Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Initial impressions of Gmail

And thanks to for the invite. :-)

Wow. It's fast. I'm used to web mail being quite sluggish -- click, wait. read, click, wait. It's somehow faster than both webmail and IMAP at work. This probably says more about our mail server than Gmail...

I like the conversation feature, but I'm waiting to bestow praise on it until I see how well it handles a large number of messages in between. Mozilla can also do a conversational (threaded) view, but it's annoying to do that to your inbox (with all the non-threaded messages). Also, I've only used it to email other Gmail users so far.

1 GB is certainly a lot of space, but it's not "endless." My mail spool easily goes over that when I'm collaborating on a paper -- sending bloated Word documents back and forth... ugh. Maybe Google will fix this by writing a Word replacement? :-)

Unless Google has patents for this stuff in the pipe -- which I wouldn't be surprised -- I expect Thunderbird and other mail programs to adopt some of these features.

Gmail is not quite a Notes or Outlook replacement, though. As much as I hated Notes, it had some nice features (sending calendar invites, etc.).

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