Slashdot Mirror
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."
From Dive Into Mark.
Also, glad Slashdot FINALLY got a Google section/logo.
Reviews and comments.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Did you even read the review? The "conversations" part of gmail is worth it enough to switch. Plus, with it's weird stylesheets thing it is a HELL of a lot faster than any other webmail system I've used (viewing source just shows a bunch of weird javascript, no html.) They really did a great job designing the UI - I have a feeling you'd be singing a different tune if you actually used 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.
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
Just as an aside to those who don't have a Gmail account, your email address has to be at least 6 characters long. That totally screwed me out of getting abe@gmail.com, which is all I wanted out of life. Just an easy frickin' email address to remember.
-my other sig is your mom
GMail will have targeted ads. I haven't seen a banner ad (spam aside) since I signed up for FastMail years ago.
Wah!
It's not as if thousands of Google employees sit there reading your mail. It's just scanned automatically for keywords that match up with their ad database. It's exactly the same thing they do to your search results. Put away your tinfoil hat and calm down.
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.
>Hell no! I expect Google to be able to clean up spam very, very well, and quickly.
It should get better as their training set grows, but it's letting a high percentage of spam through on my account. Today it delivered a second copy of some spam I'd reported the first time it arrived. Not soup yet.
> literally out to lunch on this
Karma be damned! Unless they've been eating a sandwitch for the past few years, they're not literally out to lunch! The word "literally" means that they have actually been doing what you said. It is not a synonymn for "very".
My most egregious example, from last years (American) football playoffs: "The quarterback is literally tearing the defence to shreds." No! If he were doing that, there'd be blood everywhere! He's figuratively doing that --- the exact opposite of literally.
Well, my work cleaning up the grammar of the Internet is complete. Mission accomplished. *Shakes dust off hands and walks into the sunset.*
With the gigabyte of space, it means that people like me now have a viable email backup or even a primary email account that is useful in the business world. When traveling, I don't have to carry my laptop with me if I just want to check on email. It also means that when I'm at a client site behind a firewall, I can still communicate effectively. With Yahoo or Hotmail I can use it sometimes for business but am hampered by their limitations on space.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
Put your email into a text editor, select all, copy, select "Encrypt clipboard" from the system tray, paste into Gmail. Because if you let Gmail itself do the PGP, then they have a copy of the plaintext while they're displaying it, and there is effectively no point in doing the copy.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I'm depressed to see that gmail appears to use top-posting aka "jeopardy quoting" for replies.
What are you talking about? The idea behind placing the cursor at the top of the email is so that you can go down and reply to each point in turn, snipping where appropriate. Placing the cursor at the bottom only serves the annoying people who quote huge emails with a "me too" tacked onto the end.
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