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."

Comments

Another review

[Anonymous Coward]

From Dive Into Mark.

Also, glad Slashdot FINALLY got a Google section/logo.

From Google:

[physicsphairy]

Reviews and comments.

Re:Reading through this

[drivelikejehu]

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.

Cannot do partial word searches

[Therlin]

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.

Cool.

[MrEd]

If you want an email account that's simple, bandwidth-light, fast, ad-free, does https, has 50+ domains to choose from plus more fantastique features, check out FastMail. I swear I am not astroturfing, just a satisfied evangelizing customer.

GMail will have targeted ads. I haven't seen a banner ad (spam aside) since I signed up for FastMail years ago.

Browsers

[FlipmodePlaya]

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.

Not ready for prime time

[jbohumil]

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.