Once again, the tech guys at Lake Hart have improved and updated our email servers. For that we thank them. On the other hand the update emails that we have been receiving have been a bit short of helpful for people who aren’t very tech savvy… and for people who use Gmail. Honestly, I still don’t know how I’m supposed to sign into our work webmail site.

Updating Settings in Gmail

The primary change that you need to make is to your POP server, change it to mail.ccci.org.

Settings rundown:

• Username: Your full email address.
• Password: Leave it alone, that’s the next step.
• POP Server: mail.ccci.org
• Port: 995
• Leave copy: I’d suggest leaving it unchecked, but you can do what you want.
• SSL: CHECK
• Label & Archive: This depends on your preferences and use of labels.

Hit Save Changes and you’ll see something like this:

Re enter your password and submit. The window should disappear and you’re all set.

Comment here for any more questions.

For those of you who have done everything to set up your work email to come to you through Gmail, you’ll want to take a look at this:

How to Set Up a Mail Merge in Gmail for Personalized Mass Emails (Lifehacker)

This looks really easy. And amazing.

THIS IS OUT OF DATE. PLEASE VISIT THE UP-TO-DATE INSTRUCTIONS.

Edited 6/15/2010

Go to your settings and then accounts/import. For your USCM email settings you’ll have to make some changes.

Your settings should look thus:

The specific things to note

• Username: Your full email address.
• POP Server: mymail.uscm.org
• Port: 995
• SSL: CHECK!

Make sure your check boxes look like mine, you can label them however you want.

As I posted previously (1, 2) Gmail can be a powerful tool for doing everything involved with managing your email. One huge thing that I’ve not addressed is setting up your email to pull in messages from other email accounts – including your work accounts. Today we’ll walk through how to do that.

First, make sure you’ve read/watched the previous posts regarding Gmail:

• The Advantages of Gmail
• Getting Started with Gmail

After you’ve gotten trough the basics of gettings started with it, let’s get you going on importing your other accounts. Because, despite the advantages that Gmail has, your workplace/ministry/school will not probably forward all of your mail to your Gmail account from now on – and the reality is that they will expect you to be reading those emails as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

I already shared a few weeks ago a short list of shortcuts that are useful in getting the most out of Windows. Before I share more, let me list some of the reasons I am a proponent of keyboard shortcuts:

1. It’s quicker.

That’s all.

Quite simply, you can work quicker as you learn and remember more and more keyboard shortcuts and as you work to make them a part of how you work. Think about this, how long would it take you to minimize every window you had open right now? I have 7 windows open right now, for me to go and hit the “minimize” bar on the top of each window would take about 6 seconds total, for me to hit the Windows key and the letter D together (Win+D) takes about 1/2 a second – tops. (I know that Macs have a Mouse Shortcut for this, which works very well indeed.)

Most people already know some keyboard shortcuts and they don’t even realize it, for example Ctrl+C for Copy, Ctrl+V for Paste, Ctrl+X for Cut, Ctrl+P for Print and Ctrl+S for Save. I’ve even mentioned F1 for the Help menu a couple of times.

Take a few minutes and peruse your menus in the programs that you have open. For example, under the File menu you’ll find options that look like the image to the left. Here you can see that Ctrl+T opens a new tab while Ctrl+W closes a tab.

One shortcut that is common to just about every Windows program is Alt+F4 which closes the program down. It works the same as hitting the button at the top right of the window.

Also, to switch programs you can hold down Alt and hit Tab (Alt+Tab) to file through the windows you have open rather than clicking the items on your taskbar. Ctrl+Tab works within a single program – say to switch between documents you have open in Word or tabs in Firefox.

I’ve found a number of lists of shortcuts that I want to list here. Check some of them out and take advantage as you gain more of your time to work (and a better control over your computer use).

