Briefly: GMail Ups Attachment Limit, Squeezebox
In addition to Google unveiling Hot Trends, an expansion of the Trends service which displays popular search terms for each day, Google will be upping the GMail file attachment limit. Currently, GMail users are limited to attaching files totaling no more than 10MB. The new attachment limit is now 20MB, although it likely won’t be rolled out in its entirety for a short while, reports Mashable.
I moved to Google Apps Premier Edition
I’m wondering if this file attachment update will also occur with GMail for Your Domain users. Last week, after a troublesome experience trying to email photos from my cell phone to myself I decided to move from my GMail account as my primary email address to and utilize my shorter PSTAM.com domain for email. I purchased and setup Google Apps for Your Domain Premier Edition and have been ever so pleased with it. The Premier Edition (there’s a trial running until the end of May) of Google Apps for Your Domain has 10GB of storage and an important 99.9% uptime guarantee. No more GMail outages for me. Update: Just found out Google Apps Premier Edition made the #1 spot on PCWorld’s 100 Best Products of 2007 list.
If you tried to contact me (and I haven’t replied) via my contact form last week I might not have received it. Apparently WordPress 2.2 has problems with using Google Apps For Your Domain GMail accounts, or at least me and one other person.
Squeezebox!
Slim Devices Squeezebox
When I reviewed the top-notch Sonos Digital Music System earlier this month, I received several comments and emails from people asking if there was something more within their price range considering a simple Sonos setup exceeds $1,000. As a sort of follow-up review, I’ll be taking a look at the Slim Devices Squeezebox in the coming weeks. Priced at $299, I think it fills in the gap quite nicely. I can tell you I already love this thing - it supports Pandora and Rhapsody, my two favorite Internet music services.
Update: Sonos just recently updated their units to add support for Pandora.
flickrSLiDR Update
Finally, the flickr tool I launched on Friday (flickrSLiDR) has received overwhelming attention - over 30,000 pageviews in the first 3 days. As of this writing, over 7,100 slideshows have been created with flickrSLiDR. Not bad for a small project I thought I was going to use myself more than anyone else.
I have a handful ideas I would like to incorporate into it, but that all depends on how much time my 3 summer classes will take up.
Congrats on the great numbers for flickrSLiDR!
Nice job landing the Squeezebox Paul, looking forward to an in-depth review. Did you buy it or was it loaned just for the review? I’m guessing the latter :-)
Stammy…. I know your quite busy plotting the next startup that will help you RULE THE WORLD (sorry…Pinky and The Brain was on….), but dude you gotta BLUR THAT I.P. ADDRESS IN THE PIC!!!! Don’t want hackers trying to break into your rig you know?
@Frank - hahaha, it’s a local address from my router. You can’t do anything with it. =) You know I know better than that.
@Andrew - yep, loaner unit.
Lucky bastage.
Paul,
Maybe I have not looked deep enough into the Google docs, but as an office user it seems to be missing the all important mail merge. Any thoughts on this?
Can we have more of a review on the Google Aps thing? I’ve looked at it but am struggling to understand the point of it.
Ah, the Squeezebox seems more in my price range, looking forward to the full review.
Until I can import all my old mail into Google Apps properly, I am still unwilling to use it fully. I know you can use Mark Lyon’s GMail Loader, but its way too flakey. Congrats on the success of flickrSLiDR.
I commented on the WordPress thread on email problems. Another detail to bear in mind if you have a domain with a WordPress blog and a Google Apps email server is configuring your SPF records accordingly. Using the recommended Gmail standard record (v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all.) is actually not enough, since it will not whitelist email messages sent from your own server (i.e., from the IP address f your domain). Since Gmail hs a pretty uncompromising approach to spam, these messages (such as those sent from your contect form, or the messages sent from the WordPress admin) will be at risk of being spewed into the spam category, or worse.
I solved this issue by installing the Wordpress Swift SMTP Plugin (http://www.shiftthis.net/wordpress-swift-smtp-plugin/), which safely routes all outgoing admin mail through my Gmail SMTP server.
