Your code will look like this:

<a href="mailto:webmonkey@wired.com>Send an e-mail to Webmonkey</a>

and tell us how much you love cats.

When the reader clicks on that link, their default e-mail application will launch and a blank e-mail addressed to webmonkey@wired.com (or whatever address you put in the link) will open up.

You can fill out a subject for them, too. Just throw a ?subject= into your code. Your markup will end up looking something like this:

<a href="mailto:webmonkey@wired.com?subject=I-love-cats-too!">Jon</a>,

a Webmonkey writer, adores cats.



Share your cat stories with him and you'll make his day!

He especially loves cat images -- so feel free to mail

him attachments.

This is what the code will look like on your Web page:

Jon, a Webmonkey writer, adores cats. Share your cat stories with him and you’ll make his day! He especially loves cat images – so feel free to mail him attachments.

When he gets your feline-friendly mail, the subject: line in all the mail will read, “I love cats too!”

Tip: This hack works for the cc: and bcc: fields as well, so you can address e-mails to multiple recipients all in one link.

You can also write &body= text as well.

When using these multiple field tricks in your mailto links, be sure to escape the ampersands with ‘&’. Doing that will allow your code to render properly inside rich e-mail clients.

<a href="mailto:webmonkey@wired.com&amp;cc=foo@wired.com&amp;bbc=bar@wired.com&amp;body=Boy, I sure love cats>Send an e-mail to Webmonkey</a> and tell us how much you love cats.

The mail protocol most people are most familiar with is POP, which has long been the industry standard for serving and retrieving email. A client, which is the sort of desktop mail program with which everyone’s familiar, connects to the POP server and says, “Do you have any messages for me?” If the answer is yes, the client gets a list of the messages, downloads them, and optionally either deletes them from the server or leaves them in place. That’s pretty much the entire capability of POP.

IMAP is an alternative to POP that offers many advantages. Notably, it keeps centralized copies of messages on the server, where they can be accessed from anywhere, rather than fragmented and hidden away in various non-synchronized, non-centralized desktop mailboxes. The mail client interacts with the centralized messages, so your mailboxes look the same at any computer you access them from. The read/unread/replied status of each message is tracked on the server too.

Since IMAP requires long-term storage of messages on the server, email providers have long preferred POP and its quick, space-saving turnaround, which passes the expense of long-term storage on to the user. In fact, almost no popular consumer email provider offers IMAP. Running your own server, though, you can take advantage of IMAP’s benefits. The majority of desktop email clients — Outlook, Eudora, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, et al. — are already ready for IMAP. If you prefer a web-based interface, you can set that up too.

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Set Up a Debian or Ubuntu Machine as a Maildrop

It’s called Raindrop, and it fetches all of your communications from different sources like mail servers, Twitter and RSS feeds. Then, Raindrop intelligently surfaces the “important parts,” giving them priority and allowing you to reply or interact with the communications inside your web browser. Like all Mozilla projects, Raindrop is open-source software — it’s actually a mini web server that you run locally and access through your browser. At the time of Thursday’s launch, Firefox, Safari and Chrome are supported, with Internet Explorer notably absent from the list.

While Raindrop is rough around the edges in this early release, Mozilla is hoping to build a one-stop communication platform that will give you a single place to view all your messages, e-mail, shared photos and other social tools.

The “intelligent” part of Raindrop would allow, for example, direct messages and @replies from Twitter to be highlighted over regular incoming messages not directed specifically to you. E-mails that come in can be sorted to give priority to messages from your closest friends, replies and active threads you’re participating in. The idea is to make Raindrop a people-centric communication tool that emphasizes your friends over mailing lists, rote announcements and other not-quite-spam messages.

That might sound a bit like Google Wave, which is also trying to re-imagine web-based communication from the ground up. But while Raindrop and Wave share some similar features, including the ability to view images and videos inline, Google Wave is a much more radical departure from the status quo. Raindrop is more familiar, since it essentially melds a few things you’re already using — an e-mail inbox, a Twitter client and an RSS reader — into a singular, streamlined interface. Raindrop is also similar to Mozilla Lab’s existing Snowl project, which puts a river of news and e-mail messages in Firefox. But unlike Snowl, which is a Firefox plugin, Raindrop is a standalone system that even features an API that will allow developers to build their own add-ons, extending Raindrop as they see fit.

So, Raindrop will only gain functionality over time through widgets, add-ons and media-specific enhancements for services like YouTube and Flickr. In that sense, Raindrop could be seen as a logical extension of where Google has been taking Gmail recently by letting users add widgets for chat, calendar, RSS updates and other communication tools to Gmail’s browser-based inbox.

At the moment, Raindrop is a developer release, which means there’s no installer to download. The Labs team is making a downloadable installer one of its top priorities for the project. Interested developers can check out the code and run the startup script manually (see the Mozilla wiki for details). It’s not a plug-in or a desktop client — once Raindrop reaches the packaged installer stage, you’d set it up and then visit a local URL to see your messages.

