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ExtremeTech Reviews Google's Gmail Beta
JimLynch writes "Gmail, Gmail, Gmail--how do we love thee? Let us count the ways!
We finally had a chance to try Google's new e-mail service and we're happy to say that, for the most part, we love it! In this article, we'll give you an overview of what you can expect from Gmail, as well as what we liked and didn't like about it. We'll also tell you what we think needs to be added to make it even better."
What with their upcoming IPO and all.
C|N>K
From Dive Into Mark.
Also, glad Slashdot FINALLY got a Google section/logo.
GMail doesn't get the framerates I've come to expect from Yahoo!Mail.
While write-ups on the merits of Gmail are interesting and all that, the authors of such articles need to realize that few people who read /. actually care how good it is at this point. All we care about is getting the username we want; the notion of *not* getting an account -- regardless of faults -- isn't even fathomable...
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
Does that sound to anyone else like something you would see on a pimp's business card? You know, pimpboy69@GMAIL.com or something (assuming they had business cards, or used email - I'm not exactly a gold mine of info on the pimping business - it just sounds sort of trashy).
Am I the only one who thought e-mail for homies and not google mail upon first hearing the name "gmail"?
Do you really need more 60 fps for mail? My computer does 72 fps on Gmail, and compared to my old computer that did 60, I really can't tell any difference.
...it looks like there's not much doing in gmail, save for the gig of space and a few very minor evolutions on what Opera's had for a while in M2.
Am I missing anything?
P.S.: I don't really see a reason to switch from mutt.
I've got my beta account. I really like the setup, however my only beef is adding IMAP, wouldn't google still be able to include their ads into it?
I'm still lost on something. Why exactly would I want gmail? Wow. A full gigabyte of mail storage. Who cares? I rack up about a gig worth of email each year and I just dump it to a CD for archiving. All the mail I've ever recieved in the last decade is sitting in my mail folder under Mozilla to this day.
Is the big deal just that google is offering webmail accounts? If so, there are a million of those and I'm sure they'll be just as spammy as hotmail and anyone else eventually anyway. Free webmail through google is about as interesting as free government cheese.
Google > Dell
I'm glad they covered all the important features and what needs to be added or improved, but I wish they'd spent some time going over the privacy issues and what they think about Google reading our e-mails.
Ah well -- still a decent review overall. Kudos to Mr. Lynch.
When I have heard about it, I have said to mysef that I will be the first to sign up. No matter how much storage they'll give me, I will not sign up until they also give POP3/IMAP/SMTP. I love Opera's 7.5 M2 client. I don't care if they show ads from the data in my email as long as they don't use names.
How "extreme" can webmail be?
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Reviews and comments.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Since when can't you send HTML mail in Hotmail??? Isn't that the default?
A public beta.... prediction: -1 redundant
As I was writing in my web blog, I think that piracy is going to kill Gmail. The only way to stop it? Bandwidth constraints, but with those, the 1GB offered is useless.
Searches and webmail are a great start, but my sources tell me that Google is currently in the development stages of a system that will do my taxes , make breakfast, and find me a girlfriend (and God knows, I hope it works).
Why does their opinion about your privacy matter? It's something each person needs to decide for him or herself.
on the "teens" posing for the pictures I suppose.
Make sure you don't have spam blocking on.
Is the gmail motto "All your email are belong to us"? Or does Microsoft have a trademark on that?
Not so much for the space as the ability to send and receive large attachments.
So is this review from the same guys who write those breathless "gee whiz" press releases for Apple? Sure sounds like it...
I love Gmail and I use it daily, unfortunately it cannot do partial word searches.
I don't know about you, but I'm not the world's best speller and I can't always remember the correct spelling of a location or someone's last name, but I do know the first few words so in my e-mail client I can do a search for those first few letters and find the message I am trying to locate.
Unfortunately it is not the case with Google Mail. I contacted support and they confirmed the fact for me. "Thank you for your message. Gmail does not currently offer partial word search." They did say that they'd forward it to the appropriate team, but as of this writing, it has not been implemented.
Linda, Bob, Fred (25) GPL the best?
Where the first name of the latest reply is in bold. Very cool and very useful for management. I know mutt can already do this with threading, but AFAIK can't open all the messages in the thread together like gmail's conversations. This is a feature that needs to be added to every email client.
I personally HATE it!!!!!!!!!!!!
...of all the e-mail accounts I have.
Maybe google can finally find them.
Hey what am I, chopped liver? Where's MY beta-GMail? cheers, skeezix....
--I do what I can, I work in the dark.
Hotmail syncs with Outlook Express. I've been using it for years.
