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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
Am I the only one who thought e-mail for homies and not google mail upon first hearing the name "gmail"?
...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.
Reviews and comments.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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
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).
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.
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.
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?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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!
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.
It's true you can do this with most other webmail accounts, but Google is rasing the bar not just on the total size of your mailbox, but of individual attachments as well. I would suggest encrypting any ground shattering corporate secrets, though.
Google has also shown a pattern of providing highly usable services without resorting to gaudy "revenue generation" tactics. I like the fact that they actually seem to CARE about the user experience. This might change after they go public, but at least for now I'm looking forward to using my new gmail account.
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
http://www.pimpemail.com/
c ks.com
:-)
You can get free e-mail addresses like
@slappinbitches.com
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@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
Gmail actually works.
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
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.
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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, for one, welcome our new humourless overlord!!