Slashdot Mirror
The Webmail Wars
latif writes "Much of the excitement around Gmail has centered around its innovative
interface, but a pretty interface is hardly Gmail's biggest contribution.
Gmail's real contribution to webmail is its innovative business model. The new
business model is what's allowing Gmail to offer 1 GB storage quotas, and still have an expectation of making money. Of
course, Microsoft and Yahoo have noticed this too, and one can reasonably expect them to move
their webmail services to the new model. An interesting battle is shaping up
between the big three webmail providers, and my article "The Webmail Wars" analyzes
some possible scenarios and outcomes."
Join the gmail-invite-board on Google Groups 2 (groups-beta.google.com). It's something I set up when I was looking for invites. Basically, you post that you need invites or that you have them, and people give you invites or give their e-mail addresses. It's that simple.
Also, look around Slashdot, and copy the URLs from those GMail Invite Trolls (the ones that LINK to Last Measure, but have five invite URLs in their link text). These might be OK, but keep in mind, the troll will have your new e-mail address.
Sign up here: http://isnoop.net/gmailomatic.php
I know it works, as I just sent 3 invites to their email address, and within 10 minutes someone had already activated the first one. This is a really cool service, and since it's automated, it's easy.
http://www.fsckin.com/
Gmail is still not ready. It's in its beta phase of development. You can't subcribe to it.
Anyway, that left me with a few spare gmail invites
Hopefully the folks that don't have one yet will see this before anyone else snaps them up.It's not the appearance, it's the functionality. The keyboard shortcuts are awesome and very intuitive once you learn how to use them. For example, I constantly finding myself hitting C or R in Outlook (for my work email) trying to compose or reply to a message.
Plus, I love the fact that the titlebar of the browser window gives an unread message count, and that the Gmail inbox periodically refreshes itself. That way, at work I can leave a browser window open and periodically check the taskbar to see if I have new mail.
(As an aside... hey Google... a proxy setting would have been nice in the Gmail Notifier applet.)
It's not a hack at all; use one label per e-mail and you get folders. In every single respect. The only difference between labels and folders is that labels allow you to have the same e-mail in more than one 'folder'. If you don't use that functions the label act exactly as folders. I can't believe people are complaining labels...
Imagine the following RL situation. You have the following cabinets. Work, Family, Important, and Unimportant. Now if you get an x-mas card from work you can file it either under work or under unimportant. After 10 years, when you want to read your card again for reminiscing purposes, you won't know in which cabinet it is.
With magical cabinets (which play the role of lables) you can put that card in both cabinets, so it will be there irrelevantly of which cabinet you search. If you decide not to use your cabinets' magical functions and still only put the post card in a single cabinet, the cabinets will act as perfectly ordinary cabinets.
There was an interview with one of Google's top people in which he leaked a number about what they're paying for storage. Including the machine the drive goes in, the rack and rack space, the backup systems, the power and the cooling, he figures they're paying two dollars per gigabyte.
You have not moved a lot. I have lived in 5 states and 2 countries over the past 10 years. Not one ISP I tried has been able to keep up and guarantee availability. Ones I have tried include Earthlink, MSN, AOL, ATT and a ton of locals. Having a known email address that will not change is a godsend. It helps with banking, change of address notification etc. I wish they would make a universal email adress that you could take with you when you move, similar to taking your cell phone number with you when you change carriers.
> No folders. They do not support folders. Sure, they support filters. But I can't use a filter to put mail from a mailing list into a folder. This is good how? What alternative to folders are they providing?
Maybe I'm missing something, but didn't you answer your own question? To get what is effectively a "Folder", use a filter to label the message..
Filter: If subject contains *cocoa-dev*, apply label CocoaML, and skip the Inbox.
It then is not shown in your inbox, but shows up as a new message in the CocoaML label (i.e. the link on the left side shows the number of new messages in parentheses).
This is the same as folders. The only distinction is the way that it is stored on disk, which is irrelevant to the users, since we cannot see/access the storage directly.
This also has the major benefit of allowing a single message to be in multiple Folders/Labels.. So, an e-mail from my sister with pictures of her new puppy can bin in both my Family and Pictures "folders".
Conversations are not a good way to organize e-mail.
... golders? Anyway, you can automatically have labels applied to all e-mail from yourfriend@someisp.com, which essentially puts them in folders. If your friend has multiple e-mail addresses, you can still create multiple filters to apply the same label to all of them. Presuming you know who that your e-mail is from Jim, you just find the relevant conversation (most likely within the past week), and scan through it for the little blurb. If your e-mail was just 1 line, you wouldn't really have to read all the big e-mails in the conversation to find the small one. In fact, if it was just one line, you'd see it in the preview without even expanding the message panes.
That's why labels + filters =
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere