Study this email. I don’t recommend you copy his style (which is reminiscent of overindulgent catalog king J. Peterman on “Seinfeld”) but rather think about how honest-to-goodness thankfulness, and transparency can be incorporated into your business, regardless of its size.

Hello there Ben Shoemate

Just wanted to let you know that I sent your bag out just a little bit ago. Your tracking number is listed below along with a link to the shipping company so you can track your leather piece every couple of hours.  To care for your leather piece and read about the photo contest please see the Questions page on the website. I have all sorts of tips to keep your leather in top shape.

Oh, and by the way, I didn’t want to tell you this before you joined, but 10% of the gross amount that you gave to Saddleback went directly to one of those aid organizations on the Dave’s Links page.  If you spent $500 + $20 for shipping then $52 went out to love people.  Basically, you just contributed to drilling a well for an entire village or partially sponsored a 5 year old street kid in Rwanda to get into a loving orphanage and go to one of the best schools in the country. This is the main reason Saddleback Leather exists. Just wanted to let you know… between friends. Thanks for helping.

The way I see it, out of the thousands and thousands of companies in the world, on the Internet or down on the corner selling leather goods, you chose mine and I really do feel honored.  You are very much appreciated.. Welcome to the family.

Thank you and have a great week.

Warm regards,

Dave Munson
Presidente
Saddleback Leather Co

Your order number is SBL-*********.

The tracking numbers are:
******************************
You can track your package by visiting the links below:
http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/processInputRequest?TypeOfInquiryNumber=T&InquiryNumber1=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The following items have been shipped to you:
line items
———————————————————————–
Small Wallet Light Tobacco Brown (WA-SM-LTB)
quantity: 1
total price: $28.00
———————————————————————–
subtotal:                        $28.00
sales tax:                        $2.28
standard shipping: *             $12.98
*shipping total includes handling and insurance fees
=======================================================================
grand total:                     $43.26
———————————————————————–

This order will be billed to:

Ben Shoemate
************
———————————————————————–

Orders for merchandise ship UPS and will receive a confirmation email and tracking number when your UPS order has shipped.
Orders for gift cards only ship via USPS mail with Delivery Confirmation and usually arrive in 3 to 5 business days.
—

This is an automatically generated email

Even down to letting you know this email was generated automatically – the message is honest and personal. Well done Dave.

“Ha!” sayeth the tempter, “Take away his adsense account and he will curse and defame you!” And so Google did, accusing him of click fraud although he had done none. And in his confusion and despair he looked upon the face of Google and appealleth saying – “Why have you forsaken me?” But Google made no reply…

Long bshoemate suffered. And in darkness and despair, he looked at Yahoo, but that strange portal offered no comfort. He looked to MSN but found no solace there. He traveled to the mighty Amazon, but path was not straight, the language unclear, and lost he became.

But then, an email. “Could it be! Cahloo Cahla” he cotorted in his joy and he read the email subject aloud from his open window to the streets below: “[#249567499] Google AdSense Account Reinstated!” Sweet, sweet justice he thought.

So where are the fabled ads of yore? Has he not yet put the code back on his site? Surely he must have only commented it out. “Nah, I’m in no hurry” he said, and wiser and a wearier man he rose the morrow morn.

Also, gmail ignores the . in your name. So even if you signed up for FirstLast@gmail.com you can tell people at work its First.Last@gmail.com and set up a filter to auto tag those as work. Also cool.

The first thing you need to know is that in GMail, your chats are actually stored as normal emails with a tag "Chat". So all we need to do is convert the chats to email, upload them and tag them as "chat".  Below are the 5 steps to get them uploaded!

Step 1) Extract Yahoo IM chats to Text files
Yahoo saves your chats in an encoded format. Normally you can use the Archive reader that comes with Yahoo to read it, but in order to upload them, we need to convert them first. I downloaded and installed Dapyx Yahoo Messenger – it is free and does a good job of converting extracting the files from the Yahoo Archive and saving them as text files. Before you download it though – please be warned – It changes your IE homepage without asking and I did have a problem with the time zone. All the dates where correct but the times where 9 hours off…I sent an email to the Dapyx support and posted a bug to their forum but I have not heard back.

