Here is my Inbox:

GMail Inbox

Here’s what I have in addition to the standard GMail Inbox:

• A Planet Theme (as you can see with the orange planet thing behind GMail)
• A extra side panel containing Multiple Inboxes, or different views of my mail
• Integrated Google Calender
• Integrated Google Docs

To get these and more activated in your GMail account, you will need the following:

• A GMail Account. If you don’t already have one, get it at Gmail.com

That about it.

Now, click on settings in the top right corner, and you’ll get something like:

GMail Settings

First of all, click on the tab that says Labs, and you’ll get the same screen as the one above. You’ll need to Enable the Labs features, after which its a good idea to refresh GMail.

You’ll see a lot of various options in this area, for enabling or disabling various Lab features.

Here, scroll down and find Multiple Inboxes. You can also enable Google Calender Gadget, Google Docs Gadget, and for those of you with slower internet speed, enable GMail Inbox Preview (first covered here).

GMail Inbox Preview

Once you’ve saved the changes, you need to click on the Multiple Inboxes tab link. Here, you can set the number of side inboxes you want, along with what kind of emails you want to show there. I highly recommend that you put ‘is:starred ‘ as one of the search strings. Basically this will have one of your Multiple Inboxes showing only the mails that you have starred. This way, you can put a star on an important email, and have it appear on the side of your main page.

Another feature I like about Gmail is purely cosmetic. I’m talking of course, about the Themes. I have the Planets theme installed, which looks really pretty, and also changes in image according to the time of the place you are in.

You can click on the themes tab and select a theme of your choice. Pepples is really good too.

GMail Themes

Anyway, these are just some of the basic GMail features that I have enabled on my GMail. I find that it looks way more interesting than before, and having links to my calender, docs, and starred mails right there in my main inbox saves a lot of time hunting down stuff. Check it out.

Have any other cool GMail trick? Comment it down.

So here is another, even briefer, tutorial on sending mail in Asp.NET using GMail SMTP (means using a GMail Account doh!).

Alright, this is what you do:

1. If you haven’t done so already, download a .NET development tool like Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition.
2. Go to File>New Web Site, select new ASP.NET Web Site, and choose Visual C# for your language. (Ok, You’ve mostly probably already come up to this stage, but I’m just being complete.

Step 2 in action. If you are not seeing this, try harder.

1. Now, by default you’ll see your Default.aspx file, where you can use the visual tools to drag and drop in your files. But you actually want the Default.aspx.cs file to edit. On the right you’ll see your Solution Explorer. Click on the plus and double click on Default.aspx.cs

Top right, Solution Explorer. Code in the middle.

1. Here you’ll have the actual C# code that runs to generate your HTML output for the browser. So this is where you shall put in your C# Mail code. Be sure to edit out like the username (your entire GMail gmail), and password (you know, that one).

using System;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Data;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Security;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using System.Net.Mail;

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        sendMail();
    }
    public void sendMail()
    {
        string from="vishalkumar@gmail.com";
        string to = "vishalkumar@gmail.com";
        string subject = "Hi there";
        string body = "Hey there <br /> Check out http://www.vishalkumar.in";
        sendMailall(from, to, subject, body);
    }
    public void sendMailall(string from, string to, string subject, string body)
    {
        MailMessage mail = new MailMessage();
        mail.To.Add(to);
        mail.From = new MailAddress(from);
        mail.Subject = subject;
        mail.Body = body;
        mail.IsBodyHtml = true;
        SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient();
        smtp.Host = "smtp.gmail.com";
        smtp.Credentials =
             new System.Net.NetworkCredential("vishalkumar@gmail.com",
                                                                "thisisnotmypassword");
        smtp.EnableSsl = true;
        smtp.Send(mail);
     }
}

1. Now just press F5 to debug, which basically means run the page. By simply running the above page, you’ll trigger the code to send an email to the address specified.
2. And you’re done for now. You can now add extra features like creating a form, or sending automated emails, etc, for all you like. Enjoy.

And thats it. Alright I admit, you didn’t really need that many steps. Frankly, just copy the code and play with it.

If you get stuck (and you tried really really hard yes please), gmail me later. Or comment up.

So here is the tutorial for sending PHP Mail using Gmail as your SMTP engine.

First of you all, I’m going to pretend that you’re familiar with a few things:

• PHP (you know, PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor). Its a lovely language for developing webpages. If you already knew that, then good. If not, you might want to read a good PHP Tutorial.
• A local apache+PHP webserver running to test with. I use either XAMPP or WAMPServer, while on Windows Vista. Or install LAMP stack in Ubuntu.
• Can edit your PHP.ini configuration file. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, get really familiar with the above two.

K, here goes.

1. If you haven’t done so already, get a PHP server running.
2. Download PHP-Mailer (they also have other php software for easy form-to-email).
3. Go to your C:\xampplite\htdocs folder (in XAMPP) or C:\wamp\www folder (in WAMP), and extract the PHP Mailer into it. I’ll call this folder Root from now on.
4. Now go to Root\PHP-Mailer\examples\, and open up test_smtp_gmail_basic.php.
5. Now you shall have to do some minor editing. Don’t worry, its majorly minor. Just change the Emails to your send and receiver, and type your password. Here’s what mine almost looks like. Almost. Thats not the password. … I think.