• Common Windows Shortcuts
• Mac OS X Shortcuts
• 230+ Keyboard Shortcuts for Top Web Services
• Gmail Shortcuts – there is an option in Gmail to turn these on and off.
• Microsoft Word Shortcuts
• Microsoft Excel Shortcuts
• Microsoft Powerpoint Shortcuts

Links via [Lifehacker & Mashable]

This week I’m going to take a “week off”. It’s not that there won’t be anything posted this week for you to learn, it’s that it won’t be me writing those posts. I’ve asked Rob Williams (former staff at HQ in Orlando) to share some posts that he wrote a few weeks ago for his own tech blog 170spoons.

In celebration of May 1st, which is both May Day and RSS Awareness Day, they will discuss the nature and advantages of newsfeeds (also known as RSS or “Really Simple Syndication”). Most of you reading this are already taking advantage of a form of RSS Feeds in the email that is sent out when I update the site.

Let me suggest at this point that you go ahead and sign up for a Google/Gmail account as it will help you understand better what he is talking about in the upcoming posts.

See you all again next week!

In my last post I pointed out that I am a fan of Google products, in the post before that I shared the advantages of the Gmail (Google Mail) application – which I do believe to be even superior to Outlook when combined with other applications that Google offers. I even walked you through, step-by-step, the process of signing up for a Gmail account.

Well, today I want to share another walk-through, this time we’ll take a spin around what you can see from the Inbox view. Click the image to start the walk-through

Let me know in the comments if you’ve decided to set up a Gmail account.

I do all of my emailing through a single Gmail account. I am able to do this simply because of Google’s amazing thoroughness in the implementation and design of Gmail. Let me list off a few of the many advantages and post a walkthrough of how to sign up for a Gmail account.

Some advantages:
• Free. Anyone can sign up for it. There are extras that you can pay for, but not really necessary.
• Storage space. By the time you read this there will be more than 6.5 GB (gigabytes) of it. If every email you send or receive is 50 KB (pretty big for an email without an attachment) that allows for almost 21,000 emails before it’s full. (You can add 10 GB more for $20/year.)
• Growing storage space. It’s estimated that Gmail is adding 3.3 MB daily (67 of those hypothetical emails).
• POP and IMAP access. POP and IMAP are the primary ways that programs like Outlook and Thunderbird bring in emails from the web. This can make your email available anywhere.
• Incoming POP access. This is how I do all of my email from my Gmail account. You are able to have Gmail pull in your USCM.org (or CCCI.org) email and store it in Gmail – this also works for your internet service provider account (Verizon, Comcast, etc.). You can even have Gmail send emails from those accounts.
• Keyboard shortcut navigation. This is a great feature in any program for working quickly and efficiently, we’ll learn about this in future posts.
• Multiple accounts built into one. If you sign up for johnny.crusade@gmail.com you also own johnnycrusade@gmail.com, j.o.h.n.n.y.c.r.u.s.a.d.e@gmail.com (or anything in between) as well as johnny.crusade@googlemail.com. You can also add words to it with a plus; for example johnny.crusade+ebay@gmail.com for all of your eBay stuff so if you start getting spam you know who has been selling your email address.
• Search don’t sort. Remember, Gmail is from Google – a search engine. Gmail can instantly find old emails as you search for them. It’s quick and thorough. There are also advanced searches that you can use… we’ll look at them closer in a future post.
• Sort if you must. Gmail can sort emails just like Outlook into categories (called tags) – the main difference is that you can have multiple tags on one email. So, if you have a student who is a leader at one of your schools but is also attending the summer project you’re directing you can label his email both “Podunk State” as well as “OCMD Summer Project”
• Filters. You can have Gmail automatically filter things depending on what email it was sent from, or sent to, or words that are in the email itself… or by about a thousand other things.
• Threaded Conversations. Gmail will group related emails together as a “conversation” so that you don’t have to flip back and forth between individual emails between you and someone else. It will group them together in order so that you can read them all at once. Honestly, this may be the main feature that changes the way you read email.
• FREE!

If I have convinced you (and really, what more could you ask for?) take a look at the walk-through that I put together a few months ago.

We’ll walk through the Inbox next.