Gmail
Posted to both my personal and technical blogs:
About 4 days ago I went to orkut, an online social-networking site. A friend of mine had invited me to join a while back, and although I dutifully entered in information about myself and my interests, I lost interest in orkut. I had heard that it was bought out by Google. The other day I was lured back to the orkut site by someone I didn't know who wanted to be my friend. Sorry, I'd usually rather meet someone in person first. But while I was there, I noticed that orkut was giving away Gmail accounts. It must have been a limited time offer, because I don't see it now.
I had heard about Gmail, about the huge mailbox (2 GB), and some vague things that seemed to indicate that people really like it. Being interested in email, mail clients, mail protocols, etc., I thought I'd give it a shot.
I must say I'm impressed. I mean, really impressed. I've started the process of updating all my mailing lists, etc. to use my Gmail account rather than my Yahoo account. I'm forwarding all my Yahoo mail to Gmail. In short, this long-standing Yahoo fan was an instant convert to Gmail.
So what's so great about Gmail? Plenty.
First of all, I've been a fan of web-based mail for a long time. My first personal email account was an AOL account. When they started providing web-based email, I thought it was really cool to be able to check my AOL mail when I was away.
Then sometime in 2001, my stepson lured the family to Yahoo, at first just to play games. I haven't played Word Racer (kind of like Boggle) in years, but back then my family loved it. Poking around Yahoo, I checked out their free email, and determined that it was vastly superior to AOL mail, at least at the time. So I told all my friends and acquaintances that I had a new email address, and switched to Yahoo. I set up folders, defined filters, and used the POP interface so I could download messages. Why download messages to a mail client, when I liked web-based mail so much? Because mail clients always seemed to have a better human interface and more features, like multiple views, including threads, a great way of grouping messages and their replies together.
Now Yahoo would allow you to use POP, or forward all your Yahoo mail, but you couldn't do both. And if you forwarded your mail, it was no longer in your Yahoo folder. Not too useful if you want to forward it to work but not lose the email in Yahoo. Then Yahoo eliminated POP/forwarding from free Yahoo mail, and made it something you had to pay for. I ended up paying for it, because Yahoo! Mail Plus also provided an archiving capability, and being unemployed at the time, I wanted to keep a log of all my job-search-related emails.
Back to GMail. First of all, they've done a great job with the user interface, and it instantly became my favorite... Wait a minute, didn't I just say mail client programs did a better job than web-based email? They did until Gmail came along. In Gmail you don't view messages, you view conversations. They're basically like threads that mail clients like Netscape mail, Mozilla mail, and Thunderbird have supported for a long time, but Gmail's conversations are shown in a very compact form, easily expandable if and when you want. So you don't have to group all those messages that are really about the same thing; Gmail groups them automatically.
Tired of running out of space, or remembering to archive your messages periodically, if your email client supports archiving? Gmail tells you not to worry about running out of space. Just pretend space is not a problem. OK, it's not infinite, but it might as well be. I happen to work for a data storage company at the moment, so Google needing tons of disk space is not a problem in my book! So you don't have to delete messages, just archive them, which is the Gmail way of saying "Keep these around in case I need them, but I don't want to look at them any more at the moment". How do you archive them? Just select (click on) the messages and hit the archive button. That's it.
What about folders? Well folders are passe. With real folders, I have to decide whether Phil is a friend or a musician. The truth is, he's both, so I want his emails to go in the friend bucket and the music bucket. With labels, I can do that. And since I haven't really moved the messages anywhere, all messages are easily searchable. This is Google, after all. They know about searching....
Remember what I said about POP access and forwarding? It's free with Gmail. Want to do both POP access and forwarding? No problem. Want to forward but still keep in your Gmail? No problem. Want to forward but have the mail disappear from Gmail? No problem. Pretty much whatever you want. It's mail your way.
Categories: email, gmail
About 4 days ago I went to orkut, an online social-networking site. A friend of mine had invited me to join a while back, and although I dutifully entered in information about myself and my interests, I lost interest in orkut. I had heard that it was bought out by Google. The other day I was lured back to the orkut site by someone I didn't know who wanted to be my friend. Sorry, I'd usually rather meet someone in person first. But while I was there, I noticed that orkut was giving away Gmail accounts. It must have been a limited time offer, because I don't see it now.
I had heard about Gmail, about the huge mailbox (2 GB), and some vague things that seemed to indicate that people really like it. Being interested in email, mail clients, mail protocols, etc., I thought I'd give it a shot.
I must say I'm impressed. I mean, really impressed. I've started the process of updating all my mailing lists, etc. to use my Gmail account rather than my Yahoo account. I'm forwarding all my Yahoo mail to Gmail. In short, this long-standing Yahoo fan was an instant convert to Gmail.
So what's so great about Gmail? Plenty.
First of all, I've been a fan of web-based mail for a long time. My first personal email account was an AOL account. When they started providing web-based email, I thought it was really cool to be able to check my AOL mail when I was away.
Then sometime in 2001, my stepson lured the family to Yahoo, at first just to play games. I haven't played Word Racer (kind of like Boggle) in years, but back then my family loved it. Poking around Yahoo, I checked out their free email, and determined that it was vastly superior to AOL mail, at least at the time. So I told all my friends and acquaintances that I had a new email address, and switched to Yahoo. I set up folders, defined filters, and used the POP interface so I could download messages. Why download messages to a mail client, when I liked web-based mail so much? Because mail clients always seemed to have a better human interface and more features, like multiple views, including threads, a great way of grouping messages and their replies together.
Now Yahoo would allow you to use POP, or forward all your Yahoo mail, but you couldn't do both. And if you forwarded your mail, it was no longer in your Yahoo folder. Not too useful if you want to forward it to work but not lose the email in Yahoo. Then Yahoo eliminated POP/forwarding from free Yahoo mail, and made it something you had to pay for. I ended up paying for it, because Yahoo! Mail Plus also provided an archiving capability, and being unemployed at the time, I wanted to keep a log of all my job-search-related emails.
Back to GMail. First of all, they've done a great job with the user interface, and it instantly became my favorite... Wait a minute, didn't I just say mail client programs did a better job than web-based email? They did until Gmail came along. In Gmail you don't view messages, you view conversations. They're basically like threads that mail clients like Netscape mail, Mozilla mail, and Thunderbird have supported for a long time, but Gmail's conversations are shown in a very compact form, easily expandable if and when you want. So you don't have to group all those messages that are really about the same thing; Gmail groups them automatically.
Tired of running out of space, or remembering to archive your messages periodically, if your email client supports archiving? Gmail tells you not to worry about running out of space. Just pretend space is not a problem. OK, it's not infinite, but it might as well be. I happen to work for a data storage company at the moment, so Google needing tons of disk space is not a problem in my book! So you don't have to delete messages, just archive them, which is the Gmail way of saying "Keep these around in case I need them, but I don't want to look at them any more at the moment". How do you archive them? Just select (click on) the messages and hit the archive button. That's it.
What about folders? Well folders are passe. With real folders, I have to decide whether Phil is a friend or a musician. The truth is, he's both, so I want his emails to go in the friend bucket and the music bucket. With labels, I can do that. And since I haven't really moved the messages anywhere, all messages are easily searchable. This is Google, after all. They know about searching....
Remember what I said about POP access and forwarding? It's free with Gmail. Want to do both POP access and forwarding? No problem. Want to forward but still keep in your Gmail? No problem. Want to forward but have the mail disappear from Gmail? No problem. Pretty much whatever you want. It's mail your way.
Categories: email, gmail