Google Gmail

Thanks to Bibi, I’ve had a google gmail account for several months now. I know it’s still technically beta, but a lot of people are using it as a primary mail system.

It’s generally been reliable. However, since they last increased the number of invites two weeks ago, I’ve been getting a lot of timeouts:

Oops… the system was unable to perform your operation. Please try again in a few seconds.

This reminds me of the experience I’ve had with Orkut, the social networking portal affiliated with google. Orkut’s got some great people and interesting discussion groups on it, but it’s become soo…. unbearably… slow… that I’ve stopped used it. (Edit: I deleted my Orkut account in 2006 because of all the spamming; should have done it earlier. )
But back to gmail…

gmail screen

The sponsored links on the side are benign, and appear usually after prolonged exchanges or long enough missives. As you can see in the picture, they’re identical to the top right box on my blog. For example, my cream cheese brownies generated a lot of traffic for Fat Witch. An email thread on the same topic had ads pointing to other vendors’products. (I’m still partial to the Fat Witch name, though.)

I love Google’s conversation threading model and wish this would be incorporated into Outlook. The index screen shows the thread name (subject of email), number of messages, and a partial list of recipients. When you click on a message, everything is compacted except the new parts of a thread, though you can click to open previous parts fairly easily. Best of all, when composing a response, you can do this without popping up another window to view the original contents.

The label and filtering options are okay, though I have to admit I’m still thinking of labels as “folders,” where a message goes into one and only one label. Gmail lets you apply as many labels as you want. I have several filters set up for mailing lists to dump things into “labels” (treating them like files) for me to read later. Some of them are very busy and I want to do a “catch up.” Unfortunately, you can only catch up 50 at a time. (Edit: now updated to allow 100 or all.)

Search options are much better than Outlook (which is not saying much), but not nearly as good as the NEO application that one can purchase to run on top of Outlook. It’s textual-based search, with simple stuff like search From, To, Subject, labels, words it has, words it doesn’t have, attachments, and within a range of a date. If a search produces too large a set of results, you can’t refine it, and have to start over.

Two huge pluses of gmail over hotmail and yahoo are the space (2+Gb is a lot of messages Edit: it’s now 2Gb+, Yahoo has matched. Probably hotmail too. This blog entry is over 2 1/2 years old.) and the lack of tagging (appending the “Do you Yahoo? I do, and I’m too lazy to change my .signature!”) outbound email with advertisements, a practice I find obnoxious. Spam filtering seems to be on par with the others.