Phil’s Diary - [Blog @ http://www.philsdiary.net/]
Ok, so I’ve been using GMail for a week or so now, so I guess I can give you a better idea now of what I think. First off, this isn’t a review, nor a description of all the features. If you want something like that, try something like this, complete with screengrabs.
So, I guess the two main benefits of GMail are the extra storage space (1Gb), which we’ll ignore from now on because it’s not really technically interesting. The second benefit is “converstations”. Emails are grouped (and managed) by conversation.
Does it really work? Well the first thing I noted missing was folders. You just don’t get them in GMail. Instead GMail collects all your mail together in one big folder “All Mail”, which is the only real distinction to “Inbox”.
To help you out, instead of folders you get labels. You can label each email if you like, with as many labels as you want. Then you get a link which allows you a filtered view of your “All Mail” folder, this time only showing mail that has the chosen label.
The big benefit to labels as opposed to folders is the ability to logically allow you to have multiple labels on an email, much like having an email in more that one folder.
The downside is there’s currently no “show only unlabeled”, so your All Mail folder can get quite cluttered, this is highlighted if you subscribe to a mailing list or two. It’s easy enough to filter the mailing list traffic to read it, but you can’t filter the non-mailing list traffic.… unless you apply a label to everything.
This isn’t so useful.
The other gripe I have is the number of clicks required to do a few things. All but a couple of functions are selected from a dropdown menu. This means one more click for almost everything.
That’s the two main downsides I’ve seen so far. The upsides are definately the conversation side of things, this makes it much easier when looking back at emails, and works really quite well.
The speed of the system at present is pretty good too, the pages are pretty simple, both in content and look and feel, and seem to load pretty quickly too.
All in all it’s good to see someone taking webmail in a different direction and bravely trying a few new concepts and ideas. I think they need some work still, but it is, after all, still a beta.
Posted by Phil on September 01, 2004 07:17 AM | Categories: Technology
Sick and wrong:
http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem.html
Posted by: Phil at September 9, 2004 7:03 AM