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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."
From Dive Into Mark.
Also, glad Slashdot FINALLY got a Google section/logo.
GMail doesn't get the framerates I've come to expect from Yahoo!Mail.
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
Does that sound to anyone else like something you would see on a pimp's business card? You know, pimpboy69@GMAIL.com or something (assuming they had business cards, or used email - I'm not exactly a gold mine of info on the pimping business - it just sounds sort of trashy).
Am I the only one who thought e-mail for homies and not google mail upon first hearing the name "gmail"?
Do you really need more 60 fps for mail? My computer does 72 fps on Gmail, and compared to my old computer that did 60, I really can't tell any difference.
...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.
I'm glad they covered all the important features and what needs to be added or improved, but I wish they'd spent some time going over the privacy issues and what they think about Google reading our e-mails.
Ah well -- still a decent review overall. Kudos to Mr. Lynch.
How "extreme" can webmail be?
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Reviews and comments.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Searches and webmail are a great start, but my sources tell me that Google is currently in the development stages of a system that will do my taxes , make breakfast, and find me a girlfriend (and God knows, I hope it works).
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.
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.
...of all the e-mail accounts I have.
Maybe google can finally find them.
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
Why is everyone missing the biggest point here? Gmail is not about mail, it is about One GigaByte of shared storage! That's how many 6MP pictures? Or how many mp3's? How many accounts will simply be created to just share a gigabyte of stuff?
Yup, I know there are privacy issues, but have you ever heard of encryption?
And finally, am I finisheg asking questions?
Gmail sounds pretty neutral. But I'm just waiting for @chainmail.com to start, so I can email my D&D buddies...
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.
GMail will have targeted ads. I haven't seen a banner ad (spam aside) since I signed up for FastMail years ago.
Wah!
Having 1 gig of space is a lot to fill up for us regalar joes. As hard as that would be for me to fill up, I have heard that Google employees have 1 terrabyte of space. Imagine all the email that would add up to!
There's never enough when you have too little
It could easily be a pirates den. If a CD in MP3s is roughly 100MB, users go into some IRC channel, request with an gmail addy and then it magically shows up in their inbox to download and delete. All at google's disk space and bandwidth.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
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.
and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
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)
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
PGP support would be cool.
Maybe some client-side Java to read in your keys from your drive / USB key to decrypt mail?
http://www.pimpemail.com/
c ks.com
:-)
You can get free e-mail addresses like
@slappinbitches.com
@pimpdaddy.com
@turnintri
Just tryin to keep it real dawg!
bash: rtfm: command not found
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?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Was it just me or was that article fud (pro-google propaganda without really covering the issues). My greatest concern, and I'm sure its one I share with at least one other person, is that I think I may feel quite uncomfortable about targetted advertising. I don't want to get a new girlfriend (lucky I'm reading slashdot :-) and find ads aimed at buying her gifts, nor do I want to write about my ichy balls and have ichy ball remedies on the sidebar. The article did not cover this at all. It will depend on google's implementation, so far we have some reason to trust them but this is a dicey new area.
/.'s readbase as 'the people's company'. Of course, after it floats, it will be the shareholders company. And it will (IANAL) become illegal for them to act not in the interests of those shareholders. Which could mean illegal for them to do some of the 'good' things they have been doing - because they will be spending other people's money/investment.
And the article did not even mention google's IPO. Google is discussed in this article and by some of
Finally... how is google going to stop this service being used for W@r3z? I forsee a situation where an unscrupulous individual logs in, uploads a new game or movie, then writes a perl script that can send it to whoever they want. Google can shut down the account but the game/movie could easily have been sent to hundreds or thousands of people at considerable bandwidth cost. Surely they have thought of this I wonder how they will stop it? Will they tolerate this sort of thing on the small scale - I mean they will have to won't they?
--
On Slashdot I'm a lawyer.
Gmail actually works.
Gmail is completely useless to me, and many other users who are willing to pay a bit per year to not have to sacrifice our privacy.
Of all the things I could spend a few dollars per month on, there isn't much that I would consider more practical than centralized imap access to my email at my own domain.
Services such as fastmail.fm (I won't link it) already provide for $50 per year:
- ssl pop3 and proxy
- ssl imap and proxy
- ssl smtp and proxy
- webmail
- full server-side custom sieve rules
- spam filtering
- virus filtering
- checking free yahoo and hotmail boxes
- aliases
- hosting mail for your own domain
- payment via payapl
All with 150 MB of storage base, file storage and transfer, and 750MB bandwidth per month base.
I'm sorry Google, but you're going to have to do a lot better than this if you want my permission to keep tabs on my life.
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 $$$. They will start off with innocent banners in your e-mail, but as the company matures they will begin to look at their bottom line more and more (especially if the founders retire) and you'll be at their mercy.
This is going to sound insane, but I'm hoping that Microsoft builds up a distributed 100K server cluster (or equivalent) to compete against them. Someone needs to keep Google honest
My gmail account works perfectly fine, in fact Google is letting current email users pick two "friends" to join. After seeing this post and the interest, I thought that maybe I should sell my two accounts on eBay... I loaded up eBay and did a search for gMail and to my amazement, dozens of people are already selling them and getting up to $50 for each!
Wow... $100 USD or making two friends happy? Tough choice... btw popular ones like thunder@gmail are gone already but lightning@gmail.com is still available... hmmm $$$ or friends? grrr....
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.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
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.
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.
I don't know if anybody else has the same problem, but incoming mail takes forever to get into my Gmail inbox. It's on the order of 5-10 minutes, as compared to Hotmail and Yahoo, which are almost instantaneous. If I want something from somebody right away, I've already learned not to give them my Gmail address.
From "About GMail":
"Gmail is a free, search-based webmail service that includes 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of storage."
Has somebody been afflicted with "WesternDigitalitus"? Maybe they oughta google the word "gigabyte"...
I, for one, welcome our new humourless overlord!!
I don't know about anyone else, but that got an out-loud laugh from me.
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
I am able to send a subscribe message, but when I tried to reply to the confirmation email it's just gone. Or at least never heard since...
-- br