I don't know about Yahoo. They may have just mixed up the columns on that one.
It's also interesting that GMail doesn't do HTML e-mails. Indie-Mail doesn't either through the web (client limitation) but I allow POP3 and IMAP so you can use any client. There are no built in restrictions to the actual mail server.
And virus scanning should have been a given. There are open source virus scanners if they're using *nix boxes. Indie-Mail uses McAfee which works really well. They may be concerned about the system resources needed to do virus scanning. Although there shouldn't be anything stopping them from running dedicated virus scanning systems that are mapped to the drives on other systems.
You don't have to run the virus scanner on the same computer that you're scanning.
They could also just be worried about killing off legitimate e-mails and don't want to send off notices about infected e-mails.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Why is everyone missing the biggest point here? Gmail is not about mail, it is about One GigaByte of shared storage! That's how many 6MP pictures? Or how many mp3's? How many accounts will simply be created to just share a gigabyte of stuff?
Yup, I know there are privacy issues, but have you ever heard of encryption?
And finally, am I finisheg asking questions?
I think gmail looks pretty leet so far. i REALLY dont see what the big deal with the whole ads thing is either. Doesnt sound that bad at all to me and im glad the author of the review felt the same way. Does anyone have any idea when gmail is gonna launch?????!
Gmail sounds pretty neutral. But I'm just waiting for @chainmail.com to start, so I can email my D&D buddies...
Seeing at it's mothers day a perfect story.
My folks aren't interest in backing up to a CD (in what format / compatabile with what), installing a piece of software on every machine they want to use email from. Frankly, I'm not either.
They want a company they can trust, who will provide a nice clean email service with good space, and without tons of ads and menu bars and junk. That is google.
Volunteer at an old folks home and try to get them to login even to their yahoo email account. The logins and home page are so damn busy that for an older person it is a very real challenge to get to the page they need.
Ccheck out hotmail, you have to agree to four TOS, sign up for a passport account, check it every 30 days, pay $ for a tiny amount of space etc, they force you to accept members newsletter with product announcements etc etc... and a 140 million folks have accounts with them.
And you say no one would want Gmail. You are out to lunch. Google is offering a TON more space, a clean interface, from a company folks like.
They will clean up.
Yeah yeah it's kinda cool, mostly cause it's free but whatever. Most people probably don't need the search features. To be that detailed, plain text search in any mail client would do. IMAP and a Gig of storage from someone like www.upnix.com shouldn't cost you very much and you can get your own domain. I'm just not that impressed GMail doesn't tickle me pink.
GMail will have targeted ads. I haven't seen a banner ad (spam aside) since I signed up for FastMail years ago.
Wah!
Having 1 gig of space is a lot to fill up for us regalar joes. As hard as that would be for me to fill up, I have heard that Google employees have 1 terrabyte of space. Imagine all the email that would add up to!
There's never enough when you have too little
I'm on about 15 listservs with hundreds of subscribers - mostly for science and math education - Your strong personal preferences noted, but without having a threading feature - or equivalent - sorting through these would be very tedious.
It could easily be a pirates den. If a CD in MP3s is roughly 100MB, users go into some IRC channel, request with an gmail addy and then it magically shows up in their inbox to download and delete. All at google's disk space and bandwidth.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
The thing I'm trying to figure out is why the KDE people haven't started on Kmail yet. You'd think they wouldn't let gnome get this far ahead,
I have a beta account at gmail. Right now I am tring to delete a email, but have trouble. There is no trashcan icon or 'delete' in the "More Actions" menu. I know it's possible, since there is a folder called trash.
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
In the ET review they are surprised to find keyboard shortcuts work with Moz, Epiphany, FF, etc; not just IE. I was impressed with that, too, I would expect Google to let the minority toil away without such advanced features,
However, it looks like they don't support all browsers after all: as seen here at their site. I'm browsing on Opera, so I get this message: 'Gmail does not currently support your browser.'. I wouldn't at all be surprised if they ended up supporting it after the beta, however. As the review noted, a lot of expected features (such as sigs and virus scanning) were left out in this early version.
lame... please improve your first posting skills or i'll kill a puppy.
can i have one too? briangames201@[].com []=hotmail
and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
A couple of features I didn't see mentioned and that I would like:
1 - ability to save a selection or all my e-mails offline (say a big zip file)
2 - label contacts, and create e-mail lists (say all friends, all coworkers, etc)
3 - bigger e-mail attachements, say 50MB (I know this will never happen as it will lead to abuses, but with digital cameras that can support short videos, this would be nice so I wouldn't have to send several messages with split attachements)
I'm depressed to see that gmail appears to use top-posting aka "jeopardy quoting" for replies.
