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 ..."

Comments

Duh!

[(54)T-Dub]

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.....

Re:Duh!

[gmuslera]

Forwarding all your mail still needs you to have 1gb to store it in somewhere else. You will not have its search engine, its conversation mode, and even its labels (thing you can get thru imap, afaik). Gmail package is not just spam filter, 1gb capacity and so on, is all the features combined. Even the targetted ads is potentially a feature.

Using gmail just because its spam filter is like buying a Ferrari just because it looks nice. Is the whole engine that worths.

Does it work properly/completely with Opera yet?

[Propagandhi]

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?

I've used GMail for a while now...

[Sheetrock]

While its features are more iterative than revolutionary, I believe GMail is the logical next step in how we all do e-mail.

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.

Re:Too much fuss over gmail

[StevenHenderson]

so what does GMail have to offer others don't?

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.