Step 2) Convert the text files to unix email format
Once you have the files converted as text the next step is to turn them in to email messages that Thunderbird can use. I wrote a simple vbscript that reformats the txt files into unix email format that Thunderbird can import. This script reads through all the text files in a given folder and turns them into one large output.txt file.

Instructions to use this file:

1. Download this file to your harddrive (note: never, ever run strange scripts on your computer unless you know what they do – right click the file and select and click edit to see what this what this one does – that said- lets run the script) – double click to get started
2. It will prompt you for some info – where are the exported text files from Dapyx, what is your name, and where do you want the output
3. It takes about 20-30 seconds to convert the chats to email
4. After the script is done, it will tell you its done. Open the output.txt to see the chats in email format the thunderbird can open.

Step 3) Import the email into thunderbird
Copy the output.txt file into a folder that Thunderbird reads and remove the .txt extension (unix email files have no extension) so it will just be output (with no .txt). Restart Thunderbird and you will see all you chat as emails with the first line as the subject and the date and time of the chat as well as who it was with.

Step 4) Upload to Gmail with IMAP
I already wrote about this earlier.

Step 5) Tag as chat – When you import them to gmail, make sure you have gmail tag auto tag the mail when it comes it – the word "chat" is not allowed so I used "yahoo chat", "aol chat" etc.

Your done! Enjoy!

1. Report 1: social network – How many people are in my social network? – Unique names are pulled from the To, From, CC, and BCC fields – the total counts for each  are shown. A tag cloud is created showing all the names. Overall, the names are evenly spaced out – but when 2 names appear in the same email, they are more related and grouped closer together. The more often names appear, the more larger and bolder they get. The cloud can be filtered to show only data from the to, from, cc, or bcc feilds or to show activity for a given period of time. Lines with arrows can be turned on to show the origin, destination and direction of email.
2. Report 2: A River of email – OK – so I know you are all familar with NameVoyager. No? Its a dynamic graph of Baby names (see screenshot below). Imagine the same thing for your email – years on the bottom, blue is received, pink is sent, you type a letter and the list is filtered (second screen)
   .
   (All Email – with count per year, per person – you can zoom in to see by month, or filter to see a given name)
   
   This activity over time (a graph showing the peaks and valleys of overall emails sent and received). It will be interesting to see email drop off at the holidays, peak when I’m on  projects with large teams, and drop off when I am working with small teams or not on a project)
3. Visual 3: Company wide graphs – Once I can do this, it is a small step to analyze not only mine, but a whole company’s email. This lets me build social networks. Who knows who? How well connected are they? Need to get introduced to someone – did you know your friend worked with him two years ago?
4. Visual 4: Integrate with your contacts – zoom out to see all your contact at once with a color indicating your activity with that person.  Or just be able to sort by most popular.
5. Visual 5: Build a tag cloud of words you use in all your messages (like manyeyes.com). Show topic popularity this way.
6. Visual 6: Building on the data from visual 5, build a tool like google trends that uses words as they appear in email. This would show the topic trends.
7. Visual 7: World map of email sources – using server source show the geographic location of people who have sent you mail.

Of course many other visuals are possible using other attributes over time (word count, attachment size, tags, etc).

Does anyone out there have something like this already? Working on it? What other plugins are needed? And most importantly, who wants to help

Here is my strategy…

First, ALL my documents go in the “My Documents” folder that windows provides. The first thing I do when I re-image my computer is right click on that My Documents folder and change the location to by my secondary hard drive. So the C: Drive in my laptop is for installed programs, and the D drive (I replaced my cd-rom with a second drive) is for all the files I care about. If I have to check my laptop at the airport (which I never, ever do – electronics are not covered by the airline policy) or leave it in a shady area – I pop out the D drive and put it in my pocket.

So, lets look at my D drive (My Documents folder):
As you can see, the one that is most out of place here is the “Camtasia Studio”. A lot of software when you install it, creates a folder in My Documents. The one I hate the most is Adobe, which creates a completely empty folder for NO APPARENT REASON. I delete it all the time. The other trouble maker is Mircosoft OneNote….a nice program, but…I use Google Notebook.

