My gmail account now has POP access. Gmail started providing POP access for its email accounts in phases a couple of days back. The last time I checked, I still did not have POP access. I checked today and found that now my account has been provided POP access.
The first step was to enable POP access. I did that by selecting the following options in the “Forwarding” > “Forwarding and POPAccount” section:
1. Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded)
2. When messages are accessed with POP: keep Gmail’s copy in the Inbox.
The account configuration was pretty much straightforward. Configuration instructions are given in the Gmail Help section.
After setting up POP access for my gmail account, I tried sending and receiving emails using Outlook Express. It is working great.
Hotmail offers 250 mb email storage space
Update (2/26/2005): If you want to increase your hotmail space, please see this page. I have not tried it yet but from the list of responses, it seems that the procedure works. A cached copy is also available here in case the page mentioned above goes down.
Hotmail now offers 250 mb of email storage space. Just checked my hotmail account and yes, it does have 250 mb email space now. When Yahoo mail increased its email space to 100 mb a couple of months back, I had read somewhere that hotmail was also planning to increase it’s email space in August 2004. Two and a half months later, that seems to be a reality.
As for me, I still use my University email account. It offers only 20 mb of space but I use it because it offers IMAP access. Also, it has 6 MX records i.e. basically 6 mail servers handling the incoming email. This means that if one of the email servers go down, the others will pick up the email. Most email providers have only 1 or 2 MX records. Yahoo and Hotmail have 4, Rediffmail has 3 and Gmail has 2 MX records respectively.
POP is good but I like IMAP a lot better and it is much more convenient. I have a gmail account but I seldom use it because it does not provide POP or IMAP access. It would be great if I could have access to an email service with good storage space (200mb+) and which offers IMAP access. I am even willing to pay for it. I have tried the free version of Fastmail and it works pretty good.
Related entries from my blog:
– Rediffmail now offers 1 GB of email space (June 17, 2004 10:35 PM)
– Yahoomail now offers 100 MB of email space (June 15, 2004 06:39 PM)
– Got my Gmail account! (June 12, 2004 01:40 AM)
Correction (6:39 PM 11/13/2004): It seems Gmail does offer POP access now but not to all its users yet. I just checked mine and POP access has not been enabled for my account yet :(. If Gmail starts supporting IMAP, it will be really great!!! :).
Happy Diwali and Ningol Chakouba
Happy Diwali to everybody!!! This year, Diwali is being celebrated today – Nov 12. Kali Puja in West Bengal was yesterday (Nov 11). Diwali is the festival of lights and is one of the most important festivals for Indians worldwide.
Manthan – the Indian Students Association at UTK celebrated Diwali couple of days back – on Oct 31. The reason was that was the only date the UC Auditorium was available before Nov 12.
Ningol Chakouba is on Nov 14. (Ningol=daughter of the family, chakouba=invite to a feast). It is a festival which celebrated in my home state – Manipur. On this day, parents invite their married daughters and their children to a feast and share experiences. Sort of like a family reunion. It’s a lot of fun and the food is great!
Image courtesy: 123Greetings.com
Firefox 1.0, firefox.com, Kevin Karpenske
Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox 1.0 was officially released yesterday (11/9). Have downloaded and upgraded my previous Firefox installation (0.9). It seems that Firefox downloads have exceeded 10 million!
www.firefox.com now takes you to the Firefox homepage. However, until one or two months back, it displayed a seperate page. The previous owner – Kevin Karpenske, has transferred the domain to the Mozilla foundation. A very generous gesture indeed! Kevin is a fiction writer and his new website is www.quailish.com.If you would like to thank Kevin for his generous gesture, do post a message in his discussion forum.
It seems that due to large number of downloads, the Mozilla site became slow yesterday (11/9). Also, due to heavy traffic, the www.spreadfirefox.com website currently (2:36 AM 11/10/2004) displays a text-only version.
Related Links:
– Mozilla releases Firefox 1.0 (news.com)
– Firefox homepage
Bush wins
George W. Bush has won his second term as president.
Sen. John Kerry conceded defeat to President Bush on Wednesday and asked the country to put the bitter divisions of the election behind them.
