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ExtremeTech Reviews Google's Gmail Beta

Posted by timothy on from the a-place-for-your-stuff dept.

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."

6 of 403 comments (clear)

  1. We just want it... by danielrm26 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:We just want it... by cmacb · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Forget getting a nice short ID, minimum ID is 6 characters, which ruled out most of my standard picks.

      Also spotted an error of sort in the article:

      "Gmail also lacks a built-in virus scanner. This is a must-have feature that should be added as soon as possible. Such a filter already exists on MSN Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Given the large number of viruses out there, Gmail should provide some protection against them when users receive attachments. A virus scanner might not catch everything but it will catch quite a lot and every little bit of protection helps."

      It could be that this is something that has changed between the time of the review and now (I just got my ID yesterday), but the actually prohibit sending/receiving of executables AT ALL either as an EXE or in any of the popular compression formats.

      I suppose you could eventually figure out a way around this. I also figure that they don't want the liability of keeping up with the latest virus definitions. I don't blame them. I don't run Windows anyway.

  2. Reading through this by leviramsey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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.

  3. Re:The review is a bit lacking... by augustz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. mailing lists by JoshuaDFranklin · · Score: 5, Insightful
    A friend referred me for an account and I love it. He didn't even mention how useful it is with mailing lists. Tired of your email box being filled with 25 messages with the same subject? Gmail puts them all together like

    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.

  5. Mothers Day by augustz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.