Hacking Gmail

Part I — Starting to Use Gmail
F
IGURE
3-8: A filter, set up
F
IGURE
3-9: Receiving mail from anti-dot fanatic
Indeed, as Figure 3-10 shows, the dot is basically ignored. Put it anywhere you
like or leave it out entirely: yet another way to produce filterable e-mail addresses
inside Gmail.
07_59611x ch03.qxp  11/28/05  11:11 PM  Page 22

---

23
Chapter 3 — Gmail Power Tips
F
IGURE
3-10: The blessing of the 
wandering dot
One final thing about addressing: If you are sending a mail to someone else’s
Gmail account, you needn’t add the 
@gmail.com
section of the address. Just type
the first half and it is delivered perfectly well.
Quickly Mark a Group of E-Mails
Like most desktop applications, Gmail actually allows you to mark a group of
items without having to select each one individually (by mark, I mean to put a
check in the checkbox next to an e-mail when you are presented with a list of
e-mails). With Gmail, if you’d like to select a group of consecutive messages with-
out marking each one separately, you simply need to check the first one in the list,
and then hold down the Shift key and check the last one you want to include in
the group of marked messages — the two e-mails you checked and all of the
e-mails between them will now be marked. You can use the same method to un-
mark e-mails and to star or unstar them. Note, however, that this might not work
in all browsers.
Send Executables as Attachments
When you receive an e-mail from an address that doesn’t end in 
@gmail.com
,
Gmail looks at attachments for file extensions known to be executable (such as
.dll, .exe, .vbs, and so forth), so if someone sends you one of these file types, their
message will bounce back. This goes for files within ZIP archives as well — Gmail
looks inside these for executable extensions and the e-mail bounces back to the
sender if it contains any. Gmail doesn’t look inside other archive formats, such as
RAR or ACE, so you might want to use one of these formats instead of going
through the hassle of the following workaround.
To get around this annoyance, you can use the same trick that has been used for
years. Simply tell the sender to rename the extension of the file to something
Gmail will allow (such as .jpg), and when you receive the file, rename it back to
the type it really is (for example, change 
file.jpg
to 
file.exe
).
07_59611x ch03.qxp  11/28/05  11:11 PM  Page 23

---

24