Nine Months of Sent Mail

How I captured this:
Gmail only displays 100 messages at a time. And Grab, the screen capture utility bundled with OSX, will only capture the visible window area (rather than the entire content of a page, even if it extends beyond the bottom of a window). So in my case, on a MacBook Pro with FireFox 2 and a 1440×900 LCD this worked out to three captures per 100 email page. This came to a total of 58 (give or take a few screw ups) screen grabs for approximately 2000 sent emails.
Of note, I resized FireFox to be as narrow as possible in displaying the sent folder (before horizontal scroll bars appeared). While this doesn’t extend the list vertically, it allows the final grabs to fit within the 540px width constraint of the jeffwerner.ca layout. I then captured the sent mail folder at this narrow width.
Each grab was saved as a TIFF and labelled with the start and end date of the emails it depicts. I then created a new, maximum height document in Fireworks 8, which turns out to be 10,000px. In total I imported the 58 screen grabs into five new Fireworks documents, making sure each grab lined up with the one below and beneath it. Next, create a giant slice around each imageable area in each document (note that the frustratingly maximum numerical entry allowed in Fireworks is 6,000px in any dimension, so it required a lot of manual drag-and-scroll to create the slices accurately).
Finally, export each slice as an 8-bit PNG and insert them in this blog post. And there’s my Monday evening.
Oh also of note, well, to me: I always star any email that requires follow up. I seem to have a bit of a backlog.