Gmail Advanced

I just went and installed Better Gmail and Gmail Manager on my laptop, both firefox add-ons. I'm going to have to install both of those everywhere.

The Mail.app mac-like skin from Better Gmail looks great. I first tried Super Clean but abandoned it quickly since I found it unusable.

GMail manager lets me have two or more tabs to gmail, each tab being a different account. That's very useful and I may finally switch over to using web based gmail for my gmail accounts because of that (I'll still have to keep evolution for backup and for access to my IMAP email at work. But finally GMail is much more usable when I can have multiple tabs, one for each account.

I've also finally found a convenient way to download my spam (which I use to train a bogofilter adaptive filter, just for fun). I think Gmail must have fixed their POP3 support somehow. Previously, this technique didn't work but now it does. The solution is to:
A. go to the Spam folder
B. select all messages on the current page
C. add those messages to a label (e.g., ZSpamX)
D. mark the email not spam.
E. wait until they're downloaded by my fetchmail process running elsewhere.
F. once everything is downloaded, go into the label, select everything and mark them all Spam.
G. Go into Spam folder and delete all Spam.

Unfortunately, D doesn't work with the gmail "select everything" link that pops up as an option when we've pressed the (Select) All link. So if I've got several pages of spam, I need to do A-D for each page. That's not bad though since I've got gmail setup to show 100 emails at a time.

To be clear, that last is not a problem with either of the Gmail related plugins. It's an issue with how Gmail works to begin with. Probably as a bar against people making a dumb mistake that does too global a job to the selected email the "select everything" link that pops up when you click All does not all you to assign the same label to all matching emails, nor does it allow you to Unmark all matching emails Spam. I don't remember if it allows marking all matching email spam. I've already collected and remove all my spam, so now I don't remember whether marking all the spam messages spam again was one step or ten.

In any case, the C and F steps are vital. I don't think they previously worked. Or if they did, I didn't think to try them back then. It's great though, now, to be finally able to grab all my spam so I can train my own spam classifier. Sometimes spam gets past all the spam classifiers between me and the internet, then I'd like to have a personal spam classifier customized to my needs, similarly, sometimes mail from friends or mailing lists is marked spam by mistake. Seeing all the spam and running them through my own classifier gives me a better chance of finding the false positives since at least I control the classifier.