Last night, Richard waved an account in my face like a salmon for a hungry polar bear. Under peer pressure from my geekier friends (“come on man, try it, you’ll love it”), I accepted (see my previous post on why I’ve been resisting) and have added yet another email account to the dozen or so I currently have. For the moment, I’m not going to tell you what it is. For the moment, I’m not sure I’m going to keep it.
Why and how would I use it? I’m all set up on Microsoft Outlook with a bunch of accounts, with complex rules for managing the email, with Qurb for the spam-killing, with all my Contacts, etc. Outlook isn’t exactly a work of art, but it gets the job done. More importantly, Outlook contains a vast amount of built-in knowledge and history about me–from all the email, to the contacts, calendar, etc.
Currently, I can’t easily put any of that into Gmail–it currently doesn’t support the import of email data or contacts. From a feature perspective, Gmail is dumber than Hotmail. It doesn’t even support multiple reply email addresses, an Outlook feature that is critical to my job (I generally need to specify which address my email comes from). For those times I’m away from the office, my ISP provides (an admittedly crappy) Web interface to my email, so the Web-friendly advantage is pretty much nullified.
How have other people adopted Gmail (apart, I suppose, as a faux account for online registrations or as a shag account)? Aside from geek cred (and that’s so fleeting), how does it fit in with your existing accounts?
I guess I’m an email power-user. Am I the target market for this product, or is this just Hotmail 2.0?
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I was pretty happy to get a Gmail account even though I don’t anticipate using it much.
Why?
Occasionally someone will want to send an 80mb file to me, and I have to explain http://www.yousendit.com. Now, I can just give them my Gmail address.
Len
The dealbreaker for me is the inability–unless I’m missing it–to set the way Gmail quotes text in a reply. It encourages the type of quoting that gets on my nerves (though which is apparently more common, so I sneer at great risk): the above the email quoting rather than, as I prefer, the Usenet style, with inline quoting responding to the multiple points people make.
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2000/06/14/quoting.html
The buzz is that Gmail is excellent for searching (faster and better than the other web-based services, since it uses Google’s algorithms) and that it is a better interface for mailing lists. I haven’t subscribed to a high-volume list with it (Thunderbird is threading my high-volume lists nicely, plus stores my email on my HD, which is bigger than 1GB), so I’m skeptical about its use too.
I’d be interested to hear what email non-power users think, since non-power users in all fields are by far the majority.
I have had a Gmail account for a while now, and I honestly don’t use it too much. The main reason is it does not work with Opera (my main browser) yet. Beyond that.. I don’t have the need to store 1000MBs of e-mail.
I do like the way it works, though. The interface is very nice, and seems to make perfect sense to me. I also love how it says things like, “Hooray, no spam here!” when you have no spam in your spam folder, and from: me when you send yourself an e-mail. Things like this are usually nice in any application.
All-in-all… I like it, but I don’t think I’ll use it too much… at least until they decide to support Opera. 🙂
Len: The file limit is 10mb. I think if it was 80mb it would take over the warez world. hehe.
I like the fact that you can report spam. Too bad gmail can’t be included in IM’ing because I would drop my hotmail pretty quick.
adrian holovaty is working on a python script to import your address book.
I love gmail. That said, I’ve NEVER felt comfortable having my email on my personal computer.. too much hassle for me. I’ve had too many hard drives die. I’ve been using a canada.com (web based) email address since around 1997, and hadn’t found incentive to leave them until now.
Things I love about gmail: the threading. It’s beautiful. I also love the highly versatile labelling/folder/sorting system.
Things I dislike about gmail: Nothing so far. 🙂
I consider myself to be a power user in that I know how to run my own mail server, but I am also part of the target market because I don’t care enough to deal with the hassle. I don’t do business through my email, and I’m not stupid enough to imagine that it could be secure anywhere other than on my PC.
I would say more but I have a splitting headache and I’m not sure that I’m making any sense. 🙂
what Devon said. 🙂
Also, I love the spam filtering (filters out more than any other spam filter I’ve used — I took a look at my spam filter the other day, and discovered that I get roughly 350 spam/day. I don’t see most of it. Thank god.)
I’ve forwarded my six domains to it. While I miss the ability to specify an outgoing email address easily, it’s not something I need that much. Everything else, it’s a winner.
Check out all of the goodies at http://www.marklyon.org/gmail/. Highlights include, loading all of your mbox or Maildir folders into GMail, pop access to G-Mail, and Yahoo! Mail, and auto-forwarding from your Hotmail account to your GMail account.
From a usage perspective, GMail is a very interesting experiment shifting the focus from tehcnology to interaction. Rather than having a discussion thread, you have a conversation. Instead of having ‘folders’ you have labels (a much easier concept for the consumer age, after all GMail’s brand is it’s major selling point). Coupled with Google’s innovation cycle GMail is going to be a massive success.
On the subject of storage, Spymac offered the first free 1GB email service on the web.
On a semi-related note, can someone please tell me the advantages of doing IMAP over POP? I know having access to all your email (a la Gmail/Hotmail/etc.) while travelling is handy, but I really have difficulty seeing the usefulness. I have six different POP accounts, and eight years of email, on my machine at home. I back up regularly, so I don’t worry about losing any of it, but, seriously, what am I missing? I’ve seen other geek-friends trash POP, but I still don’t get why.
So far I’m mostly just giving my Gmail address out to family and friends who have a habit of sending HUGE files to my hotmail account. Hotmail is apparently increasing its storage space to something like 100mb I think. I read it somewhere yesterday …. anyway, so is yahoo. In the press conference, Hotmail reps apparently said they didn’t realize storage space was an issue until now. Dorks. If Gmail has done nothing else it has put the pressure on the other email providers to increase free storage limits.
The major advantage IMAP has is that your all of your email is accessible all of the time from whatever machine you like. Normally emails are deleted from the server once you retrieve them via POP. Therefore, these emails are only available from the machine you downloaded them to.
One of the other advantages of IMAP is the support for concurrent updates. This is only applicable to an email account with more than one user.
Invite me! Invite me!
For the Gmail fans: http://justinblanton.com/archives/2004/06/20/getting_more_out_of_gmail/
I can’t see myself ever adopting. Now if Google added an IM client as well, and gave instant annc of incoming email as MSN’s will, I might budge. Still, webmail is always secondary to me. Too important to have a close grip on my .PSTs.