Slashdot Mirror
The Case Against Gmail
stry_cat writes "Ed Bot makes the case against Gmail: 'Gmail was a breath of fresh air when it debuted. But this onetime alternative is showing signs that it's past its prime, especially if you want to use the service with a third-party client. That's the way Google wants it, which is why I've given up on Gmail after almost a decade.' Personally, I've always thought it odd that no other email provider ever adopted Gmails "search not sort" mentality. I've been a Gmail user since you needed an invitation to get an account. However Gmail has been steadily moving towards a more traditional email experience. Plus there's the iGoogle disaster that got me looking into alternatives to everything Google."
And why hasn't IMAP been extended to support them properly?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Difficult to use with a third-party client? Really??? Please be more specific and elaborate cause i always had the opposite impression!
you forgot the US Government spying. until our IT giants tell the US government that they are leaving the united states if they don't stop, there is no reason to continue to freely use their service when an alternative is available.
Ed Bott has been sucking the Microsoft tit for years and he loves it.
I've been using Gmail since the old days when you had to have an invitation, and I've always used a third party email client because Gmail's web-based interface is stupid and pointless. Ed Bott is an idiot and I don't understand how he ever got a job writing for any computer/tech related magazine or website.
I knew exactly one person who used it, it simply wasn't a popular feature, even if it was the homepage on some Gateway PCs.
Sadly, many people don't realize that just because a web feature exists and works now, doesn't mean that it can be considered permanent. Auditing for security, proper functioning in the latest browsers, and other general maintenance still cost money. Google at least gives some notice, not all providers can do so.
I am serious. Why does /. consider an article by a Microsoft shill bashing Google and recommending Microsoft's product to be worthy of our time?
Thank you in advance for any serious answers.
. . . and what's wrong with IMAP and POP? They're called "standards" because they're "standard" and consistent and don't change every day like some people's menu bars and web interfaces. My wife can read her Gmail from her iPhone, too. Neither of us is confused by their interface . . . In fact I don't know what this article is complaining about other than "MICROSOFT IS NONSTANDARD" which is not exactly a shock, but he's saying it as if everyone else in the world is supposed to conform to Microsoft's standards. Um m m m m , no.
If you're worried about privacy: I pay for Verizon FIOS. That includes email. I *pay* for this, it's *mine*, they're not supposed to be making money off it . . . except I know from other evidence that they are scanning the email just like Google does, especially when I'm looking at it with the webmail interface rather than Thunderbird. So I don't think you can trust paid services either. And I'll bet dollars to donuts that if you run your own server, someone is scanning things to the SMTP port. If you don't control the wires end-to-end, then you don't have control, period.
For the ultra-cool folks who ask "who uses a client" and "who uses email anymore" . . . what are you doing reading such an ancient site as Slashdot? Go read something that nobody else knows about yet, and let us dinosaurs roam in peace.
3rd party clients SUCCCCKKk.. Gmail is the best there is. It's fast, you can do it from anywhere w/out a dumb bulky client. The messages are stored remotely.. It's intuitive and simple.. Sorry but no case can be made against it. As far as advertisements and all that who cares.. NSA is reading everything we write so fuck it.
Yes, it's totally bullshit that you would want to have a single page with all your email, news, weather, and everything else, launching from the start of your browser session. It's idiocy only pursued by the elderly to want to look at one page to get instantly up to date on everything.
I'm sorry that iGoogle was your singularity.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
People still use email for anything other than verifying forum accounts and retrieving forgotten passwords? There are so many faster and easier ways to communicate
That's possibly generational. I don't like to send SMSes because of the character limit and the idea that it's at least nominally tied to one device. I don't use any social networking services because I've actually read their terms of service. I think phone conversations are intrusive and damaging to my concentration, so I prefer not to talk on the phone, and many slow typists I know dislike any sort of realtime IM system.
Most of the people I know who dislike E-mail don't like the "formality" of having to write complete sentences or are paranoid about the possibility of some kind of record being kept of the exchange, but to me it's clearly the best general-purpose communication tool available most of the time. The haters tend to be young and want to conduct as much communication as possible through either Facebook or SMS.
I don't know if that's you or not, but I will say that E-mail isn't going away any time soon regardless of your wishes to the contrary.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Because it's stupid. If you have to constantly search for things it means you are a lazy disorganized slob. The number of times I've had to search for an email can be counted on one hand because I have things organized so that I know where they are.
Why should I waste time manually organizing my e-mails when I can just search for them when I want to read them later? Computers exist to do menial work for me, so I don't have to do it myself.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Google is being helpful in training/educating us not to rely on their free products for anything important.
Google DeskTop search? Downloads were disabled with only a days warning. No really adequate replacement has really come forward since (I would guess Recoll is the best of the lot). The "rationale" offered seems to be white-wash for a decision to "encourage" us to store our data in their cloud.
Then iGoogle. Is so expensive for Google to run iGoogle servers? Really?
All the other services they have turned off are perhaps less significant due to smaller user bases, but they teach their lessons to users also.
Before becoming dependent on a Google service, you need to keep a back-out strategy in your pocket.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Maybe, but also a bit fallacious. There's a trend today towards removing long running 'advanced' functionality in order to give the appearance of simplicity.
"I don't have to "search" for Excel on my PC, I know that if I click down here, then up and over here, I see the little [X~] icon. I don't open the search bar and type Excel. And I never open the search bar and type Excel.
I rarely use Excel, definitely not enough to commit its location in menus to memory. But I can type winkey+e+x+enter in a fraction of the time it takes for you to "click down here, then up and over here" through menus. I'd say using search to launch applications is the right way to do it -- one of the few additions I think they nailed in Vista.
Exactly. His slant can easily be determined from his comments about using calendars in Outlook: he complains that Outlook can only open gmail calendars in read-only mode. But this appears to be a limitation of Outlook -- my Thunderbird client (with the appropriate calendar plugins) can update gmail's calendar, so why can't Outlook?
He then parrots the "scroogled" talking points.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Unfortunately that functionality requires support from the recipient's systems. My mail server doesn't understand the concept of a recall notice, it's just another message in my mailbox. My client doesn't understand them either, so I just see a strange message that does nothing. And frankly I like it that way. I don't want someone else pulling things out of my mailbox, I want a nice clear unaltered record of what was sent to me when. I don't ever want to be in a situation where someone can show me a copy of a message that was clearly sent to me that I had no clue about because I never saw it in my inbox and I have no record of it and no way to prove I didn't receive it.
Hardly. Every time they change the UI it feels less like email, and more like a strange conglomeration of email, social media, and instant messaging, where email always loses importance. I personally find the whack-a-mole buttons annoying as hell, especially since the one I use second most ("mark as read") is buried under "More".
And I'm sure anyone here who has tried to deal with Gmail as an IMAP server has yanked out at least one fistful of their own hair.
So this guy may be a slimeball by vote. I believe you.
But Google certainly cannot even themselves project themselves as DO NO EVIL
anymore. Their whole strive towards non-anonimity is all at the least playing into
the hands of the NSA.
And from that we may (Chomsky anyone?) conclude that it is INTENDED with that
purpose in mind. <Profanity here>
The fact he is a paid contractor for the "enemy" of an opinion piece, indicates it might not even be worth the attention required to refute it.
It's an opinion piece, not full of fact and research. There's nothing to refute, unless you have a mind reading machine to see if he's expressing his true opinions.
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