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Gmail Adds Features
tommertron writes "Gmail rolled out a host of new features
today. Big improvement in the contacts list, with the ability to search it and
organize messages according to contact. Also, you can now forward all incoming
gmail to any email account, but, according to Google, this feature is only 'free
for now.' Does this mean gmail will start charging for some features? Meanwhile, Internet News is reporting
that on Monday, some gmail accounts contained an Atom link for reading your email
summaries in a news reader. Also meanwhile, my decrepit Hotmail account still hasn't given me that promised
250 megabytes ..."
Of course they are going to charge you to forward your email. Otherwise you could use their great spam filter and bandwidth without having to see their adds. And what do you expect from a Free email service. At least you can have some confidence that they won't sell your email address.
Queue bitching about targeted advertising.....
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Opera is my browser of choice (I've found it to be more stable than Firefox, if not as full featured) and so far it hasn't been compatible with G-Mail. Does this upgrade improve support for my favorite browser?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I will always like pop 3. They just dont fill up, and even if you can only use them on 1 computer, I have a laptop, so i can just take it with me.
l33t.
We are all inundated with e-mail nowadays. Semantic parsing and bayesian filtering are commonplace, but no conventional e-mail client allows automatic grouping by subject in quite the manner of GMail. I enjoy the ability to search messages rather than arbitrarily tossing them into folders to be forgotten. Indeed, e-mail has called out for intelligent grouping for some time now.
It opens up some fantastic marketing opportunities as well. Already they exploit this with the excellent GoogleAds along the side of the screen that have relevance to the e-mail one is perusing; however, with the gradual acceptance of commercial e-mail by people and by legislation I believe there is a great deal of future potential in selling/buying general profiles of e-mail accounts using this same data. As search engines and e-mail combine, the quality of the search interface becomes a mute point; the most interesting information is pushed to the user based on relevance to their online lives.
The only real concern is privacy, but I'll bet it's possible to sell really general-type information without violating any policies -- thus using advertising to continue to deliver the kinds of features users expect without costing them a dime. If only they could do something like this with online backup/recovery as well.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
No new features?!?! How bout these:
1. Text-based ads instead of graphics or flash.
2. No taglines. Very nice if you want to send out professional emails.
3. Excellent spam filter.
4. FAST CSS (might be wrong about that) interface.
5. Google search built right into your email inbox, archive, etc.
I can go on if need be. You're nuts.
With RSS feeds becoming more and more popular across a whole raft of different applications (including tasty new integration with Firefox), surely combining the two formats (Atom and RSS) would be beneficial, lest we end up with another VHS/Beta or DVD+/-RW/RAM situation..
Why not just have the readers support both? Firefox supports both RSS and Atom feeds. Although there are technically 3 different RSS formats because of the non-backwards compatible changes they keep making.
I hope they'll stick with RSS version 2.0 for a while.
No one should advocate HTML mail - this is just crap, and the best way to inject all sorts of junk into e-mail. If a message isn't getting to you clearly in plain text e-mail, then the sender really needs to take a writing class. I think this .sig sums it up: (credit: Matthew Keller)
"No one ever says, 'I can't read that ASCII E-mail you sent me.'"
Btw, I know this from past experience when I was running a newsletter for some six hundred or so members of our ski-club. We would send the full newsletter out as a pdf attachment. However before meetings we would send out a reminder without attachments. A lot of people, and for good reason, object to Outlook-style rich-text. HTML is a reasonable alternative and gives the ability to organise the information.
If HTML is allowed, then either you have no support for automatic following of external links (like IMG) or the ability to disable it based on contact.
See my journal, I write things there
I would say that with the amount of smart cookies working for Google, someone managed to write a script that takes a nicely commented and well written javascript file and removes whitespace, comments, shortens variable names and spits out the result. This means they can have a smaller download for end users and a maintainable source file for developers.
It wouldn't take too long for someone who really wanted it to "un-obfuscate" the source. At least the formatting part you could do via a script and then rename variables when you work out what they're for.
That's actually why Atom was first proposed. After Netscape lost control of the standard, RSS spintered into seven incompatible versions! Atom is an attempt to merge and stabilize the best of "Really Simple Syndication", "RDF Site Summary", and everything in between. The reason Google uses Atom, is because Blogger is a major sponser. Personally, I think Atom has an impressive design (although some is still a little clunky). Note that the final draft has yet to be published, as Atom isn't even 1.0 yet!
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
Full HTML may be a bit much, but what about allowing parsing of the few XHTML core modules, like the text, hypertext, and list modules? This is basically just HTML without images, styles (except for the email reader's style sheet), or other multimedia. This would make it infinitely easier to quote other emails and to link to sites on the internet.
At the same time, robot searchability would be improved while the "crap" you dislike can't be transmitted easily. I gather that you don't object to the semantic data exchanged via HTML email, just the (usually poorly done) multimedia.
Finally, as XML uses UTF by default, languages that contain letters not found in the English alphabet can be exchanged. ASCII is arguably an anachronism in an age of global text transmission.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
It's nice to see Gmail add features, but it still lacks an obvious one: the ability to properly quote emails when replying to them.
The raw copy of everything with "--original message follows--" is really lousy. How can you quote pats of the message that way? How do you insert answers to different questions of the original mail?
I would love to see Gmail do better than this Outlook brain damage.
{{.sig}}