Source: CNN
As of now (2:51 PM 11/3/2004), Bush has 274 electoral votes (51%) and Kerry has 252 electoral votes (48%). 270 electoral votes are required to win the election.
Was watching the election analysis on TV yesterday night and one of the commenters mentioned that Ohio was the deciding state. Whoever won Ohio would win the election. Seems like Bush held a 136,000-vote lead in Ohio.
The presidential election system in the U.S. is a bit complex and I don’t understand it fully. A better explanation is here.
Time has a nice photo essay about Election Day (Nov 2) 2004. It seems the US presidential elections was even held in other countries like like Germany and Israel!
First Flight Couriers – absolutely miserable shipping
First Flight Couriers‘ shipping time is absolutely miserable. It might be good for other places in India, but at least not for North East India.
I ordered an item from Bazee.com for delivery to Imphal, Manipur. It was shipped by the seller on Oct 9 from Mumbai. After that, the item was never received. I sent various emails to First Flight and finally got a reply after many days saying that they were “looking into it”. I assumed that my packet was lost. Finally, I was informed that the packet arrived yesterday (Oct 28). The packet took 19 days to deliver! According to the First Flight website, it was supposed to be delivered in 3 days. And it seems that FirstFlight has only *one* courier person for the whole of Manipur.
If you would like to send items by courier to Manipur from other parts of India, I would say use DTDC or BlueDart, but NEVER First Flight! Their service is absolutely miserable!
And oh, their online tracking service, it still says – “09-Oct-2004: Despatched from Origin”. No other information. Great, huh?
Update (9:46 PM 12/24/2004): I recently ordered an item online from a seller in Mumbai. The destination was Delhi. The package was delivered in 3 days. So, it seems that FirstFlight service is good for delivery between main cities in India.
Movable Type 500 Internal Server Error
I had upgraded to Movable Type 3.11 from 2.661 a couple of weeks back. But I did not change the default styles and templates. Yesterday, I updated the styles and templates. Everything was great but I started getting some mysterious 500 Internal Server Errors. I could not figure out what the problem was. Later, I found a couple of these lines in my server error log.
[2004-10-21 05:36:31]: error: file is writable by others: (/home/maisnam/public_html/blog/archives/000102.php)
I then chmoded all the files in the “archives” folder to 644. Now, I am not getting those internal server errors anymore. Hope I have solved the problem. I will be posting updates on this topic.
Update (12:53 AM 10/21/2004): I am getting these errors again everytime I add a new entry or make a change to an existing entry. It seems that the problem comes back everytime the files are re-generated. Right now, the patch-up solution I have found is to manually chmod to 644 all files in the “archives” folder and the index.php and archives.php files in the main folder. Any suggestions are welcome.
FeedBurner
Came across FeedBurner today. It is an RSS and ATOM feed reader. It also provides detailed feed statistics.
The feedburner URL for this blog is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/m
The Day After Tomorrow
Watched “The Day After Tomorrow” on DVD today. The theatre release was on May 28, 2004 and the DVD release was on Oct 12, 2004. Liked the movie though I guess it would have been much better in the theatre.
Also, read somewhere that the theory proposed in the movie (i.e. the North Atlantic Current failing due to the melting polar ice caps) is actually feasible but it would take a lot of time for it to come into effect (not 7 to 10 days as in the movie).
Have been watching a lot of DVD movies over fall break. Here is a partial list:
– Along Came Polly
– Man On Fire
– Mean Girls
– Paycheck
– The Alamo
– Walking Tall
Links:
– Review at Yahoo Movies
– Review at IMDB
– Official Site
Update (11:13 PM 10/17/2004): Found the article. Here is a quote:
“There is evidence that the North Atlantic branch of the current has failed in the distant past
Copy entire folder in Linux
To copy an entire folder (directory tree) in Linux, use the following method:
mkdir target_directory
cd source_directory
cp -ap . target_directory
Other options:
cp -apv . target_directory (for verbose results)
\cp -ap . target_directory (for unix)
More info:
– linuxguide.sourceforge.net