Maybe there is a setting, but if this is the default, then the option to change it is pointless- no one will.
I hate getting top-posted emails. I hate trying to wade backwards in time to find out what the hell the cryptic first line refers to. Thank you Outlook for bringing this "feature" to the masses and lazy users who can't be bothered to edit quotes meaningfully for wasting bandwidth and my time. And, now, thank you gmail, for perpetuating it.
I feel like Don Quixote.
-h3
PGP support would be cool.
Maybe some client-side Java to read in your keys from your drive / USB key to decrypt mail?
Common storage == pr0n. 1GB of pr0n. Each. That's a lot of pr0n.
obnoxious popup site that has nothing to do with gmail, look at the link
http://www.pimpemail.com/
c ks.com
:-)
You can get free e-mail addresses like
@slappinbitches.com
@pimpdaddy.com
@turnintri
Just tryin to keep it real dawg!
bash: rtfm: command not found
cuz it will EAT YOUR BRANE!
Do you have a link to back-up your claim?
Gotta be a song in there somewhere (alright, well a terrible song)
I wonder if we could convince Google to allow PGP signatures. Or rather, to automatically generate one. Then it would be harder for spammers and viruses to pretend to be from somewhere else. And if Gmail starts using PGP, I am sure that several others will follow suit.
Also, I recently received a zipped executable named TextDocument.zip from a gmail account. I wonder, have spammers already started using Gmail? Or perhaps a virus impersonating the address?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
80% of all women prefer men with BIGGER email accounts! Now you can be a BIG BOY 2!
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
no text
Was it just me or was that article fud (pro-google propaganda without really covering the issues). My greatest concern, and I'm sure its one I share with at least one other person, is that I think I may feel quite uncomfortable about targetted advertising. I don't want to get a new girlfriend (lucky I'm reading slashdot :-) and find ads aimed at buying her gifts, nor do I want to write about my ichy balls and have ichy ball remedies on the sidebar. The article did not cover this at all. It will depend on google's implementation, so far we have some reason to trust them but this is a dicey new area.
/.'s readbase as 'the people's company'. Of course, after it floats, it will be the shareholders company. And it will (IANAL) become illegal for them to act not in the interests of those shareholders. Which could mean illegal for them to do some of the 'good' things they have been doing - because they will be spending other people's money/investment.
And the article did not even mention google's IPO. Google is discussed in this article and by some of
Finally... how is google going to stop this service being used for W@r3z? I forsee a situation where an unscrupulous individual logs in, uploads a new game or movie, then writes a perl script that can send it to whoever they want. Google can shut down the account but the game/movie could easily have been sent to hundreds or thousands of people at considerable bandwidth cost. Surely they have thought of this I wonder how they will stop it? Will they tolerate this sort of thing on the small scale - I mean they will have to won't they?
--
On Slashdot I'm a lawyer.
I find it hard to believe that Google's going to open up their service without an address book that at least remotely compares to Yahoo's.
Well, we already have Kookle.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Remember, we are talking about the country that was willing to send a pop star into space.
I have seen Lenin's corpse. It's a little disturbing.
I don't know about anyone else, but this sounds like a great way to have cheap offsite backups. Just email them to yourself@gmail.
Gmail actually works.
So google's offering us one-gigabyte of storage, of course 99.5% of people will never fill up 1/10th of that, and google knows that too. Google probably has the correct train of thought that people are tired of being constrained to two megabytes of hotmail space/whatnot. They also realize that hard-drive space is a dime a dozen, so why not give everyone their gigabyte?
>If you don't trust google with your email, you can always trust it to hotmail
At hotmail you can only store a few megabytes, with much lamer organization than GMail offers. People are going to wind up with a lifetime of correspondence in their GMail accounts, all conveniently searchable.
Under Section 215 of the USAPATRIOT Act, government agents can take a look at that just by asking. Same with any email implementation, of course, but GMail's easier to get at than your home machine and offers a bigger payoff than Hotmail.
Phishers could collect GMail passwords and script searches for exploitable information.
In other words the real privacy issues come from the sheer usefulness of GMail.
The Path of Paranoia here would be to use a Hushmail account for personal and confidential email and route all your mailing list traffic to GMail. Gmail's features should be pure gold for people who save back issues of technical mailing lists.
Oh, the keyboard shortcuts are addictive. It's so responsive you could almost think you're getting the same efficiency you would from an old character-based mailer.
They just want to look cool so they can try cash in on the Google IPO.
Gmail is completely useless to me, and many other users who are willing to pay a bit per year to not have to sacrifice our privacy.
