Making Gmail always use HTTPS without any Greasemonkey

It’s the stupidest solution, but I hadn’t thought of it before.

I had seen that the Better Gmail extension had this feature of making Gmail always run over HTTPS, but it also came with so much other stuff that I found it to be just too bloated, and kept wishing for a simpler solution (meanwhile exposing my privacy to all those sniffers out there — oh the danger!).

Of course, I could always replace “http” with “https” on the address bar, but it’s a pain doing that every time. If only I could set it to be always like that…

Wait a second: I always start Gmail as my home page. Always use Alt+Home when I want to go to it. Yes, people, I had this brilliant idea: why not just put the address with “HTTPS://” in the configs as my Home page?

And that I did. Now I’m a safe, happy Gmail user. No extensions, no glitchy Greasemonkey scripts. Just the ululating obvious.

Tunando o Gmail

Ok, pode ser que todo mundo já saiba, mas descobri isso agora: greasemonkey + gmail rulez!! =)

“mark as read” com uma tecla, “mark as read and archive” tb, atalho para navegar para labels como no GReader, usar “https” por default, e várias outras coisas show (e outras nem tanto) vem empacotados nessa extensão:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4866

A descrição dos atalhos de teclado está em http://blog.persistent.info/2005/12/greasemonkey-christmas.html
Dá pra evitar o pacotão e pegar só o dos atalhos nesse site, pra quem quiser. Aí precisa instalar o GreaseMonkey:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

O de ir pra labels foi o killer feature, nossa, mto bom isso :)

Update: pressionar ‘h’ mostra as opções de teclas. Outra espetacular: X+u seleciona todas as não-lidas (e depois “r” marca como lidas).

How to empty a Gmail label with FireWatir

When you have a huge label with thousands of messages, Gmail can’t handle deleting all of them at a time (it says it can, but for me it’s never worked). This solves the problem.

I wrote it more as a practice to get familiar with FireWatir, so it’s not very pretty or anything and it’s a bit slow. I think WWW::Mechanize would be faster at it (although you wouldn’t have the eye-candy of seeing the live action on the browser ;-). I’ll port it to Mechanize, once I have some time, as a bootstrap into learning that too. I’ll have to subscribe to a few more lists in order to have testing ammo for all that. ;-)

If you have doubts on how to use or suggestions on how to improve it please feel free to contact me. It assumes, by the way, that Gmail is in German. Replace that string with the one that comes up for your language.

P.S.: there’s also a syntax highlighted version. Does anyone know of a way to highlight the code here in WordPress?

def empty_label(label)
  # you need a Firefox instance already running with JSSh installed and listening
  ff = Firefox.new
  # Goes to Gmail in HTML
  ff.goto('http://mail.google.com/mail/h/x4odcwnm5f5v/?s=l&l=#{label}')
  a = []
  # doing 'c.set' didn't work for me here so I had to do this hack of getting the value
  # and then acquiring the element through ff.checkbox(:value,value)
  ff.checkboxes.each {|c| a << c.value}

  while a.length > 0 do
    c = []
    a.each {|v| c << ff.checkbox(:value,v)}
    # checks all checkboxes
    c.each {|e| e.set}
    # clicks the drop-down entry for deleting
    ff.select_list(:name,'tact').select('In den Papierkorb verschieben')
    ff.button(:name,'nvp_tbu_go').click
    a = []
    ff.checkboxes.each {|c| a << c.value}
  end
end

A more contextual alternative to email

Inspired by Shrikant Joshi‘s comment at TechCrunch I decided to put some thought to how email can be “more contextual”.

When I think of “contextual”, I imagine a local, distributed, on-the-spot sort of thing. I imagine embedded.

So my idea of “more contextual”, on these few minutes I put myself thinking about it, is a web application that would allow me to centralize all my text communication into one place.

To date, we have Gmail + Gtalk. You bind together two forms of textual communication into one place, go through your chat history as you would through your regular email, that sort of thing (plus google/yahoo groups).

Now throw into that your blog comments, your flickr comments and mostly any kind of text stuff you drop around on the web everyday. Imagine those being entered through an embedded “drop box” that, besides leaving your text on the website you are, direct it back to your email, saving information about the website, allowing replies to come in and go back as if you were responding to a normal email (coComment generalized and integrated to email).

This idea of a embedded drop box for entering text throughout the web allows for an extension of the Gmail+Gtalk concept in which, instead of centralizing the applications into one place before integrating them, centralizes the incoming and responding, while pulverizing the outgoing.

That would be “contextual” to me.