An anonymous reader sent us a few hacks today for the Samsung SGH-i600 phone - Link. This is basically the US Blackjack, except that it's released in the UK with Orange's branding and a bit of crippleware. One of the hacks that's mentioned is using GMail with the device, and it's a cool hack that can be applied to any Windows Mobile Smartphone or Pocket PC with internet access.

Overview
One of the things I've liked about these devices, in addition to the free dev tools, is that the mail client supports IMAP and POP email servers, not just the corporate Exchange setup. If you use GMail, you can set up your phone to send and receive email via GMails POP and SMTP servers.

This howto will guide you through the necessary settings. The screens may look a little different depending on what device and OS version you have, but the basic settings information will be the same throughout.

By default, after logging into Gmail with a secure https connection, you are forwarded to an unencrypted url with some session data that tells Gmail and other Google services that you've authenticated successfully.

The problem is that anyone sniffing your wireless (or wired) connection can listen to that session information and use it to impersonate you. This could mean reading your email, pulling previously entered addresses from Google maps, or opening up your Google Docs or Analytics information. This session "sidejacking" was recently demonstrated at the 2007 Black Hat conference, where the presenter, Robert Graham, took control of an audience member's account during a live presentation.

Safely Connecting to Gmail
If you're using public, unencrypted, or WEP-encrypted WiFi, there's a way to force Gmail to use an encrypted connection. If you manually navigate to https://gmail.google.com/, your connection will remain encrypted after logging in. This does not work for https://www.google.com/gmail, so make sure to use the right address.

Log Out Before Leaving Gmail
This part sucks. Your authentication cookies will still be set for the google.com domain. If you navigate to any other Google properties after logging into secure Gmail, your session information will be spilled for any WiFi sniffer to see. This probably includes going to any site that runs adsense... which is almost every site available via the internet tubes.

So, to safely use Gmail:

1. close all other browser tabs and windows before going to secure Gmail
2. don't click any URLs in emails or navigate to any other sites while Gmail is open
3. sign off before continuing to browse the web (might not hurt to also flush any cookies)

FireGPG is an awesome little plugin that adds GPG support to Firefox. You need the GPG package installed on your machine to start, and after activating the plugin, you'll have a new right-click menu that will let you sign, encrypt, decrypt and verify any selected text.

You can use this to add strong crypto functionaliy to any webmail system or forum that you use! Special support for GMail is already built-in, which provides encryption and signature buttons right alongside the normal send button.

Currently, there isn't a lot of documentation, but the author has set up a Wiki. If you want to help out, try the software for a while and pitch in with a page or two on the maual.

FireGPG: Use GPG Easily in Firefox - [via] Link

GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) for Linux, Mac, and Windows - Link

This extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (2.8 GB and growing) for file storage. It acts as an online drive, so you can upload files from your hard drive and access them from every Internet capable system. The interface will make your Gmail account look like a FTP host.

One thing to note is that Gmail accounts sometimes get blocked for 24 hours if excessive amounts of data are being transferred. Because of this, it's recommended that you don't transfer more than 1GB/day to any particular account. There's no reason why you couldn't use a few accounts for different purposes, however.

Gmail Space - Firefox plugin by Rahul Jonna and Tnarik -Link.

I've got years of old mail archived away from different ISPs over the years. I think it'd be interesting to push all that stuff out to GMail and re-read the discussions I was having in 1996.

Links:

• GMail Loader (GML) -[via] Link.
• GML Instructions for OS X -Link.
• Convert Outlook PST Files to mBox Format -Link.

Matt Cutts shares three solid Gmail productivity tips to help keep your inbox under control, including keeping mailing lists out of there (using filters), prioritizing messages (using Greasemonkey and persistent searches), and excluding messages from certain accounts (using filters and labels).

This comes in really handy is if you are ever required to enter your email into a form online. If you use a unique keyword for every form that requires an email address, you'll be able to track down the culprit if you receive spam, just by looking at the To: header. You can then filter by that address to dump further incoming messages into the bin.

On the downside, this is just another arms race. It's not exactly rocket science removing the +keyword from gmail.com email addresses... On the plus side, it's useful for automatically categorizing and filtering the legitimate mail too. [via]

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When my access to O'Reilly's email server went out today, I still managed to send a message to tech support from my O'Reilly email address. Since I'd already added my other address to Gmail, here's all I needed to do:

1. Log in to your Gmail account at mail.google.com.
   
2. Click Compose.
   
3. Use the drop-down menu in the From field to select the address you'd like to use to send the message.
   
4. Compose and send!

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We at Hackszine are all about collaboration, and lately our geographically distributed team has been working on web-based and decidedly non-MS Office ways of doing so. We've been paying particular attention to the Google suite made up of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail, and Google Calendar (and rumored to soon include a PowerPoint alternative), which have generally worked well but have caused some significant hitches as well. Once we all get together on the same document, things have moved smoothly, but it usually takes many failed invitations, foiled uploads, and redirects before we get there.

