I want to add my voice to that of all the people who are complaining about the inability of Gmail to correctly deal with mailing lists, when using IMAP.

I filter some mailing lists to their respective folders. When I answer an e-mail sent to a mailing list, the sent message is not filed in the same folder as the rest of the conversation (it only appears in the Sent Mail folder). Therefore, when I read mailing lists using a client (like Thunderbird or Mail.app) I cannot see the complete threads. Which is really annoying.

This problem is unique to people accessing through IMAP (I don’t know about POP). When reading the mail using the web interface everything is fine.

I always have been a happy user of Gmail. Its inteface is probably one of the most interesting interfaces ever done for e-mail. However, I also like to read my e-mail through IMAP, it allows me to use Gmail off-line.

But this IMAP implementation has a huge problem. It doesn’t deal well with character encodings. Many messages that I can read well from the web interface or after having downloaded them through POP, don’t show well through IMAP. I tried this with Thunderbird and with Mail.app.

Google has always been encoding savvy, but it looks like this time they forgot we live in a multilingual world.

Ja fa molt de temps que des de l’entorn de les Indias s’està intentant explicar i fer veure que la filosofia que hi ha darrere el rankisme, la mania de fer llistes dels millors, és una estupidesa perniciosa. D’aquí neix feevy una fantàstica eina de blogrolls dinàmics.

Fa uns dies Nichoas Carr va publicar al seu bloc una nota sobre un nou ranking calculat “científicament”:

The problem of detecting contaminants in a public water system is analogous to the problem of figuring out what’s going on in the blogosphere, write a team of Carnegie-Mellon researchers in an award-winning paper called Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks

En llegir això no vaig dubtar en escriure un comentari, us el deixo aquí per tal que quedi arxivat:

Rankings are just silly. Finding contaminants isn’t.

When one is looking for contaminants, knows exactly what he is looking for, a set of known molecules which are bad for health or for the environment. The target is always the same for everybody. But looking for what happens on the blogosphere is meaningless. What is interesting for me, probably won’t be interesting for you. We all are looking for different things! After reading the list these guys produced, I found few blogs I already read and I didn’t find many blogs that few people read but which are of high value for me. Not to mention that most blogs in the list are in English and that I read blogs in four more languages.

Rankings are made for the ranked and for the media, which love this ordered world. But, fortunately, the real world is chaos, and there is no rank able to grasp a slight part of this chaos.