Open and edit test_smtp_gmail_basic.php

$mail->IsSMTP(); // telling the class to use SMTP

$mail->Host       = "stmp.gmail.com"; // SMTP server

$mail->SMTPDebug  = 1;                     // enables SMTP debug information (for testing)

// 1 = errors and messages

// 2 = messages only

$mail->SMTPAuth   = true;                  // enable SMTP authentication

$mail->SMTPSecure = "ssl";                 // sets the prefix to the servier

$mail->Host       = "smtp.gmail.com";      // sets GMAIL as the SMTP server

$mail->Port       = 465;                   // set the SMTP port for the GMAIL server

$mail->Username   = "vishalkumar@gmail.com";  // GMAIL username

$mail->Password   = "topsecretpassword:D";            // GMAIL password

$mail->SetFrom('vishalkumar@gmail.com', 'Vishal Kumar');

$mail->AddReplyTo("vishalkumar@gmail.com","Vishal Kumar");

$mail->Subject    = "Hey, check out http://www.vishalkumar.in";

$mail->AltBody    = "Hey, check out this new post on www.vishalkumar.in"; // optional, comment out and test

$mail->MsgHTML($body);

$address = "vishalkumar@gmail.com";

$mail->AddAddress($address, "Vishal Kumar");


6. Now, pressing save, you’ll be half done with this little tutorial. Ok, the actual step is you need to edit your PHP.ini file settings. You can find that C:\xampplite\php if you are into XAMPP. Here you need to open the PHP.ini file, then search for “openssl”. Go ahead and take that ‘;’ comment symbol from the start of the line. In WAMP, all you need is your mouse. Just click on the speedometer icon of WAMPServer in the taskbar. Go to PHP>PHP Extensions and click on php_openssl to turn it on

Enable the php_openssl.dll extension by taking off the ';' in XAMPP

Tick to enable php_openssl in WAMP

7. Restart your servers services. This should be fairly simple
8. Go navigate to http://localhost/PHP-Mailer/examples/test_smtp_gmail_basic.php in your browser. And then check your Receivers Inbox. Hi!!!

Thats about it; thats how I managed to send emails using GMail’s SMTP engine to any mail, through PHP.

Note though, this tutorial is meant to be a specific reply to a certain query I got, but I figured more people would want to read this, so I posted it up.

If you have any doubts, or extensions, or any helpful suggestions, comment up.

Google Chrome. Shiny shiny.

GMail Inbox Preview
First of all, for those of you who use Gmail, you know it can be a real pain in, well, a pain, when it comes to loading your inbox, which for you geeky folks, is nothing but the entire AJAX like program for your mail.

There’s simply nothing as slap-on-your-face-ish as waiting for 4 minutes to load your Gmail inbox, and then only to realise that you have only 2 emails, one from a free Colon Cleaner and some other mail with a whole lot of Chinese (Ok, I’m kidding, they’re in my Spam).

Anyway, Google has blessed us with a new Gmail Labs feature called Inbox Preview.

Gmail's Inbox Preview

Here’s how it works: Right after you sign in, and you start getting that Loading Gmail progress bar, during which time you usually leave the room to make some hot tea and come back, you can now see the latest 10 of your emails. You can now decide within nanoseconds (Ok, I exaggerate), whether or not you want to continue.

“I want it, how do I get it?”:

1. K, first of all, you need to endure that Gmail loading thing (I promise, just this once).
2. Go to Settings (that’s in the top right of your screen)
3. Go to Labs. You’d need to enable the Labs features to continue.
4. You’ll see a whole lot of Labs features, which will probably change the way you look at Gmail.
5. Anyway, scroll halfwayish till you find the Inbox Preview option (its right above the Multiple Inboxes, look for the big red M with little child M-lings on the right)
6. Enable, and then scroll down and save.

There you go. If you want to test, I’m going to advise you wait until the next time you need to check your mail.

Also, while we’re here, if you always use the same computer for checking your mail, you might consider Gmail Offline, which installs itself into the browser, allowing you to access your mails even when offline, and spare you the downloading time.

Google Chrome 2
For those of you who like fast things (Lamborghini, ASUS Graphics Cards, me running towards chicken), you certainly won’t be disappointed in the brand new Google Chrome 2.

Google Chrome 2

Features:

• Holy crap, middle mouse scrolling. Yes!
• Full Fullscreen. Press F11. Go ahead, I dare you. Yup. Now thats Real Fullscreen alright.
• Its still super hyper fast at loading up. Its still like opening up notepad. And that, I like.
• It loads things faster. Uhh…thats what they said here. (Times like these when I don’t feel like doing an independent javascript benchmark suite, I take their word)

Chrome really is super fast. In fact, its javascript engine (the part of the browser that does cool animations and stuffs), is hyper fast. So fast, that in fact, there are some javascript programs that can only be run in Chrome.

A wobbly monster rendered in Google Chrome

Check out more wierd, fun, and useless things you can do with Chrome at the ChromeExperiments.com site (yes, thats the site)

Click here to go to the Google Chrome Site.

Otherwise just be seated in your comfortable seat and click here to download the complete installer here. This is probably what you want if you are downloading at your friend’s (with unlimited broadband) place.

Google SMS Channels

Google's SMS Channels

Alright, this may be old news to some, but I‘ve only just heard about it, so I figure since nobody mentioned this to me, then nobody I know knows about it. Or something like that.

Anyway, Google India has launched, quite recntly, a pretty nifty (and free) service: SMS Channels.  With this, you can now receive (free) SMS updates from various live feeds that have been created, or you can create yourself.

So check this out, I’m now getting (for free), a couple of sms everyday, from the latest Google News Technology updates, another set from BBC International News (yes, its true, shoot me). There’s a whole lot of other channels for other SMS jokes, etc, so be sure to check it out.

Useful? Well, its an Opt-in service. This means that while you can certainly address a large group of people for free via sms, and even automate it through smsing an RSS feed, you need to get people to sign in and subscribe first. Just an little initial setting up difficulty for some, but otherwise cool.

Check it out here.

A Good Night

Found any of the above useful? Found anything betterly useful? Please do let me know in the comments.  : )