GMail: first impressions

[waider]

Ok. First impressions of the much-talked-about GMail service, now that I've scored an account (thanks, k!):

• Damn, this is slow.
• Where's the POP/IMAP access?
• How do I delete this mess... oh, I can move it to trash. Now how do I get rid of it from trash? Ah, right. Extra options on the actions menu in the trash folder. Clunky.
• What's with all the new windows? Can't I just keep it in the same window as I'm already running[1]?
• Hmm, I do like the little Loading tag on the top right.

So mostly I don't think I'll be doing much with this: generally speaking, I hate webmail systems, because no matter how much work you do on the UI it's still browser-based which as previously mentioned is something that bugs me a whole lot. I read email in emacs, thanks, and I'd rather I was able to continue doing that. More to follow, I'm sure.

[1] Mozilla allegedly has an option to make this "open in new tab" instead. It doesn't work for me. And if I disable the window.open call entirely I break a bunch of other stuff. So. For now I am concentrating huge amounts of hate on anyone who feels it is necessary to open a whole new window just because I clicked on a link. (for the record, I don't mind discreet popups, such as the Gmail Contacts window. That's fine. Whole New Windows = Teh Bad, though)

Comments

[jwgh]

I'm not really sure either, but the big point of this is supposed to be the threading (which I agree is very nice; why doesn't Eudora do this?) and searching capabilities and targetted ads (though I'm not seeing any ads yet) and whatnot then I guess it either had to be done as webmail or as their own email client, and the latter would be the more difficult of the two to implement, probably, because of platform differences. (Although I still had to upgrade Safari to use GMail in that, which meant I also had to upgrade my operating system since the latest version of Safari also requires the latest version of Mac OS X.)

A gig of storage is supposed to mean that you never have to delete anything (though I just checked and I actually have more than a gig of email on my local hard drive ... hmmm) so I'm not too surpised that they made it less than easy ... although using the user interface to encourage a particular kind of user behavior isn't something I really approve of.

I don't see the new windows because I'm blocking popups. Hmmm, maybe I'm missing something. Anyway, it appears to be usable without them.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Well, sure, the benefits are the huge search capabilities. But that shouldn't stop you from being able to hit the damn thing upside the head with an IMAP client. Maybe some enterprising hacker will script an IMAP scraper for it, with pseudo-folders to trigger the glorious search functionality.

Regarding the delete option, I wanted to make sure that I can fling a bunch of messages at it and delete them again so I can test it out properly. While Google are generally good enough at sticking to their "Do No Evil" philosophy, I'm leery of having large quantities of email on a server that I don't control.

[kodi]

I wrote them to whine about not being able to middle-click or control-click to open in a new tab, and the automated response mentioned that they're working on "many" upcoming features:
- Automatic forwarding of your email to another account
- Plain HTML version of Gmail
- Import/export Contacts

The plain HTML will make me happy, but it looks like IMAP isn't "upcoming" any time soon.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

POP goes the Email, but looks like it's Windows-only.

[bitpuddle.livejournal.com]

Funny -- I was using it yesterday, thinking how fast it was.

I'm not a webmail fan, but I do like the way conversations are threaded in Gmail. I like it enough to give it a try. It may be the best webmail interface I've seen yet, though that doesn't say much.

I didn't know you wanted a gmail account -- I could have sent you an invite.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Ta for the offer :) I didn't actually want one, but I guess k. saw through my protests to the inner geek craving and felt I should have one anyway. I'm rather pleased that I managed to snag waider@gmail.com, too.