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

Re:We just want it...

[Planesdragon]

All we care about is getting the username we want; the notion of *not* getting an account -- regardless of faults -- isn't even fathomable...

You seem to think that we're ALL mindless fanboys.

I for one won't be getting a GMAIL account. Unless the featureset somehow is worth the upset, which is probably won't be, I'm not going to bother.

Re:why gmail?

[penguinoid]

there are a million of [email accounts] and I'm sure they'll be just as spammy as hotmail and anyone else

Hell no! I expect Google to be able to clean up spam very, very well, and quickly.

Or do you think that they are bad at finding things?

Secure email

[penguinoid]

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?

Beware

[dude127]

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 :)

Global Vagabonds and Gypsies

[Beautyon]

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.