Email - Orangescale.NET / Thomas Arie Setiawan

Flickr’s New Photos Notification

I don’t know when Flickr rolled out this changes, but I see now that notification email subject about new photos from my Flickr contact is more useful now. Previously, when my contacts uploaded photos to their Flickr photostream, I get notification with subject like this: [Flickr] New items from friends.

Now email subject is something like: [Flickr] New items from {his/her name}. This is more useful because I can see who just uploaded the photos. Information delivered in the email is similar with the previous one, anyway.

10 Reasons Why I Love Posterous

After using Posterous in the last few weeks more frequenlty, I feel that I like it more than before. It feels right. These are 10 reasons why I like Posterous — and why you should love it, too.

1. Email-friendly, of course

One of the internet feature I regularly check is email inbox. Sometime, I want to post something directly from email sent into my inbox. Posterous is about working directly from the email — web-based email or email clients.

2. Free

It’s a free service. Right now, I have 1 GB of free storage. Since it does not offer types of account (free or paid account), Posterous said that we can have more than 1 GB if we hit the limit. If I have to pay to get more storage or features, I will consider to subscribe. But, I hope it offers the right price/package. And, we can have multiple Posterous sites using a single email address.

3. Autopost

How many social media accounts I have? How to distribute or send something to those service easily — if I want to share something using those services? The autopost feature is just perfect. I can send photos to Flickr, send videos to YouTube, post something to my own blog. But, I can do them all automagically from Posterous. And, I can choose whether I want to share them directly or not. Or, I can share only to specific targets.

Posterous as Media Sharing Service

Few weeks ago, I posted a question about media/image sharing provider as Twitter companion. I asked about the better solution between TwitPic or TweetPhoto. Andre Siregar (@dregar) mentioned about using Posterous as the image sharing provider. Right now, I’m enjoying Posterous. Posterous offers many features that are easy to use, especially — of course — when it has something to do with email.

When we share media files (photos/videos) — related to Twitter — the idea is to put the image somewhere in the internet, and broadcast the URL to our Twitter account. Most services offers similar mechanism. And, most of them also have ‘post by email’ feature. Now, I think I will use my Posterous account as my primary service to do this. The main reason is that I like using ‘send by email’ feature.

Other reason is about personal preference. Posterous has flexibility on the design. I have made some modifications for my Posterous page. It’s still simple, anyway. Also, Posterous can handle multiple media formats so that it’s not limited to photos/image only, but audio, audio or any other files. If I want to share to Twitter — for example — I can do it easily using Autopost feature, or send it to a certain email address. Nice!

Posterouseptember: Posterous Features in September

logo_posterous This September, Posterous blogging service released some new features and improvements. If you’re not familiar with Posterous — or never heard about it before, it’s a service that will help you put something online. You can post text, photos, videos and also documents. The big difference is that you can do it directly from your email. This service was launched back in July 2008. And, this is my Posterous page. If you have a Posterous account but you haven’t logged in for few months — or want to try it, here are some new features:

Feedburner feed tracking

If someone subscribe to your Posterous RSS feed, you can find out how many feed subscribers you have. This process should be easy because you can integrate your feed to Feedburner account. Using this, you can use all Feedburner’s features.

Autopost to Scribd

Posterous offers auto post ability. Using this, you can send your posts from Posterous to different websites/service. If you send a document, you can deliver it directly to Scribd.

Themes and Custom Themes!

If you want to have your own custom look for your Posterous page, you can do it easily now. There are some themes available. Once you select your theme, you can do some modifications like colors, custom image header, etc. If you’re good at HTML and CSS, and want to create your very own theme, an advanced customization feature is also available. For some people — at least for me — this is a killer feature!

Embed songs from Lala.com and videos from Viddler and Google Video

If you want to embed audio files from Lala.com and videos from Viddler and Google Video, you don’t have to deal with embed codes. Just put the links, and Posterous will do the rest for you.