I was able to install the developer code with no problems on my local machine. After telling Raindrop my Gmail and Twitter account info, the script dutifully fetched my messages.

Raindrop’s overview of your Inbox. Click the image for a larger view.

As you can see in the image above, Raindrop retains Gmail’s threaded conversation view, however, in this case Raindrop failed to filter out a message from a local wine shop, which, while not spam, is nevertheless not something I would want prioritized.

Still, Raindrop is clearly a work in progress and despite not being perfect, it did do a pretty good job of filtering out less important conversations.

Raindrop inline e-mail and Twitter messages. Click the image for a larger view.

As you can see, Twitter updates are shown inline with e-mail threads. Other messages, like mailing list subscriptions, are filtered out of the main conversation flow and given their own boxes so you can see what’s new without fully disrupting your more personal communications.

At the moment, any filtering or message deleting in Raindrop does not appear to sync back to your mail server. This is a serious flaw that we expect will be addressed before Raindrop reaches the downloadable stage.

This early developer release of Raindrop isn’t much to look at yet. But I should note that Mozilla has already spun out a new design that looks a bit more like Snowl:

Raindrop’s newer interface (image courtesy of Mozilla). Click the image for a larger view.

The newer look is a bit cleaner and abandons the traditional e-mail-style layout in favor of something more free-flowing.

Raindrop is clearly still very experimental and not meant for even casual usage, but we’re looking forward to seeing where Mozilla Labs takes the project.

Wrapping your head around Raindrop is difficult to do without actually using it and, due to the lack of an installer, using it is beyond most users at this point. Thankfully, Mozilla has posted this video which gives you nice overview of how Raindrop works.

Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.

See Also:

• Google Invites Everyone to Catch Its Real-Time Wave
• Mozilla’s ‘Snowl’ May Eventually Change the Way You Browse the Web
• Mozilla Revamps Labs Site, Reminds Us Weave Exists
• Mozilla’s Chris Beard on the Future of Firefox and Online Services

If you’ve ever wanted to be able to directly access other Google services from within Gmail, the Gmail Labs team has your solution. Two new options in Labs add a quick overview of your Calendar and Google Docs documents to the Gmail sidebar.

Even if you use several Google services — Reader, Docs, Calendar, etc — you’ve probably noticed that you still spend the majority of your time in Gmail. Gmail acts as a kind of communication hub with e-mail, calendar reminders, event invites and more trickling in over the course of the day. It makes sense to have a quick view of other, related services and that’s exactly what the new Labs features offer.

The Calendar option adds a small list view of your upcoming events while the Docs gadget shows your most recently edited documents. Both gadgets can be customized to filter out unimportant items. The Calendar gadget allows you to show and hide individual calendars and there’s also a quick link for adding new events without leaving Gmail. The Google Docs gadget offers filters to show only specific kinds of documents and offers a quick link to the full Docs page.

If you use the new offerings in conjunction with the Labs tools that allow you to reposition your contacts and label boxes, it’s not hard to create a fully customized communication hub — Gmail messages in the middle of the screen with labels and chat in the right sidebar and Calendar and Docs gadgets in the left.

It’s also worth noting that the Docs and Calendar gadgets aren’t the only possibility — there’s also a new generic gadget feature which allows you to add any Google Gadget to Gmail by simply plugging in the URL. In the long run this might turn out to be the big news since it appears to open the door for Gmail-specific gadgets.

At the moment however you should keep in mind that not all Google gadgets are fully compatible with https, so if you’re connecting to Gmail via https (and you should be), you may see mixed content warnings caused by parts of the gadgets being served over http. The Gmail team is reportedly working on fixing the issue.

And remember that if the preview version of Calendar isn’t enough for you, you can try this Greasemonkey script, which will add your full Calendar page just below the main Gmail screen using an iFrame to insert the calendar.

To get in on fun, head to the Labs section of Gmail (click the green beaker icon at the top right hand side of the page) and enable the new features.

See Also:

• Streamline Your E-Mail Workflow With Gmail’s ‘Canned Responses’
• Gmail Expands IMAP Capabilities With New Labs Features
• Gmail Helps Stop Your Drunken E-mail Rants

Gmail Labs has added a new “canned response” feature that allows you to create and save common e-mail responses for faster replies. Once you enable the new features, all you need to do is compose a message with the boilerplate text and then choose “save new canned response” in the canned responses menu.

Now whenever you want to send a quick response — something like, “thanks for the update” — just choose the saved response.

Perhaps the most useful part of canned responses comes from chaining them to a Gmail filter. Gmail allows you to create filters based on keywords, sender, recipients, and more in your incoming messages. Once you have a canned response saved you can set a filter to grab one, create an automated reply, and hit the Send button for you.

One thing to be aware of — the canned response will delete all the reply text so there’s no quoting from the original message (unless you save your canned response with part of the message response, but that would severely limit the canned aspect).

Google Operating System discovered an interesting bit of trivia about canned responses: they’re actually saved as invisible drafts. If you want to see them search for label:drafts, but by default they won’t show up in your drafts view.