Of all the things I could spend a few dollars per month on, there isn't much that I would consider more practical than centralized imap access to my email at my own domain.
Services such as fastmail.fm (I won't link it) already provide for $50 per year:
- ssl pop3 and proxy
- ssl imap and proxy
- ssl smtp and proxy
- webmail
- full server-side custom sieve rules
- spam filtering
- virus filtering
- checking free yahoo and hotmail boxes
- aliases
- hosting mail for your own domain
- payment via payapl
All with 150 MB of storage base, file storage and transfer, and 750MB bandwidth per month base.
I'm sorry Google, but you're going to have to do a lot better than this if you want my permission to keep tabs on my life.
What's most important is the nature of the information, who you are, where you are, and who your friends are. The information itself is irrelevant.
That's what's being wanted here by the All-Seeing Eye.
It's gonna eat my brane? Huh?
Free Firefox news reader.
i checked the Screenshots of Gmail, and i found that there's "Invite a Friend" link on the left panel. Does that works? if yes, then who's inviting me ??
It said "We're not compatible" and suggested that I upgrade my IE5 to one of several:
Mozilla (for mac)
netscape (for mac)
firefox (for mac)
And in each case, NONE of them are available for OS9. So, if you're running OS9, you're screwed. On this machine (my internet /email / web machine) I use OS9 because:
no one bothers to write viruses for it
it runs on my G3 350, and OSx is a PIG on this machine, and being one of the unemployed, I can't afford a new machine for email etc.
So, I'M SCREWED and so is anyone else runnign OS9.
Oh well - no gmail for me...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
But I'm sure its been asked for before...
Needle Nardle Noo
No matter how cool gmail looks (and it does look cool), you are asking for trouble when you agree to route all of your e-mail through a free corporate account.
:)
After you begin to rely upon their service, you could be at their mercy if you use them as your primary account. They could choose to take away features at a whim (or not provide them as technology advances) or outright discontinue you at will. I don't know about the rest of you, but its a real pain to to switch e-mail (especially if you have a gig of stuff on their servers).
Not don't get me wrong, by all accounts, Google is a great company. However, like all corportations, Google needs to make $$$. They will start off with innocent banners in your e-mail, but as the company matures they will begin to look at their bottom line more and more (especially if the founders retire) and you'll be at their mercy.
This is going to sound insane, but I'm hoping that Microsoft builds up a distributed 100K server cluster (or equivalent) to compete against them. Someone needs to keep Google honest
My gmail account works perfectly fine, in fact Google is letting current email users pick two "friends" to join. After seeing this post and the interest, I thought that maybe I should sell my two accounts on eBay... I loaded up eBay and did a search for gMail and to my amazement, dozens of people are already selling them and getting up to $50 for each!
Wow... $100 USD or making two friends happy? Tough choice... btw popular ones like thunder@gmail are gone already but lightning@gmail.com is still available... hmmm $$$ or friends? grrr....
Wow what a time saver! Yeah, clicking on my browser (set at the Google home page of course) is just way too much trouble.
Thats what Gmail is for. Its for all those people who DONT have a computer themselves and who only use terminals in airports and internet cafes all over the world. They are legion, and previously, had to check their mail regularly or see their unique accounts deactivated. Even if they did check their mail regularly, The amount of space they were given was so small as to be almost useless.
With Gmail, all of this changes. And there is no barrier to switching, save changing your email address and informaing everyone, this price is very affordable; there are not thousands of legacy emails and family photo attachments that cannot be transfered over to the Gmail - the artificailly low storage limits on the other free systems have seen to that. Once they, the Hotmail legions understand what Gmail is, all the other free services will see users desert them like rats fleeing a sin...well, very fast.
The only way that the other services can possibly hope to stem this flow is to immediately duplicate the storage and permanency of account features of Gmail. Only then will the price of leaving become too great.
And that is not going to happen.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
This will be extremely interesting to see how it plays out with Google selling this...will it be part of Ad Words or will it be something separate to sell? I imagine that search will be far more effective than e-mail for targeted mails when it comes to relevant ads. Think about the miscellaneous topics that our covered in newsgroup digests...in one digest there might be politics, movie reviews, and food discussed. Which of these 3 topics gets served as an ad? Very curious...
You'll apparently never get pop/imap on a free service. Isn't email important enough to pay for? Anybody recommend a good IMAP/sub-domaining webmail service? If google had a pay option, I'd jump on that just knowing their stability. Oh, netaddress sucks by the way.
-I am an elective eunuch.
what's so great about email anyways? gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail.. same shit.
did you forget to take your meds?