Flickr Email Upload and Send to Twitter

Today, I tried another Flickr feature. It’s similar to what they have right now — upload by email. The difference is that after the photo uploaded, it will send a notification to Twitter, send an update status. If you’re familiar with Flickr’s Upload by Email, it should not be difficult at all.

First, you have to link your Flickr and Twitter account. Add your Twitter account into your Flickr profile, and do the next authentication process. After that, you should see the integration status (see image below).

You will have a special email address. Any photos sent to that address will be uploaded to your Flickr and a status update will be broadcasted to your Twitter status. The email address is similar to your regular email you use to upload photos to Flickr (by email). For example, if your private email address is something21rate@photos.flickr.com, your other email will be: something21rate2twitter@photos.flickr.com.

I tried it, and it works without any problem. The photo address will be shorten. (see image below)

I’m not actively using this upload-by-email feature, but it’s something useful and glad Flickr has it.

Do you check your email spam folder?

For the email service, I use Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. I almost never got any problem with them. Because they did great job filtering the email spams, I almost never checked my email spam folder. If they’re spams, why bother checking the spam folder?

But, I sometime check the spam/junk folder. Reading the email subjects in brief, just to see what emails are identified as spams. Recently, Mike Aquino was in a bad problem with Yahoo! Mail spam filtering feature. He got a job offer flagged as spam. This kind of case is rarely happened. But, this is a bad situation. Luckily, he did checked the spam folder.

Topify, A Much Better Twitter Notification Email System

I think I forgot when I joined (got invitation) to try Topify and started using it. Until now, Topify is really useful. It’s a timesaver! Topify is a simple service that will send notification (by email), and it’s related to Twitter. Two important keywords: Twitter and email account.

Sometime, we got notification from Twitter when other Twitter users start following us. Or, if we receive direct message. Is it good? It is. But, what can we do with the email we receive? What’s next?

Previously Twitter sends email notification in flat text. The notification only provides some basic details like Twitter username, real name, and link to Twitter profile page. The last thing is a link to our Twitter dashboard page to modify the notification settings.

Recently, Twitter provides more details, and it’s in HTML format. It includes these following details when we have a new follower:

Link to new follower’s Twitter profile page,
Number of followers,
Number of updates, and
How many people our new follower follows

When we receive a direct message, we will also get information about the sender and link to reply. I use Topify to handle my Twitter-related email notification. And, I’m satisfied. How?

Resnooze: Email Reminder Service

There are many options we can use as reminders to make sure that we will not forgot something — appointment, paying bills, etc. Right now, for the web-based service, I use Google Calendar to manage some schedules. Most of them are sent by email.

Besides that, I also have some of them set on my phone. If you want to have a web-based service and want to have reminders sent to your email, you can try Resnooze. It’s a simple, but I think it’s pretty useful too.

Longest Email Address

I am not sure whether it’s useful or not, but there is free email service where you can have a very long (again, VERY long) email address. It’s under abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com domain name. Before registering, it’s better to read what it offers (because it’s so long):

Some web forms are unable to read your email address
Soe email software can not be configured
People hav a hard time typing in your email address
Companies think that your email address is fake

Read that first. But, if you want to have it, you can sign up (it’s free). You will get 25 Mb storage. But, you will have ad-supported service. That’s what it said. I haven’t tried to signup as I do not ned it.

Google Supports IMAP

After giving more storage for its Gmail users (I have 4 Gb of storage right now), Google starts to give IMAP support. Google Help Center already mentioned about Supported IMAP Client List. But it seems that not all accounts got this feature. I checked both in my Gmail and Google Apps, I still haven’t got the options to enable the IMAP settings, only POP.

Why is IMAP integration a good thing for Gmail?

POP was a stepping stone, but IMAP pushes Gmails benefits over the top. With IMAP, users can now access their email via a desktop application like Outlook or Thunderbird, read emails, make changes, delete, and have the changes made across platforms. So if you now log into your Gmail account, the message which you read in Thunderbird, will now be marked accordingly. No more wasting time trying to sift through emails that had already been answered. (source)

Okey, I’ll wait.