I also have divided my Projects at the root. Prior to this I had one projects folder with sub-folders. You have already seen the Email folder in my previous post, so lets get to the interesting one and look at Clients. This is by far the elephant in the room with 8.19 GB, 6,197 sub folders, and 91,743 files.

Inside the Project (Clients) folder, I have organized things by year, and client name (sorry – I thought I better blur out the client names – that’s not important here anyway we are talking about the structure itself). Alright now, stop trying to read it! If you want to know where I’ve worked just ask me, I’m not ashamed.

Before this I did not have the year as part of the title, which was good because I often go back to work for the same clients over and over and all their projects grouped together, it also allowed me to press the first letter of the client to jump to that folder. So why add the year, because it adds consistency with how I organize my other folders such as Photos and helps with Back-up.

Next lets look inside one of the client folders.

Reference Folder Structure
In 2002 I started to notice a growing problem, although my projects have similarities, I was difficult to back and find files from old projects because I was not following a naming convention. To be honest, since I don’t work with the same team from project to project, naming conventions are hard to follow. I come with mine, others come with theirs and we end up compromising – taking the best of each and doing what is right for the project and the client.

The idea was to start each project with a set of empty folders that map roughly to a pattern that had been established on many projects. I then retro-fitted the structure to old projects.
Here it is (you can also download a zip file that creates this empty structure)

It is still a good structure, but it has a price – first of all, when you start a project, all the folders are empty, so you spend time clicking through them, looking for files that don’t exist. So you get annoyed and delete the empty folders. At this point, you start creating folders on demand again. This would be solved if windows had a better file management system using tags or at least showing file count at the folder level.

As for Music, I let itunes orgainize it, I don’t like how it does it, and I hate how when I reinstall itunes I loss at lot of info like playlists and rankings.

What else? If you have a question, our found this useful, tell me in the comments.

This post gets a lot of attention, so I rewrote part of it. It will give you step-by-step instructions to take all your old email (in my case over 10 years worth) and upload it into Gmail. Over the years I have used several different email clients: Pine on Unix, Outlook, Lotus Notes, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail. I am currently pretty comfortable with Gmail and have been using it since it was released. Like many people I am a data pack-rat and have kept all my email files (well, almost all – sadly I discovered a 6 months gap). My vision is to put it all into Gmail so I can leverage the great search and tagging features they provide. So here are the steps.

Overall Strategy – get everything converted and loaded into a local server, then sync it to Google.

Why do it this way? There are many advantages. First, if your just moving 100 to a 1000 messages with no attachments, then you can just skip all this and use the IMAP interface found in Google’s FAQ. That method allows you to “see” you gmail account in outlook (or thunderbird or lotus notes) and then just drag or copy messages from one box to the other.  But if your moving more than 1000 messages (or in my case 20,000 messages) with lots of attachments, that will take you days, and you have to sit there are watch it because you can only move about 200 messages at a time. In this method, we consolidate first to a local email server (I’ll show you how to set it up below) running on pc, then let the two accounts (your local one and gmail) sync on their own. Any other way and you are stuck sitting there, dragging and dropping or copying and pasting 200 messages at a time from one folder to another. Second – this keeps all dates in tact. It is really nice to see message you send in 1995 in your Gmail account. Third, once we do this, we can use it as a local backup of our Gmail – just incase the unthinkable happens to Gmail. (I said don’t think of it!)

Ready? Let’s get started

Here is the over all process – you will notice that I installed a email server on my computer called Mercury. This allows us to set up a IMAP and POP account locally that is much faster and will serve as a local backup of all email. 

Step 1) First find all your email

I dug through all my old hard drives and consolidate my mail into one location. As you can see, I have outlook (pst) files, lotus notes (nsf) files and files from an old Unix (pine) account I had at school. The zip file (all 2.7GB of it) is the finished product – all my email from 1995 though 2005 (2006 and 2007 are in gmail already).

 
If you are looking at my files, you see a lot of overlap, that’s ok, better safe than sorry…we can delete the duplicates once they are in Thunderbird using an extension.

