Tag: gmail

Translate with Gmail

Gmail

Google TranslateOver the years I’ve consulted for a number of start-up and recently established fashion companies, from manufacturing handbags to shoes, and that has necessitated dealing with a lots of suppliers all over Europe and even as far a field as India and China.

As I only speak English this has created, over the years, a whole number of amusing translation issues, and a generated unfortunately a great deal of communication issues. I wish when I was working on these projects on a more full-time basis I had had access to the facilities of google translate to help iron out these problems.

For those encountering these problems on a daily basis there is a better way than google translate, if you use gmail, which is using the google labs feature allowing you to translate emails directly from within gmail. So if you’re dealing with a supplier get them to sign up for gmail and get them to follow these instructions to enable it.

So here we go for the instructions:

1. Login to your gmail account:

Gmail Login

2. Then click on settings, which you can find in the top right hand corner:

Gmail Settings

3. Then click on the labs option in the settings:

Gmail Labs

4. Then find this option and click on activate:

Google Translate in Gmail5. Once you’ve activated the option then in emails you can activate the translation tool by doing the following:

Activate Gmail TranslateI’d also advise if you are sending an email to a supplier in a foreign country then you should write your email in English and then go to google translate and cut and paste a translation in their language and include it in the email you send with your original English message, thus minimising the likelihood of confusion in sent messages.

Isn’t it great that google is enabling us to communicate better, lets see what the future holds, in the mean time use the above instructions to improve your communications with suppliers abroad.

Filed under: TechTagged with: , ,

Rebuilding Apple Mail Mboxes

So. I use gmail’s IMAP service to collect emails from each of my email accounts. I’ve used the IMAP service since it was introduced, as unlike the POP3 service it ensures that my inboxes, etc, are synced with the cloud and also with the other computers I used, thereby enabling me to sit down at any computer and see the same, identical information.

Unfortunately it is not unusual for these mailboxes to start displaying duplicate emails, which not only makes searching them more difficult (excluding the duplicates presented by the “All Mail” IMAP mailbox) and can eat up a great deal of extra hard drive space, especially when you have tens of thousands of emails spread across multiple accounts.

So when this started happening again recently I decided to do something about it. The solution if you use Apple’s Mail program is quite simple. It’s called “Rebuild” and can be found in the “Mailbox” menu of Apple’s Mail program here:

Apple Mailbox Menu
Click the item in the red box

Once you’ve clicked this button Apple’s Mail program will go about the task of rebuilding your mailbox, during which these duplicates emails that have been syncronised to your account will be removed. This process can take a couple of minutes, or a couple of hours depending on the size of your mailbox. I had a couple of thousand messages in the mailbox this afternoon and it was completed before I had finished writing this entry.

Filed under: HelpTagged with: , , , , , ,