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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
...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.
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.
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 actually works.
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!!