It’s another very minor update — like the recent change in Contact List behavior — but if you find yourself repeated answering e-mails with the same boilerplate response, canned responses should make your life a little bit easier.

To enable the new features head to the Gmail Labs section (click the green beaker icon) and scroll down to the Canned Responses section.

See Also:

• Gmail Fixes Auto-Contacts Feature Again
• Gmail Helps Stop Your Drunken E-mail Rants
• Why You Should Turn Gmail’s SSL Feature On Now

• Gmail Suffers Outage, World Ends

For the second time in recent months Gmail has suffered a significant outage that left an unknown, but clearly upset, number of users without e-mail. This time the outage appears to have affected primarily Google Apps Premier Edition Gmail users.

The company apologized in a message posted to Google Groups saying, “we know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience.”

Around 9 PM PDT Google claimed that service had been restored, but all total some users were left without e-mail for over a day. As for how many, Google hasn’t offered any details, but those affected lashed out at Google. One message from an affected customer reads: “we may have to make other arrangements… apparently Google mail is not very reliable.”

It’s tempting to dismiss that person’s complaint by saying that you get what you pay for, but remember that, after the first 30 days, Google Apps Premier Edition is not free, it’s a paid service. Unlike the earlier outage, which affected mainly users of the free version, this one has hit paying customers where it hurts.

See Also:

• Gmail Suffers Outage, World Ends
• Reactions to Gmail Outage Range From ‘So Sorry’ to ‘Tough Luck’

Gmail Labs keeps cranking out the hits — this time the experimental project is a collection of Advanced IMAP Controls. The most useful of the new features is a way to selectively control which of your Gmail labels are available to your IMAP mail client.

Of course controlling which IMAP folders show up in your desktop e-mail reader is something most mail clients already handle using a subscribe/unsubscribe option. But Gmail’s new controls are handy for mobile clients, many of which lack the per-folder subscription tools that desktop clients offer.

The ability to set your IMAP folder subscriptions on the Gmail side is also a handy way to hide Gmail’s “All Mail” folder, which can bring even the most robust clients to grinding halt if you have a sizable amount of archived e-mail. Depending on how your organize your e-mail, All Mail may also be storing duplicate messages you don’t need.

But selective folder subscriptions aren’t the only new options for Gmail’s IMAP feature, Gmail is also attempting to bring its implementation of IMAP more in line with the IMAP protocol. The Gmail blog explains:

The IMAP protocol allows messages to be marked for deletion, a sort of limbo state where a message is still present in the folder but slated to be deleted the next time the folder is expunged. In our standard IMAP implementation, when you mark a message as deleted, Gmail doesn’t let it linger in that state — it deletes (or auto-expunges) it from the folder right away. If you want the two-stage delete process, after you’ve enabled this Lab, just select ‘Do not automatically expunge messages’ under the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ tab in Settings.

Also new is a way to configure your IMAP client to behave more like a traditional IMAP provider. Since IMAP doesn’t inherently share Gmail’s concept of archiving messages to all “All Mail” (rather than Trash), it can make managing your mail across multiple clients a little tricky. The solution is to make Gmail behave like a normal IMAP provider:

If you’d prefer that deleted messages not remaining in any other visible IMAP folders are sent to [Gmail]/Trash instead, Advanced IMAP Controls lets you set your preferences this way. In the ‘IMAP Access:’ section of the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ tab, find the ‘When a message is deleted from the last visible IMAP folder:’ option. Select ‘Move the message to the Gmail Trash.’ If you want to take it one step further, you can select ‘Immediately delete the message forever.’

Gmail’s IMAP implementation is still a little bit different than most, but these new features should make it behave a bit more like what old school IMAP fans are used to.

To enable the new features, head to the Gmail Labs area (click the green beaker icon) and look for the “Advanced IMAP Controls” option. Once that’s enabled, head to Settings >> Forwarding and POP/IMAP, and tweak the settings to suit your workflow. To control which folders are visible, head to the labels section of Gmail where you’ll find a new “Show in IMAP” option next to each of your labels.

See Also:

• Google Adds IMAP Support To GMail
• First Look: Hands On With GMail’s New IMAP Support
• Gmail Helps Stop Your Drunken E-mail Rants
• Gmail Labs Invites Mail Addicts to Come in and Play

Gmail developer Jon Perlow created Mail Goggles as a kind of e-mail sobriety test. It works by stopping your message when you hit send and then presents a series of simple math problems you need to solve before you really send the e-mail.

The problems themselves aren’t very difficult, but they do serve the purpose — making you stop and think about what you’re doing.

By default Mail Goggles is set to catch late Friday and Saturday night e-mails, but you can set the days and times to whatever you like in the preferences.

To enable Mail Goggles, just head to the Labs section, select the times you want, and save your changes.

See Also:

• Why You Should Turn Gmail’s SSL Feature On Now
• Gmail Labs Adds New Interface Tweaks
• Gmail Labs Invites Mail Addicts to Come in and Play