As an element in my comprehensive rearguard exploration of last week’s/month’s/year’s interesting computer doohickeys, I have finally begun a sustained experiment in using Gmail, which is proceeding apace.

Only one bump to date: the unflagged blackholing of a flood of comment spam from comments.cgi on the blog left me a mite frowny – if I can’t see the mail, it’s hard to click the mt-blacklist link, now innit?

As is my wont, here are some Gmail toys, for whenever I get around to them.

Mark Lyon’s list of Gmail candy. It includes Pop Goes the Gmail, for POP3 access, as well as his GML, an app to allow you to pop your current mail archive into Gmail, should you feel so inclined.

Most useful on Mark’s list in the short run is Address Book to CSV 1.1, which enables a user to export from Address Book into the format that Gmail supports to build its’ own contacts list.

There’s also the propellerhead tomfoolery of a PHP script that converts your unused Gmail space into an offline backup solution, something that I could have sworn that tall guy over there wrote about, but I find no trace of it.