Step 2. Download the Software

• Thunderbird (free email client) – http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
• Mercury (free email server) – ftp://ftp.usm.maine.edu/pegasus/mercury32/m32-452.exe (read about it)
• Lotus Notes (free trial) – http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/downloads/
• Outlook (free trial) – http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/default.aspx

Why Thunderbird – because it is open source with a large developer base. This means there is a good set of tutorials for writing extensions if I to want later on (for those visualizations). Also, I’m making a long term bet that 50 years from now, there will still be tools that import these files – (since they are just text files with no encoding and no database) – plus Thunderbird is really fast and can read 6gb of email quickly (lotus notes and outlook tend to slow down). So Thunderbird will be the final destination on my computer and I will upload from there.

Step 3. Install the software

• Thunderbird – just default everything
• Mercury – Make sure you set it up for both POP and IMAP when you get those options in the wizard
• Lotus Notes – Default
• Outlook – Default

Step 4. Import Unix files to Thunderbird

These are the easiest because Thunderbird will read these natively. All you have to do is copy the files in to the local folder and reopen Thunderbird.
A) Find out where thunderbird is storing your local files. To do this go to Tools > Account Settings. (note I renamed the local account to Ben Shoemate (all mail) but what your interested in is the "Local Directory" copy that and go there in windows explorer. This is where you need to copy the Unix files (they are files with no extensions). Just copy them to this "local folder", close and restart Thunderbird. Your old mail will be there! That’s it!

Step 5. Set up a local Email account in Mercury.

Open Mercury – if it is all ready running you will see down in the windows toolbar by the clock.

Otherwise , Start > Program Files > etc..

Once Mercury is open, go to Configuration > Manage Local Users > Add User
Because there is so much mail, I am going to set up a different local account per year. Gmail.com can import from 5 accounts at a time, and this will save a lot of time later on. So just make up an account name – I use my initials and the year and a simple password.

It should look like this when your done.

Each of these accounts are real email addresses. When you are local (in lotus notes and outlook) you can map to them with bs1999@localhost
In gmail, you can add them as bs1999@youripaddress (i.e. bs1999@111.111.122.11).

Step 6. Lotus Notes NSF files to your local email with IMAP

Once lotus notes is installed, you can simply double click the nsf files to open them, or you can click File > Database > Open > browse

You should see your old mail now. Ahh the memories….But don’t stop to read everything again or I’ll never finish this tutorial! Now, in lotus notes we are going to map to the local email account you set up in mercury. (Note: Gmail now has IMAP so you could just map directly to gmail if you want using the same procedure – but again, it will take a 100 years if you have this much email).

Go to File > Preferences > Client Reconfiguration Wizard

Check Pop or IMAP and click next.

Select IMAP, enter your new email account you set up in mercury, and type localhost, click next.

enter your account name again, and enter the password you gave yourself.
Click next, enter localhost as the server and your email address again – this doesn’t matter since you will not be using this email address for very long and it won’t show up on any of the mail that goes through it.
next, next, next your done.

To open the view of this in notes, click the "Databases" icon on the left panel and open your new account (this might take 2-3 minutes while notes creates a new nsf file etc.)

Now you should have you local account open. Now simply open the old nsf file, go to the "all documents" folder, select all, copy (I think it will only let you copy 2500 at a time) and then switch to you new email account and paste. Once you have all the messages for that year in the local IMAP account, close the nsf and repeat for all nsf files, and all years.

Step 7 – Outlook to your local email with IMAP

The same as in lotus notes – open your pst, then add the imap account and copy and paste.

• To open the pst go to File > Manage Data files and click Add.
• To open the local IMAP account go to Tools > Account Settings > New email account

Check the box that says "Manually configure server settings".

• Select Internet Mail
• Enter your Name, Email address (bs1999@localhost) and password, select IMAP, the server is localhost for both incoming and outgoing

Once you have mapped to this account, simply copy your old mail from the PST to the new account.

Step 8 – Clean it up in Thunderbird

Connect Thunderbird to you local email server (mercury) and download all your mail. Just like in outlook and lotus notes, we are going to add an account to Thunderbird and let it download all the mail you just put into it from lotus notes, pine and outlook.