Guess what: email is NOT a secure medium. Any relay server can save copies of your email if it feels like it. Anyone can read it. If you send sensitive information over e-mail without using encryption, you are an idiot. And anyone who has a guessable password on their account deserves whatever they get.
Also, I wouldn't put that much trust into Hushmail. It's like putting a massive lock on a canvas tent. Email is simply not secure.
I am so jealous of you I want to die. That's all.
"[keyboard shortcuts] even worked well with the crappy Epiphany browser in Gnome."
Crappy? I've used Epiphany and I never considered it crappy. Have I just not used it enough to discover this apparent crappiness?
Sorry if this seems off topic, but seriously, it's just a lightweight Mozilla, isn't it? The same Mozilla that the "beloved" Galeon is based on...?
"So, I'M SCREWED and so is anyone else runnign OS9."
Yes, but how well does Gmail work ?
OK, I know 99% of the world finds it too cumbersone to use. But I hope they provide some mechanism to upload a public key and somehow let you have a private key locally to encrypt email. One of the big minuses in getting wide acceptance of encrypted email has been lack of a good, trustworthy central key repository.
Google will have an almost immediate user base of millions. They can raise awareness of secure email and promote its use easily. Google shouldn't overlook this. People TRUST Google! If Gmail enables reasonably easy-to-use encryption, the widespread use of really private email might finally become a reality.
One more thing: Do they plan to support SSL connections? Even if you don't need or want the security of end-to-end communication, being able to send and receive email from the Gmail servers without worrying about whether or not your ISP or other network sniffer is looking at your mail. Hey, I may be paranoid (actually there's no such thing as paranoia) but there's a reason why snail-mail envelopes have that "security" pattern printed inside them, you know? I've yet to see anyone who sends their correspondence in transparent envelopes.
imagine how spam is going to be dealt with. Some spam that gets through the filter has some sort of marketing. Add GMail's search related ads to the side that's chosen by analyzing your email, then you'd have double the ads for penis enlargement and debt consolidation.
.smell my feet.
its fastmail.fm
http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&categ ory=4291&item=3675169168&rd=1
Note: That was not my auction... but I wish it were! Somebody sold a gmail invite for $130USD a little while ago, but the market's become quickly saturated and they're going for a lot less now. It makes sense though - the only people buying these are buying good and unique aliases before they're all taken. I myself sold an invitation a while ago (to a lawyer, no less), although for a lot less than what that invitation went for.
----- Wtcher Dragon, UDIC
For those who are bad spellers, have no fear. After you type your message, you can click the Check Spelling link at the bottom of your message to have your spelling checked. Potentially misspelled words will appear as red text. Bad spellers are going to love this feature!
Why not just look in the text area for the red words, and when you see them, fix them? Call me crazy but that just seems easier to me.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
You goddamned piece of American hippy trash.
Agreed. For my part, not only do I RELY on folders AND labels (using Evolution) AND color highlighting in combination, but I have relatively deep nested hierarchies of folders. Yes, I DO receive that much e-mail, most of it automatically sorted.
It's good to see that GMail will store sent mail, I assume using a label. One of Hotmail's biggest problems, IMHO, is the lack of that functionality.
I'm kind of concerned about the lack of an address book feature. Does anyone care to elaborate on the article's mention of the "primitive" contact management system in the beta?
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
JimLynch writes "Gmail, Gmail, Gmail--how do we love thee? Let us count the ways! We finally had a chance to try Google's new e-mail service and we're happy to say that, for the most part, we love it! In this article, we'll give you an overview of what you can expect from Gmail, as well as what we liked and didn't like about it. We'll also tell you what we think needs to be added to make it even better."
Such blatent pandering to IPO hype is disgusting. Grow up and move out of your mother's basement. You have a lot to learn in life.
So another dotcom decides to provide a free email service with
:)
* 1 GB of storage - I've been able to manage my yahoo account with 6 MB, pretty well over the last 5 years. How many personal mails do you think are so important that you'd end up with GBs of them?! (i mean, 'so we're meeting at the fountain at 6', 'check this cool fwd', 'try this puzzle', 'PTA meeting at 4'..??). Corporate email - well the Co. won't recommened using a webmail for Corporate email, and till then the Co's Exchange server and my mail client on my 80GB HDD are fine! Mobility? Do I (anyone) really need all my previous emails in that other city I'm visiting?? A few if I need, I can forward/burn/share on the network.
* Scanning my mails for ads - huh. How many people use webmail for confidential/critical information (apart from Al Qaedians..)? How else were SPAM filters supposed to work all this time, if not scan for content? Unless they start meeting me at the local mall after scanning my mail with the appointment details, I'm ok with dumb targetted ads. Yahoo does use my profile for showing ads from Indian singles and shopping sites.