Ever since Google acquired Writely, the "Email to Google Docs" feature has consistently failed for me when sent from my work email address, requiring me to upload everything from the web interface instead of copying Google Docs with a message that I send to our group with a Word attachment, which would really speed things up for us. So, just getting a document started has been a tedious hassle. But the hassle hasn't ended once the document is online.

This week, Dale Dougherty sent this Google Docs/Calendar request to our group, which I've decided to share with our competent Hackszine readers, since I've been unable to find a workable solution myself:

I've been trying to share a Google Doc with the two Brians. When I use their O'Reilly email, they don't get the message. So I have to use their Gmail addresses. Should I be able to invite anyone with an email address to view or edit a Google doc? Bre sent me an invitation to his calendar using my O'Reilly address and it didn't work--it complained that it couldn't link his calendar to mine. My Google account is set up with my Gmail address. Can someone explain this set of problems--using a non-Gmail email address and your Gmail address interchangeably?

Dale's message highlights a problem we've encountered with all of Google's services--namely, that when you're invited to join a document at one email address (that is, when the message actually makes it through spam filters), but the rest of your life is attached to another, you're out of luck. Since I maintain a Google Calendar (shared with others and including others' calendars) associated with my Gmail account, I'm not going to maintain an entirely separate calendar (is that even possible, or wouldn't that still require another Google account?) for collaborations with people who use my @oreilly.com address as their primary means of contact, and there doesn't appear to be any way to merge online identities within the Google system.

Tim O'Reilly puts a finer point on this issue:

The only hack I've been able to figure out is to get people to send me the invitation to both accounts. (I forward all my *****@oreilly.com mail to Gmail, but not the other way around, as that would create a loop, yet I use *****@gmail.com for calendar et al. The alternative would be to make *****@gmail.com my primary email address and forward to *****@oreilly.com.) Seems to me that this is a hidden (maybe even unconscious) power play by Google. There's a race on to get your sticky identity from one site to become your default identity.

This is a good point. Is Google attempting to keep their system closed, locking us into a single online identity associated with their services? If that's the case, it wouldn't be that much better for collaboration than being locked into the MS Office suite, the unfortunate de facto standard for most professional collaboration right now.

So, does anyone have any solutions to this tangled nest of questions? Any specific hacks to help out the Hacks team? In addition to these specific concerns, we'd also love to see any general hacks that help get you use other tools to get things done that would normally require MS Office. This is a hot space on our radar (especially with the launch of Google Apps for Your Domain), both behind the scenes and in terms of what we'd like to cover.

If you use Google Notifier on your Mac to keep tabs on your Gmail messages and Google Calendar events but are disappointed by the limit of messages/events the Notifier shows before banishing the rest to a "View more..." submenu, this hack's for you. MacInformant points to this useful Easter egg divulged by David Phillip Oster, one of the official Mac Software Engineers at Google, to change the limit to any number you'd like:

1. Pull down the Notifier menu (either Calendar or Gmail), hold down Command and Option, and click Preferences on the menu. You'll see a hidden settings editor.
2. Enter MaxMessagesOnMainMenu in the Key field (upper and lower case must be entered as shown) and 20 in the Value field, then click Set.
3. Quit Notifier and start it up again.

Now, when you pull down the Notifier menus, you'll see all of your messages and events at a glance, without submenus. If you want to change the limit again, perhaps back to the default, just open the hidden settings editor and change the value to whatever you want.

Like the folks at MacInformant, I'm on a Mac too, so I don't know if this works under Windows. Windows users, does Command-Ctrl do the trick?

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Without getting into the ethics of employers blocking access to certain sites on company machines (and without comment on the ethics of subverting those filters), if you need to access your personal Gmail account from an office that restricts access, engtech has a number of solutions for getting around the firewall. Check out the linked post for details, but here's a quick rundown of your options (the last of which I hope is entirely tongue-in-cheek, which might save it from being offensive):

1. Use different web addresses.
2. Configure your mail program to access Gmail (through POP).
3. Access Gmail through Google Desktop.
4. Use a web server with Gmail Lite installed.
5. Bribe the IT guys at your work.

If nothing else, this hack would help on days when the company email fails and you still need to reach someone urgently on professional business.

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Anyone who's a part of a mailing list has been party to email threads that just went on way too long. If you use Gmail, did you know you can mute the conversation to keep all future additions out of your inbox:

By using the 'm' shortcut key, new messages added to the conversation bypass your inbox so that the conversation stays archived. If your address appears in the to or cc field, though, the conversation will pop back into your inbox ready for your attention.

is:muted

If you later discover that some interesting talk has been going on behind your back, unmuting the conversation is as easy as selecting the conversation and choosing "Move to inbox" from the "More actions..." menu.

Now, what I really want to see is a way to mute conversations where my address is just on the cc line, for those many times when I'm copied on a message that never should have gone to me in the first place, or when friends or colleagues hijack a relevant message with off-topic chatter. Anyone have a hack for that?

(Via Mark Pilgrim)

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