• Open Thunderbird
• Click Tools > Account Settings > Add Account
• Enter Account Name (for me its bs1999@localhost), Name, email address (bs1999@localhost)

• Click Server settings

• Click OK.
• The next thing I did was organize copy them down into my local Thunderbird account and used an extension to delete duplicates
• Then I spent some time looking for gaps…oh well

Step 9 – Upload to gmail

By now your local account has a lot of mail. Let’s start pulling it into gmail. I set up a new gmail account to test it first. From there I can pull it into my main account.

• Log in to gmail
• Click Settings > Accounts > Get Mail from other accounts (Pop3) > Add other accounts
• Add your accounts from your local account. Note: you need you IP address. If you have a router you will need to route ports for pop3 (port 110) to your local computer. Log into your router to do this. While your there, get the IP of your router (ITS NOT the one that starts with 192. or 10. those are always local addresses)

(that’s NOT my IP address btw)

Next – gmail gives you some great options to tag the mail as it comes in, do it. Even if your not a tagger – do it.

You might also want to leave the message on the server (your computer) if this is a trial run.
Click Add account. If you get a problem, make sure your firewall is open, you port is mapped, and your password is right.

Next I’ll show you how to upload all those old chats…

If you liked this post, check out my other greatest hits:

• Words Einstein never said (but everyone thinks he did)
• Rewriting the Star Wars Prequels (they need it)
• Pimp your Credit Card
• The story of the bear and the big dipper

——-

THE PLAN

In the beginning was The Plan.
And then came the assumptions.
And the assumptions were without merit.
And The Plan was without substance.

And darkness was upon the face of the workers.
And they spoke among themselves, saying, “It is
a crock of shit, and it stinketh.”

And the workers went unto their supervisors and said,
“It is a pail of dung, and none may abide the odor thereof.”

And the supervisors went unto their managers, saying, “It is
a container of excrement and it is very strong, such that
none may abide by it.”

And the managers went unto their directors, saying,
“It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong.”

And the directors went unto the VPs, saying unto them,
“It promotes growth and it is very powerful.”

And the VPs went unto the Prez, saying unto him, “This plan
will actively promote the growth and vigor of the company,
with powerful effects.”

And the Prez looked upon the plan, and saw that it was good.
And The Plan became Policy.
This is how shit happens!

——-

Let me share my personal take on this…

I have been involved enough with corporate strategy and governance (as it relates to intranets, portal, and other web related stuff) to know how it works. You do something, it works, they ask you to document it, and that documentation becomes law. Until one day, you come back for another project and you try to do something, and someone tells you can’t do it.

“Why not?” you ask, reminding them that you are a consultant, that most honorable and noble of office creatures, “Who are you to say what I can and can not do?”

“I enforce the policy” they say.

“Give me that!”, you say as you snatch the printed policy boldly from their trembling hand, the 3-ring binder crashing to floor as pale faces peer over the stained, cubicle cloth.

“What?!” you laugh, “This? I wrote this 2 years ago, it doesn’t even apply any more.” And then you realize, your logic and reason mean nothing here. The only defense against corporate policy is powerpoint!
I am in the process of moving 15 years of email online from various formats to gmail so I can’t help reminiscing a little. I let you know if find any other gems like this in the archive.

Oh, I know. The snow. The effective snow
Stars, the last day, endless and centerless,
The purest form is always the one
II. List of Franklin Search Parties
People might see to be the opening
From point to point of meaning—open? closed?—
Not so much of place as of renewed hope,
And beyond, the same sound of bees
Left and right, and far ahead in the dusk.
to matter, for the flushed boys are muscular
What is there in the depths of these walls
So you can watch me watch uplifted snow
at balls hit again and again toward her offspring.
So you can watch me watch uplifted snow
He is harsh, dismal, ice—that is, exiled;
Bronze the sky, with no
The mortal architect had brought to life,
shaded by live oaks and bottlebrush trees
The pain of being born into matter.

Update: After Googleing (or is it Googling?) the first line, I found that all the lines seem to be randomly selected from this page at the University of Chicago. Nice.