* More efficient Search - I rarely need to go into the labyrinths of ancient personal mails, so a better search is no big deal.
and of course, I am going to be in the race for getting my_first_name@gmail.com..(JoshuaDFranklin -can u put me as well on your referral list 0:-D) btw my last name is so obscure, there' no one else in the world (apart from my immediate family) with the same surname..so i pretty much get firstnamesurname@anywhere.com!
aLL tHe GreAt peOpLE aRe DEaD. i'M nOt feeLiNg tOO GoOD eiThEr..
Well, except for the fact that Mozilla runs on OS9, you're right. Not the newest version, but some of the older versions. Too lazy to look it up for you, but I'm sure you are capable. (My ex is running Mozilla under OS 8.6)
-Daniel
Ownyourphone.com. Custom ringtones, cheap and easy
I have a gmail account. I was excited at first, but at this point it is unusable.
You can only set up 20 filters, and there is no "and" "or" ability.
The spam filters only catch about half of my spam. Choosing "Report as spam" doesn't remove any other instances of the same spam which are sitting in my inbox. I get a lot of duplicate spam, so it would have been nice if there was some intelligence here.
You can't search on custom headers. I run my mail through spam filters before it ever gets to Gmail. These put specialy X-Spam headers in the email messages. You can't search on anything but "From", "To", "Subject", "Has the words" and "Doesn't have the words" which refer only to the body. This is just dumb since the data is obviously there and available to search on.
The address book is basicaly a place holder, it has no features you'd want beyond the most simple list.
You can't customize the Inbox view much at all. For example I like to display the "To" address in the Inbox view since I get a lot of mail addressed to different domains, and different email addresses. I need to be able to at least sort on these. I can search on them, but the searches can't be saved like the "Search Folders" in Outlook 2003. This is how a search based email service should work if you've ever seen them, they're great and completely blow away gmail's search feature.
I wanted to love Gmail, but it's not half the email client that Horde or Squirrelmail are on the web side, and comparing it to client side email programs is not even fair, it offers nothing other than offsite storage and access. If you don't need remote access there is no reason to switch to Gmail at all. I hope they get busy and start pumping up the feature set, I think they have a good beginning but it's no where near ready to compete with mature email solutions.
The parent is NOT off-topic. It's about Google's ads, for godsakes.
But it's also a cross between a comment on Google and a comment on the next story about the 2ch web site in Japan.
And it's somewhat on topic because in a way e-mail is like a blog.
So, let me spit it out.
What I'd love to see is an addition to Google News that allowed you to comment on news stories.
As the 2ch story points out, being able to comment on stories is such a huge idea that has yet to really catch on in the mainstream press.
Just look at what happens on Slashdot. People are dying to debate the non-tech news stories that they're excited about so they post off-topic on Slashdot because it's their only outlet.
Mainstream news sites don't want to deal with the liability of accepting comments, but how about just having a comment system available to people who entered the article through Google News.
The collected and threaded comments could be thought of us a part of Gmail. After all, comments systems are really just take-offs of usenet and e-mail and usenet have always been closely related.
This could lead to some hot debates becuase Google News already has a huge readership so there would be a ready made body of posters and the topics are right there. It just needs to be combined and let the debates bgin.
The one thing is that you'd want to be able to assure a certain degree of anonymity, but something like the Slashdot system should be good enough. It may not be genuine anonymity, but close enough to allow people to speak their minds.
One wonders why you thought of "Shemale" first.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Gmail doesn't work on Windows 3.1 either, I bet. Sorry, but OS 9 really is obsolete and unsupported even by its parent company.
From Gmail's mission statement...
Gmail uses Google search technology to find messages so users don't have to create folders and file their individual emails. Many of Gmail's other features also incorporate search technology to improve their effectiveness. Used this way, search enhances the efficiency of email, so we believe it's a natural area for Google to offer a service.
So rather than encourage users to organize their email, they're telling us to just throw it all in one big pile and trust their search technology to find what we want later. Will Google tell us next to stop using burdensome hierachical filesystems with, gasp, folders ot organize our documents?
A disappointing thing in Gmail is when it comes to replying to messages. :(
It places the cursor at the first line, to mimic the Outlook brain dead behavior, thus encouraging top posting
Also, Gmail doesn't support PGP signatures.
{{.sig}}
I don't know if anybody else has the same problem, but incoming mail takes forever to get into my Gmail inbox. It's on the order of 5-10 minutes, as compared to Hotmail and Yahoo, which are almost instantaneous. If I want something from somebody right away, I've already learned not to give them my Gmail address.
