Tonight Ashleigh and I tried the new “Watch Now” service from Netflix. It allows us to watch a movie instantly on our computer screen instead of waiting to receive it in the mail. The service is only available for select titles, and obviously only with a fast internet connection. Anyway, it’s pretty amazing that a movie can be delivered so quickly and reliably, and at a very decent quality, over the internet. Our movie had to pause a few times for just a minute to “catch up” to itself (as a result of hiccups in our internet connection), but that gave us an opportunity to use the restroom; it wasn’t much of a nuisance. This is definitely the future of movie renting, and I highly recommend it for any Netflix users who haven’t tried it yet, provided you have a very fast connection.

I finally switched from Yahoo Mail to Gmail last week. So far, I’m pretty happy. I’m just trying to get used to the automatic threading of “conversations” and using “labels” instead of folders. Why did I switch? Yahoo Mail Plus, combined with Yahoo Personal Address for my thenestor.com email address, made my Yahoo Mail kind of pricey. Gmail offered the same service for free, including the use of my domain name. And unlike Yahoo, Google doesn’t take over the whole domain name; just the mail part.

Now I’m on to the challenging task of moving old mail into Gmail. The first step was obvious: To get my mail from Yahoo Mail into Gmail, I just set up Gmail to retrieve from the Yahoo Mail POP server. Done and done. It just takes a while, because Gmail processes only 200 messages at a time, every half hour or so. Gmail is even smart enough to put most of the “Sent” mail into the “Sent” folder.

The harder part is getting my old mail (from before I used Yahoo) from Outlook Express. Basically I followed instructions similar to these. Most of the Gmail import solutions out there involve forwarding all your mail and therefore losing the original dates of the messages. Not interested. Instead, I put my mail on a POP server on my own computer and then had Gmail download it from there.

First, I imported my mail to Mozilla Thunderbird. Then I set up an IMAP/POP server on my own computer. I found a free, easy-to-use mail server called Mercury. I set up an account for myself, and then I went into Thunderbird and hooked it up as an IMAP account. Then I copied the emails from the archive folders into the Inbox of the IMAP account. After that, I went to Gmail and added an external account (to retrieve POP mail) using my IP address. Voila, it started downloading 200 messages at a time.

Now the tricky part is that a lot of my mail is going to the Spam folder, so I have to keep checking it once in a while during the retrieval process. The good thing is, all of the false-positive Spam has really old dates, so it’s easy to spot.

We got a puppy. Her name is Ilse von Nestorhausen, and she has a web site:

http://www.ilsevonnestorhausen.com

Because every pet should have a web site. That’s what the web was invented for.