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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."
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
...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'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.
You mean like any application that touches your mail? Like that nice spam filter?
It isn't as though a person is looking through it. Its just a machine looking through for keywords and puttings ads on the side. It isn't even collecting stats.
Douglas P. Price
Your emails are evaluated by a computer ALREADY as part of almost every single virus and spam filtering process on the market. Most of these processes include word by word scanning to develop effective spam filters.
Folks have raised a number of interesting privacy issues. However, I think the EFF has done a MUCH better job then many of the other groups who are literally out to lunch on this.
If you don't trust google with your email, you can always trust it to hotmail, who will do their level best to lock you into their service, cancel your account, including advertising tags in your messages etc etc.
Not so much for the space as the ability to send and receive large attachments.
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.
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.
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)
Because a large group of people decided that the /. moderation system is broken in that it does not reward funny posts. So they mod them interesting instead.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
The privacy concerns start coming in if Google stores that information, correlates it with other information about you, and builds a database accessible by humans. But there is no indication that they do this, there is reason to believe that they wouldn't, and they are NO MORE LIKELY to do this than Hotmail or Yahoo. If you are really a privacy nut, you shouldn't be letting companies with unknown motives store and process all of your personal correspondence in the first place! Privacy concerns are inherent to all webmail. GMail is no worse than any other service, and I trust Google more than Microsoft or Yahoo.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
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
They just want to look cool so they can try cash in on the Google IPO.
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.