From "About GMail":
"Gmail is a free, search-based webmail service that includes 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of storage."
Has somebody been afflicted with "WesternDigitalitus"? Maybe they oughta google the word "gigabyte"...
Does anyone care about encryption anymore? Is there any web mail service that offers PGPish public/private key encryption? Maybe one that's not free?
BTW, has anyone tried FastMail? They don't have encryption, but they're still pretty cool.
I haven't read anything very interesting on any of the IT review sites lately. This ExtremeTech nonsense is just a continuation of that trend. I started to skim the article, saw the part that said they had implemented keyboard shortcuts for the gmail interface. Thats way cool! Now how did they do it? Theres no mention of what type of coding gMail is built with, is it just fancy CSS? is it Javascript? Is the mail client actually a Java app?! WTH is the MEAT?! I want to know how it runs! The comparison chart at the end is totally lame, nothing important or non-obvious was compared there. Also I was unimpressed with the blatant dissing of whoever the government official was who talked about gMail bringing billboards to your desktop. Obviously the advertising area in gMail is not a big deal, but you can say that, and leave it alone. This bashing of the politician did NOT enhance the article at all.
There is something that stops me from making gmail my main email account. What if someone stole your password?
It can happen and then the person will have access to all your emails from years ago (assuming it happens late enough). When you keep your emails on your PC such things cannot happen.
One idea is to ask for a secondary password when the user wants to access the archive. You don't enter that secondary password everyday and everywhere. So it's not that easy to snoop someone's secondary password. Roozbeh/
Sorry but I find this review rather giddy and one-sided.
---- scrm
maybe you should stop signing up for online email beta tests and go get a job. ho ho ho
It seems to me that this is going to be the most popular thing ever once people realize they can share their password/username and download remotely and without detection one gig worth of music/movie/game files. You could even register several accounts couldn't you? Lets hope they have a lot of upload bandwidth for the ensuing storm.
By the way, has anybody registered the username igotzmp3?
Dear Beta Tester,
We are glad to bring you some new features to enhance your beta testing experience here at Gmail. Some of these features include:
Checking your e-mail via telephone, anywhere in the world.
A simple, easy to use spam manager where you can filter almost any kind of unwanted e-mail.
Ability to create unlimited invite codes for all of your friends, so that they may too experience the wide range of diversity of Gmail.
We are proud to announce that all of these features are now available to current beta testers. Unfortunately, we will not be offering these services to members that receive an invitation from this special service. You can activate these features anytime by visiting http://activate.gmail.com/
We encourage you to send your feedback, suggestions and questions to us. But mostly, we hope you'll enjoy experimenting with Google's approach to email.
Speedy Delivery,
The Gmail Team
The only problem is that when i clicked the url redirected to:
http://paip.netfirms.com/gmail/
I'll ask my shrink :)
What sense does it make to have 1 GB storage and only can have attachments of 10 MB? There are freemail accounts with 20 MB attachment size out there and I have for 2,99 a month 50 MB per attachment. What is 10 MB today? Even less because of its base 64 encoding.
I, for one, welcome our new humourless overlord!!
It was you, wasnt it?
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
GOOD 2 KNOW!!
I refuse to read a review on a page, where only 10% of the content is the review and the rest is ads or links elsewhere.
Bottom posting is just as brain-dead. It really depends on the message length and how many replies are being included. Most of the emails I send and receive are reasonably long - I want the post on top and the quoted text of what I'm replying to is included for reference only. I only "bottom post" if I'm responding to a very short message which is relatively rare for me.
There is an Spanish site (Intper) that promises unlimited email storage and offers other services such as weblog, photolog, creating surveys, chat, ...
I don't know about anyone else, but that got an out-loud laugh from me.
This is from the source itself. Google Mail will soon have a better address book that will allow you to import / export addresses. Also there is gonna be a html interface to the email service. This is the email I got from them -- Hello, Thank you for your message about importing contacts. You might be interested to hear that we are announcing an upcoming feature for importing/exporting contacts, as well as the other following features: - Automatic forwarding of your email to another account - Plain HTML version of Gmail We hope you enjoy Google's approach to email. Sincerely, The Gmail Team
Did you ever try to only quote relevant snippets instead of blindly copying everything?
{{.sig}}
I went to read the review and this format blows!!
It has become very popular to hide the real info that would have fit nicely on a single page in 3 or 5 pages of littered ad space. The artical in question does not even get 25% of the page. I know that they are just trying to get you to see more adds, but this is ridiculous.
