Smart Cookie Dad

This is a fairly new web site that lets you share fun emails with your friends and family safely without cluttering your email box. You earn points by using the service and people seeing your post. Once you gather enough points, you can either donate your earnings to Go-Green charities or exchange your points for reward redemption.

The process of sharing is very easy. You sign up for an account on forwardOn. When you want to send fun emails to your friends, instead of sending to them directly, you send it to share@forwardon.com. In less than a minute, a reply should come back with your fun email hosted on forwardOn. You can then forward this fun email to your friends. Here is what the reply from forwardOn looks like:

forwardOn

Monk doing what monks do     http://www.forwardon.com/view.php?e=Id11ef636350fe507d

Please Note: – Follow email etiquettes when forwarding this email to your friends.     Enter email addresses in bcc field and delete any unwanted text.

forwardOn – Get free rewards for sharing fun emails. Plus, auto prevent email viruses, scams, chain letters, clogged inboxes and wasted storage.

The best reward is the $10 Amazon gift card for 10,000 points. It’s actually not difficult at all to earn his $10 gift card. When you sign up, you earn 5,000 points automatically. All you need to do is to post something interesting to generate 5,000 views to earn another 5,000 points. Say you know 10 friends who you usually forward fun emails to and assume each of your friend also has 10 friends which they send emails to as well, a single post on forwardOn for your 10 friends already generate 100 views. Your friend can continue the forward to help you earn even more views. If you are aggressive, you can even post it on social sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, MySpace..etc. If your post catches on, you will have potential to earn tens of thousands points. If it stay on front page long enough, you can generate hundred of thousands points easy.

Gmail has been good at caching your recently viewed mails so you can still access one or two emails after you are disconnected. This works okay for any momentary connection drop. However, when you are disconnected completely for longer period of time, you are pretty much out of luck. This is one reason some people are reluctant to adapt to web-based emails. Now this mentality needs to change for Gmail because Google just added a new feature this week to allow offline access to your emails. This new feature makes Gmail a direct competitor to Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird and any other desktop email client.

It’s very easy to set up. You first need to download and install Google Gears (you don’t need to download if you are using Google Chrome already). After Gears is installed and enabled, all you need to do is to login to Gmail, click on Settings -> Labs. Find Offline mail feature on the list and enable it there. You will then see an Offline link next to Settings. Click on it and follow instruction to continue with the set up. 

I did some testing on this offline feature.  It worked very seamlessly.  The emails come up very fast as usual whether you are online or not.  You can unplug your connection any time, Gmail would detect the connection when you plug back in and begin syncing immediately. The amount of emails or date range for offline mode is currently determined by Google and it’s not adjustable. I can go as far back as 6 months offline on my personal Gmail account. This is currently a lab feature (experimental). I think this feature is already very solid as-is. It should be out of the lab very soon.