I will be going to the next UK Usability Professionals Association (UPA) North meeting at Cafe Muse at the Manchester Museum on Thursday 8th December. This time we are very privileged to have Prof. Alistair Sutcliffe from University of Manchester to present the main event.

The Main Event – Alistair Sutcliffe on ‘Designing Attractive Web Sites’

“This talk will present recent research that attempts to unpack the current debate about user engagement and aesthetics in web site design… The end point, I hope, will be to foster discussion of concepts of engagement and aesthetics in web design and when such concepts are really important in delivering effectiveness and commercial success.”

If you are interested in usability, aesthetics and e-commerce and how it all fits together, you really SHOULD NOT MISS THIS!

The B Feature – Steve Potts on Website Accessibility Evaluation Techniques

Steve Potts will give a brief tour of the techniques and pragmatic perspective applied when evaluating websites for accessibility.
“In this presentation we’ll investigate how to address website accessibility evaluations from a technical perspective, highlighting the difficulties imposed by the wide range of collective technologies accessing the web, and the criteria by which we measure the objectives of an evaluation.”

Steve is a good friend of mine and someone I admire and respect. Steve’s presentation is another reason you should not miss this event.

As ever, the meeting will provide an opportunity to network, chat, have a drink and meet new people.

Venue and Date Details

• Venue: Cafe Muse, Manchester Museum, Oxford Road, Manchester,M13 7QQ Map at http://tinyurl.com/byj4u
• Date: Thursday 8th December 2005
• Start Time: 6.30pm for 7.00pm
• End Time: Around 9.00pm and then drinks at Cafe Muse and Kro Bar.
• Cost: Free

You do not need to be a member of the UPA to attend this meeting.

RSVP: It helps us if we know how many people are coming, so please email to book using northern.usability [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

Here’s an interesting Gmail problem I found the other day. One that is a little worrying on two counts. The first: It seems gmail are slow to roll out new features to non-US accounts, And the second: It appears that the code architecture behind gmail is quite poor. Or at least the internationalization of it is badly designed and doesn’t use common code.

I recently spotted this post by Aaron Swartz on the Google Weblog:

Gmail: New From Address

Without apparent fanfare, Google now lets you change your From address to any email address you can verify. Click on Settings, then Accounts. Once you’ve verified the email you can go back there to make the new address the default. (Thanks, Noah!)

Great! This is a feature I have been waiting for for quite a while. Multiple easily selectable from addresses. When I sign up to mailing lists and forums or when I register on a web site, I always give a new email address based on the name of the list, forum, or site. That way I can identify where mail comes from, can filter it more easily (it all get forwarded to the same address), and can trace spam if anyone sells my email address. But posting to mailing lists usually requires the from address to be the same as the one you signed up with. Using Gmail with its single from address makes this a problem. Thus I was really pleased to see this new feature announced.
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I’m sure it can’t be just me but I think Gmail’s spam filter is deteriorating. Over the last few weeks, I have noticed a few more spam mails ending up in my inbox. Then a couple of days ago, I noticed a few false positives. Now it seems like its an epidemic!

Yesterday, I had to rescue at least 50 emails marked as spam. Most of these were regular mailing list mails I’ve been getting for ever.

I’m finding that most, but strangely not all, my blog comment notification emails are marked as spam. Note that this is not the moderation notification. That gets through ok. But when I approve the comment here on the blog, the notification email proper gets flagged as spam and I have to rescue it.

What gives Google? When I mark a mail has ‘Not Spam’ are you learning? Thunderbird does! It seems you do not.

Update:
I’m expanding this post to clarify my grumble somewhat.

I know that Gmail has to deal with millions of spam emails a day, they do a very good job. I also know that the spammers adjust their spam. I can see that when a new mass mailing gets through for a day (sometimes two), but then stops as Google adjust their filters to catch them.

My big, big, big concern is that almost all of the false positives are from senders I’ve been receiving mail from for more than a year.

I don’t mind the odd false positive, but more than 50 in one day!

For those who mentioned it, I do use thunderbird, for exactly the same emails and more: Gmail only gets copies of my mail. Thunderbird hasn’t given me a false positive for six months. Not one! To be fair I get more spam in my inbox with Thunderbird.

For me the tool not catching enough spam and having to deal with it by hand is a nuisance, but if I accidentally delete just one legitimate email because it got put in my spam folder as a false positive is unforgivable.