I just read an artical on XMLSockets that was done the same way. I cut and pasted the real artical into a seperate new webpage and printed it out so that I could actually read what the author had intended to be read.
Boycott these places!!
I am able to send a subscribe message, but when I tried to reply to the confirmation email it's just gone. Or at least never heard since...
-- br
just change the file extension from .exe to .jpg or something and in the email tell your friend what it should be.
If you have a referral to spare, could you please refer "google@NOSPAM.pizzaman.dyndns.org"? I would certainly be most greatful. :)
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
I was going to rant on about how much better Zoe is, but the review really makes it sound like the Google folks have gotten a few things right. Zoe may have to change it's byline of "Googling your email".
Nonetheless, I'd really like to suggest that folks who like GMail give Zoe a try and if you don't think Zoe is feature complete, then help out... it's an open source Java program, so you have the control and it's cross platform.
One caveat is that Zoe is a mail archiver, not a client, so it's best used in conjunction with a desktop client for reading and composing messages. It's not quite in the same niche as GMail, but it's actually more flexible because you get the choice of how to use it and it still stores messages so you don't have to mess with mail folders and you will be able to find any message from any browser.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Just wait a little bit and it will be supported. I just got the following e-mail from Gmail when sending in a feature request:
You might be interested to hear that we are announcing these upcoming features:
- Automatic forwarding of your email to another account
- Plain HTML version of Gmail
- Import/export Contacts
So it looks good for support on browsers like Opera or older browsers like on older versions of the Mac OS. Remember, this service is still in Beta.
Beef! Beef! Beef!
The article's writer seems to sidestep the privacy issues. Last I heard, Google was going to scan e-mails and display ads related to e-mail content. He does say something about the ads themselves being non-obtrusive, but nothing about privacy issues and ads.
I am an Aussie, and I don't get what is so interesting about 867-5309...
Anyone want to let me in on the secret?
Did you ever try to only quote relevant snippets instead of blindly copying everything?
Sure. For instance when answering a list of questions or addressing a series of points in which case I'll usually have a short intro dealing with generalities and then quote -> response -> next quote -> next response, etc.
Ill' also strip out everything but the immediately preceding message in the thread. There is usually no reason to continue sending along the entire history of the conversation.
If i'm using email as a glorified chat program with very short questions & answers the quoted original goes at the top with my reply at the bottom. But in that case it is still easy enough with the default "top posting" to hit the down arrow a couple of times to put my insertion point at the bottom.
But usually I write so that the quoted text is not necessary to understand what I wrote. The original I'm responding to is attached at the bottom (if at all) merely as a reference. Frankly it's usually only included because that is what the software does by default. It's not necessary, I don't anticipate that the recipient will even read it. Presumable they already know what it says. BUT it is occasionally useful as a reference so it does no harm and potentially some good to include it by default - Just not at the top where it only gets in the way without serving any immediate purpose.
It is REALLY irritating to have to scroll through my own email to get to the response. I already KNOW what I wrote, I'm now interested in what YOU wrote in response. If I come back a month later having the quote of the original will be useful. In that case, which is usually the only case I'm concerned about, having only the bit that my corespondent thought relevant is less useful than having my entire message unedited.
If you go read the gmail test drive at the link mentioned up here, then you get to a page full of adds powered by, guess who?, google. I could not see a disclaimer, but take the review with a grain of salt. My disclaimer: I'm a gmail user, and was not able to get the username I wanted (it seems that 'first name'@gmail.com is not allowed, based on some pretty good list they have). And I enjoy gmail, even though: there are very few ads for now; and there is no sorting feature (alphabetical, chronological, whatever): it is sorted by conversation, and my mind does not work this way all the time. Meredith Brody
It would be nice to see if GMail comes with
a) IMAP support b) Powerful Search client (Best to have plugin to Thunderbird) on Native Operating Systems
I hate the idea of going through webbased email for checking emails.
bin
look siG is kool
Just pointing out the obvious. He hates posts modded as funny, writes a post stating the fact, gets post rated funny, wonders what why he can't see his own post. Now that Is funny.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
What I find most amusing about Slashdot posts moderated Funny is that the ... humor ... almost perfectly models the kind of banal, asnine mumblings that would go on if I were spending an entire day sitting in a server room with a couple of my geek friends. It's uncanny.
Breakfast served all day!
A good point.
But this is the fault of the usefullness of the service, any service offering this amount of space (ie, the one I currently pay money for) is prone to the same issue.
Are you dreaming the impossible dream that top-posting will die?
Didn't see if this has already been posted, but I imagine that as the user base grows that the spam identification would become more effective?? Similarities etc. in spam received by one third of accounts should allow more reliable identification