dfbills.com blog

I’ve been dealing with an intermittent issue for about a year now where some of my mail messages never appear in the Gmail inbox.  I usually access my Gmail using IMAP and rarely use the web interface. 

Up until now, the only way I’ve had to find them is to search for unread messages and page through listservs and all sorts of junk looking for messages with no labels applied.

Today after waiting for an email that apparently never arrived, I decided to do something about it.  First step, determine how many messages were really affected and find a search string to display them.

That string turned out to be:


is:unread -label:[gmail]-Meetup -label:[gmail]-ListServ-w3 -label:[gmail]-pr -label:[gmail]-listserv-su-alumni -label:inbox


After seeing the results of that query, all I could say was “Wow, this issue with my gmail not going into the inbox is much larger than I’d previously thought.” 

So, I did some digging around in Google Labs and found the “Quick Links” add-on which let me save this search so that it’s never more than one click away.

Then, I spent some time going through hundreds of messages that went back nearly a year and found what I had been missing.  Along the way, I could only think of two reasons this could be happening:

1. I’ve filed certain messages away in the web interface and Gmail has continued the “thread” in a mailbox other than Inbox.

2. I might have an IMAP email client configured incorrectly and it may be filing messages into non-existent mailboxes.

3. There’s some sort of glitch in Gmail.

More testing is required to get to the bottom of this, but at least now I can find the messages that are “missing.”

A software update brought me to this nice 404 over at Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes.  I like the “at the very least” portion, because it very much sounds like something Doug would say.

The area you are attempting to reach in the dougscripts.com domain cannot be found. It may have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Or, at the very least, the link that got you here is incorrect.

Perhaps you can find what you are looking for using the links in the column on the right or by using the menu and search forms at the top of this page.

Consistent errors should be brought to the attention of webmaster AT dougscripts DOT com.

Facebook has launched “Prototypes” which are experimental features and applications built by Facebook engineers.  This is similar to Google Labs in that you can access and even comment on upcoming features.

Prototypes can be managed or removed from the individual Application Settings pages.  And from Facebook: “Please keep in mind they are sometimes buggy. They can also change very rapidly or be taken down without notice.”

The notoriously slow, but heavily used, bulk email service MyEmma took a rather bland nosedive this afternoon.

The service is temporarily unavailable.
We're sorry, our service is temporarily inaccessible.
We are working hard to remedy the situation and hope to have access restored soon.

37 Signals takes a low-key approach to their error screen when search files in Basecamp.  My interpretation- “Eh, it’s down- try again later.  Please don’t bug us.”

Search is temporarily unavailable.
Please try again in 5 minutes.
If this continues for an extended period of time please let us know. Thank you.

I got this great error page over at bit.ly today.  Perhaps it is possible to shorten URLs too much?

Sorry to interrupt your show, but there seems to be a problem.

Some fun WolframAlpha searches:

When were you born?

Are you self-aware?

Are you Skynet?

Easter eggs?

Oh man- like I need another excuse to keep me form doing my pushups!

We're sorry, but something went wrong.
We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.

Wolfram|Alpha, now in soft launch state, is showing sweet HAL references as overload indicators.

A nice new Twitter 404 image. These guys really do it up classy.