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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?
Forgot to mention that they updated the gmail notifier. New icon, and a little better. Updated automatically though, without my permission...
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I agree with Dave Winer, the author of the RSS format. 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... Rather than have the two battle it out to the death, why not get the best of both worlds?
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So I noticed the big red new features thing yesterday, clicked on it and saw a message saying they were adding new features, but nothing about them. I also had the mysterious ATOM feed as a button on my sidebar. I clicked on it and saw that it was a feed of new messages in my mail box. "This is a cool step in providing cool technology to the masses," I thought to myself.
Alas, it had one major problem. No API. So there was no way that I could actually subscribe. This is because the URL was non-descript and requires an authentication (as I would hope a feed of my new messages would). Today I went back to take a screenshot of the new sidebar and blog about my adventure in GmailAtom land, and the link was gone. Sad. Here's to hoping that it comes back soon.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
OK, so who still does NOT have a gmail account? I have two invites left - what goodness will you do to humanity if I give you one?
AND - if gmail use is growing exponentially (I got 6 invites after 2 weeks use, and of 4 invites sent out, there are 2 new users), how long until eveyone on earth is buried in gmail accounts?
Time to test Google's true capabilities...two GMail accounts fowarding messages to each other...
"Send"
We're testing a new feature that lets you forward new incoming messages to any email account you want. It's free during the test and you can set it up in seconds. Even set up filters to forward only some of your messages. It's your mail. Get it the way you want it.
Open the message, then click the "New Window" icon. An extra step, yes, but pretty easy.
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.
One feature that's been there since the beginning, but apparently isn't mentioned anywhere on the site, is unlimited sub-addressing. Say I sign up for foo@gmail.com; I automatically receive mail addressed to foo+work@gmail.com, foo+urgent@gmail.com, foo+slashdot@gmail.com, or whatever I make up. Then I can filter or forward messages based on these criteria. Why isn't this nice feature getting any press?
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
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.
Download 7.54 and it works fine. Go now.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
I sent them this question about two months ago. Here is the reply I received:
Hello Alice,
Thank you for your message.
Once you have a Gmail account, it is valid. This means that even after Gmail becomes more widely available, you will be able to keep your account, and your username will remain unchanged. Hopefully, this eases your concern.
We hope you enjoy Google's approach to email.
Sincerely,
The Gmail Team
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Go here. Or download Opera 7.61
More than mere navel gazing.
Gmail's biggest flaw is that you can't sort your messages by anything (i.e. there's no heading bar at the top of the mail listing that you can click, a la Subject, Sender, or Date). Yahoo Mail is seamless at this. With Gmail you get sorted by date, that's it.
Now you might say I could just search my inbox, but that's no good either. Why? The search results suck. I have 171 emails with the exact same subject line right now (running a promotion), and searching for that exact string gets me 68 results. Great... You also can't sort those results, either.
Love the interface otherwise, but the technology needs work and the interface needs sorting!
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I second that. In fact, I sent them a similar message via their suggestion form. I explained that I would pay for the ability to have my old email (in mbox format) imported with the correct dates.
Have you tried using mutt to bounce the messages to Gmail? Such messages should retain the date attributes, as well as sender, destination, and other such goodies, assuming Gmail doesn't mangle this stuff (and I don't believe it does).
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.'"
There's been a lot of discussion on the Atom feed at InsideGoogle, including a link to make your own Gmail Atom feed if your account doesn't have a link yet. Also, some stuff here and here
No, it does NOT use ActiveX - it just uses the full HTML support IE provices (dynamic HTML) - same sort of thing that makes OWA (Outlook Web Access) possible ... (probably the most impressive web email that exists - granted you need an exchange server so it's hardly fair to compare it to free mail systems)
You need to have Opera ID itself as Opera. GMail uses ActiveX to display itself in IE, probably to avoid lots of complications from odd Javascript problems with IE. Since Opera is IDing as IE, GMail is assuming it has ActiveX support, which it does not.
Interesting that they had to resort to ActiveX. An interesting question though, is how long it will be before they'll detect Firefox/Mozilla users and have a powerful XUL interface available - if you could do a nice interface as rich and as fast as this GMail would start looking very impressive (and people would be moving very fast to Firefox to get it).
Jedidiah.
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Okay, I just spent a while browsing the source, and really, it doesn't look that hard. Laying out the controls with XUL looks largely straightforward, and everything made perfect sense to me, and I know no XUL at all. The rest of the functionality is provided via javascript, and that's where a little more work went in, but it really doesn't look like anything more than one would expect for an app of that complexity.
All up, my general impression (having only skimmed through the source) is that it looks to be no more difficult to develop such an app than with anything else one might use instead.
I am very impressed. Many kudos to the mozilla people for making such things possible.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
They must have replied more nicely and quickly due to your gender. It took me almost a year to get this response:
Dear Ari,
Once you have a Gmail account, it is valid until we decide to give it to a female requesting the same user ID. As Gmail becomes more widely available, we plan to use this to accomplish several goals.
1. To ensure a balanced user base, consisting mostly of attractive young geek girls who feel empowered because they stole accounts from men
2. To deprive you of your ability to communicate with cute young geek girls, as we will also be blocking incoming mail from outside the Gmail system
In effect, the Gmail staff will be the only men able to communicate with the cute, young geek girls. We wish you luck, and hope that you enjoy using our service for the next several weeks until we can find a suitable female replacement for you.
Sincerely,
The Gmail Team
It's really not fair.
The GMail interface uses HTML, with Javascript doing the DOM manipulation (as you correctly state). It also uses XmlHttpRequest to get content (such as the full email) from the server via Javascript - that's why you see your email on screen without the page reloading.
Internet Explorer's implementation of XmlHttpRequest is done using an Active X component.
Gmail works with the new version of Safari mainly because that version also now supports XmlHttpRequest. Opera 7.6x is starting to support XmlHttpRequest too - its buggy at the moment.