But, just to be on the safe side, I also modified my SPF record to include an IP4 parameter (ip4:216.70.127.86) and disabled mail on my Media Temple (DV) 3.0 server, and now absolutely all my blog-generated email arrives safely, whether it transits via my Gmail SMTP server or not.
/me hacks 192.168.1.104!
Paul, FYI, because I was intrigued by the issues mentioned in this post, I took a while to test a fresh WordPress 2.2 installation’s reliability for sending email. I set up a new site on a (gs) Media Temple server with a brand new 2.2 WP install and made the following modifications:
(1) First I installed the ShiftThis.net | Swift SMTP plugin (http://www.shiftthis.net/wordpress-swift-smtp-plugin/) and set it up to send mail via the Media temple SMTP server that goes with the domain. Don’t forget this is used, in principle, only TO SEND mail, so it is in no way inconvenient if I don’t use my hosted Gmail. Using the latter, however will work but will result in any outgoing mail being logged in the “Sent” folder in the Hosted Gmail account, which may or may not be desired: choose accordingly. I configured my Gmail hosted Premier account to fetch any mail from this account using SMTP, just in case someone replies to an email sent using the actual address designated for accessing the SMTP server. I tested the plugin with Gmail Hosted also, and it worked too.
(2) Second, I configured the SPF records for the Media Temple domain used as an SMTP server (just to make sure this is important, I tried sending an email from the domain using the SMTP server without having set a SPF record : it was sent safely but ended up in my spam folder and in Gmail or Hotmail would have been vanished without trace) I used the Media Temple default for this (v=spf1 a:yourdomain.com/20 ~all) but this can be refined if that mail server is used in other contexts.
(3) I altered the pluggable.php file (found in the wp-includes folder) to replace “wordpress@mydomain.com” by “user@mydomain.com”. This had best match the administration default set in the WordPress admin under >Options >General. This ensures that any admin-related mail sent via the SMTP server to myself arrives safely. It is important that this admin address is NOT the same as the address used to author posts, as WordPress does not seem to like that combination.
(4) The last step, obviously, was installing a contact form (I used the WP-ContactForm: Akismet Edition [http://www.bloggingexpertise.com/plugins/wp-contactform-akismet/], basically because I liked the Askimet antispam feature and because it is fairly recent and works, but actually any contact form will do) and set it up to send any INCOMING messages to my Hosted Gmail Premier account. These arrived safely because Gmail established that the SPF record for the domain from which they had been sent specified that server as a legitimate author for that email.
(6) With some plugins other than the Askimet Contact Form I mentioned (which will work with the ShiftThis plugin out of the box), it can be necessary to make the following change (detailed in the documentation for the ShiftThis.net | Swift SMTP plugin [http://docs.shiftthis.net/wordpress_swift_smtp_plugin]; if you’ve installed a plugin that sends email and does not seem to be working correctly with the Swift SMTP Plugin, do the following:
i. Open the problem Plugin in a text editor.
ii. Do a search for the function mail( and replace it with wp_mail(.
iii. Upload the revised plugin and it should now use the SMTP setting for sending mail. (depending on which subscription plugin you’re using, it might be necessary to edit it in this way; I needed to edit mine).
Basically the key point is that if you don’t set up your WordPress to send mail using a mail server that Gmail, with its strict anti-spam policies, regards as suspicious because the server it was sent through cannot be authenticated, the chances are the email will not arrive. This applies to both INCOMING mail (sent to you via the contact form) or OUTGOING mail (sent by the WordPress admin to you or to your readers or yourself regarding subscriptions, comments and registrations and the like) and anyone whose email provider has a strict spam policy will either not receive it at all or find it ends up in his spam folder.
Yikes, I forgot the main point: the example I mentioned can be tested live here:
http://donaldjenkins.fr
Congrats on flickrSLiDR.
It’s good to see the GMail limit increased.
I won’t be using google apps for my domain until they suport IMAP for e-mail.