have a connection problem. It might not be that but cables are easy to check. And if the cable is bad it is cheaper to replace than an iPod.
3. Don't plug other things into the FireWire port of you external disk besides another daisy-chained disk of the same type. Especially don't plug in an external iSight Camera.

Recently, I blogged that Time Machine Failed Me. You can read it there, but there is a bit more to the story.

I had turned Time Machine off. After all, every time (yes, every) it tried, it failed. (In an earlier post, I mentioned an error that occured when I didn't check the state of my PowerBook before shutting it down. That was my error.)

But, I still used and relied on SuperDuper!. And then the unthinkable happened. For the first time, SuperDuper! failed. Red type in the SuperDuper! window told me, "SuperDuper!: Failed to copy files from Macintosh HD to firewire."

I looked at its log file. The log file is fascinating. I'm... um... seasoned, I suppose is a good word for "old." I've been around a while. I remember doing backups onto 9 Track Mag Tape. You did that with "everything" on the system stopped. Even in more modern times, Backups have given trouble if the system was trying to write anything. SuperDuper! clearly keeps trying and trying. (And, yes, I have booted from and recovered files from my back-up volume.)

But, I digress. The last line of the log said this:

| 05:50:20 PM | Error | SDCopy: utimes /Volumes/fredpb2-boot-leopard/ System/Library/Automator/Apply Quartz Composition Filter to Image Files.action/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/main.nib: Invalid argument\n: Invalid argument

So, I tried again. Same error, different place. I ran DiskUtility against the FireWire HD. No problems. I ran it against the system HD. Again, nothing to repair. So, I wrote to Shirt Pocket's feedback address at 17:57:53 -0400. I got a response from customer support (I am joking a bit... "customer support" is the owner and operator, head programmer, and perhaps the only employee, David Nanian). A few hours later I got this response:

It looks like your destination volume failed during the backup. Please power off both the Mac and the backup drive. Wait a few minutes, and then simplify the FireWire bus to just the drive (if there was anything else attached - especially an iSight, iPod or hub). Power back up, and then use Disk Utility to repair the destination volume (use the buttons on the right side of the Disk First Aid tab, not the left side "repair permission" buttons). Repeat until there are no errors indicated. When that's done, give it another try, and let me know if that helps!

"Especially an iSight," eh? Darn. I do have an iSight which I cleverly plugged into the FireWire socket on the back of my external drive (since it took the only FireWire port on my PowerBook).

I unplugged the iSight camera, started a backup, and went to bed. This morning I found that it had worked without an error.

Which brings me back to Time Machine. I figure that same iSight camera might have been the problem. So, I restarted Time Machine. And it worked throughout the night (and throughout today) also.

So, I'm using Time Machine again. But, I am trusting SuperDuper! Apple has... Steve Jobs, somewhere. SuperDuper has David in Weston, Massachusetts, who wrote the thing and responds to email late at night. Even when he is on vacation!