I use gmail; it's my main address, and I have reasons for that.

History
My first address was in Hotmail, and I liked it, but shortly after I set it up, my workplace gave me my own email address, and I used that, and forgot my Hotmail password, and let the account die.

My work address was good but when I was away from my work computer, I had to use webmail, and I found it awkward, clumsy, and ugly. So I set up a mail account on my ISP. Now when I was away from my home computer, I had to use webmail, with the same complaints, awkward, clumsy and ugly. I did learn how to forward email to another account and that worked well for a while.

I also began to notice certain patterns. If you moved and/or got a new ISP provider, you lost your email address. If professors left the college where I worked, they had their address removed. Not forwarded from, just removed. (The students, there for only a couple of years, and with the same addressing convention as professors, got theirs for life. I never understood why the difference.) I decided I needed a web-based mail application so I could access my email from any online computer, and to protect me, I hoped, from losing an address that I'd been using for a long time. (This was before Facebook.)

At the same time I was using Bloglines to follow a number of bloggers I had found I could learn from. Some made references to Yahoo mail. But I'm very sensitive to the connotations of words, and "[a] Yahoo is a legendary being in the novel Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_%28Gulliver%27s_Travels%29 so I just wasn't attracted. And anyway, gmail was recommended  more. Plus, in my mind, "google" was similar to "giggle" and therefore had good connotations, and Google was a known quantity. So I set up a gmail account.

What I Like
I have become a real gmail fan. For many reasons, I'm sure I'll miss mentioning some.

The most important!
I forward the three other email addresses I use to my gmail account and, this is the really important part, I can reply from the address the message came in on! So no one knows that I'm not actually on my work account; I'm using gmail.

The most trivial
I like visually attractive environments and I like playing and changing. gMail has different themes you can access under Settings on the upper right of the gmail screen.

Conveniences – in no particular order

• gmail search works well, and even a word in a message gets me to what I'm looking for
  
• From my gmail account, I can easily move to other Google sites, the calendar, Google Docs, Reader, and much more
• I've set up labels (in different colours) and I can drag them onto messages, and use more than one per message (unlike folders) plus I can use a variety of coloured stars to help me organize.
  
• I have a huge storage space!
  
• I love how I can organize my Contacts, so I have both individual's email and groups' emails available for adding with a click – see the image below for some of my Contacts groups
  
• I love GoogleGroups – it's such a useful way for members of a group to communicate with each other – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups

Last (for now)
You can add all kinds of capabilities to suit your needs using Google Labs, the green jug icon.

I've only enabled what I want and that includes the Tasks window on the lower right. As soon as I click on the flat line, it opens and shows my list of tasks.

I was inspired to write this incomplete explanation of why I like gmail so much by http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/7-ways-to-be-more-productive-with-gmail/ You might want to check it out.

 
http://jnthweb.ca/
https://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/

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Yesterday Twitter went down. I’d already been bleeding my most boring tweets off by using Backpack’s Journal and fulfilling two purposes:

1. Re-routing my impulse to tweet about mundane things into, as I mentioned, Backpack’s Journal;
2. And thus creating a log of my activities, a kind of diary.

Did I mention personal use of Backpack is free? – http://backpackit.com/ And I really appreciate that because I’ve set up the Reminders to send me email when bills are due or automatic withdrawals are scheduled. Thus helping me avoid insufficient funds charges.
So even though I couldn’t access Twitter, I could still type about finishing the newsletter, but in the Backpack Journal, not on the social web. However, I couldn’t harvest and comment on interesting URLs posted by those I follow on Twitter, and I was surprised how much I missed that.

I kept checking Seesmic on the web for Twitter; it’s still down late Friday evening. The Twitter web itself seems intermittent and slow, but I’ve gone back to TweetDeck which seems to be working well and yesterday let me start reading Tweets again and link to the URLs that might be interesting.

What I discovered was kind-of ironic – a blog comparing digital literacy with Networked Literacy – http://www.thethinkingstick.com/digital-literacy-vs-networked-literacy and I was totally struck by it

So I highlighted it using Diigo, – http://www.diigo.com/06sl8 –  bookmarked it, and tweeted it.

Digital literacy is important, but Networking Literacy is essential. I missed Twitter when it was down because it’s my source of interesting, helpful hyperlinks, and where I share the hyperlinks I believe others will benefit from. Even a hint that I could lose this, even only Twitter being down and for just a little while made me realize that

I get hyper when I’m not linked!

http://jnthweb.ca/
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Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD,
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The Gatekeepers’ Removal
We live in important learning times. Whether that’s a curse or a blessing depends on your point-of-view. I think it’s a blessing for two reasons.

The first time I helped a student correct his error-riddled (green) text on a (dark) computer screen, I knew I would be learning how to use a computer. As a poor and slow typist, I could only get anything I wrote looking like an important document by paying a good typist. Even before the internet, a gatekeeper (the professional typist) stood between me and a polished document. Another and much more restrictive set of gatekeepers stood between me and being published. An agent, an editor, a publisher, and typesetters blocked my writings from being published almost all the time. Gatekeepers had specialized and expensive skills and equipment and I had only ideas that I could rough out (and I do mean rough) by hand.

Early Word Processor

The same kind of situation was true for photographs, audio recordings and film and video. The expense of hiring specialized experts and buying specialized equipment meant that there were very strong gatekeepers limiting people’s ability to practice their creativity fully. Suddenly, with personal computers and software, the expenses were less (a computer and a printer is less expensive than a printing press!) and the different skill sets were reduced and transformed into learning how to use software.

When I saw how easy it was to correct and print what I wrote, I was inspired to learn how to use the computer so I could do graduate studies. I read and wrote and printed up my work, and I’m not sure which was the most important learning, the theory I wrote about, or my learning how to use a word processor. At the same time, the phrase “user-friendly” became central to software development and it became easier and even more fun to create. The gatekeepers were being removed quite quickly.

Word for Windows Manual

So the gatekeepers were being removed ( and there were and are real problems connected with that, but that’s for a different post). But that wasn’t the major change, in my opinion.Living in Important Learning Times
Suddenly (well, in a 20 year time frame) we were all communicating differently. The father of a friend recently told me that when he was in Antarctica 50 years ago, it took eight months to send and receive a return message, by mail, of course. Now he is sending and receiving  messages from all over the world in literally minutes (if the person responding answers right away). And I’m writing and finding illustrations to publish a blog post that anyone in the world who is online can seen almost immediately after I tap on “Send”. Not even time is a gatekeeper anymore.

But the learning I’ve done! the learning we’ve all done!!

I’ve learned how to use various software tools and various web apps. How to make them work technically and how to use them for my own purposes, how to create with them. And all over the world, people are doing the same kind of learning of technical how-to’s and, even more significantly, learning how to connect with the (sometimes very small part of) this huge and hugely diverse audience, how to find their niche, and play in it. We are in a time of great change, and thus great learning. We are all either accepting the learning that faces us, or closing our eyes and denying ourselves. For some of us, this learning, this computer and web stuff comes easily. For some it’s a struggle. I suspect it’s a mixture of ease and struggle for most of us. But it offers us all such opportunities to learn and play and create!

Gatekeepers & Learning on 12seconds.tv

http://jnthweb.ca/
https://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com

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