revjim.net

Now that I've been using GMail for a bit, I've developed a sort of Love/Hate relationship with it. We'll do the love first.

* GMail groups my messages by conversation. It's very easy to look at all the messages associated with a particular conversation if I need to refer to what someone else said a few responses back. Even if a bunch of people were CCed on a message, all of the responses are grouped together. This beats a conventional system where I'd have to hope the threading worked and, even then, my responses would probably be in the "Sent" folder. It's very easy to use.

* GMail lets me change my From address. I've yet to see another *good* webmail system that allowed me to do this.

* GMail has pretty good SPAM filtering. I've turned off all SPAM filtering on my host. I get, at most, one a day that makes it into my Inbox. And, I've only seen about 4 false positives so far, and all 4 were quite iffy to begin with.

* GMail lets me use my keyboard to navigate and it does so intuitively. Just the other day I found myself wishing there was a key to go back to the message list without removing the current item from that list (which is what "y" does). Of course, you can press "gi" if you want to go to the Inbox, but what if I was in search results? Well, you can. The backspace key does just this. I find that I keep my Inbox cleaner when it's so easy to press "y" to Archive the message when I'm done reading it or right after I respond. Even now my Inbox only has 15 messages in it. Compare that to, for instance, my work Inbox with 104. And I get more personal mail than work mail.

* GMail offers all kinds of interesting features that you don't know exist until they happen. For instance, this morning I got an email inviting me to a Halloween party. The email contained the address that the party was being hosted at. Google is so smart that "it offered directions":http://revjim.net/archives/2005/09/gmail-smart.png to that location in its side bar.

* GMail makes it easy to save a Draft and it associates the Draft with the conversation. This makes it very easy to write responses in pieces and pick up where you left off.

* GMail's spell checker is *great*. They made improvements (this morning, I think) that make it even easier to use, and it was dead simple before.

* GMail automatically adds contacts to my contacts book and offers to show me only those that I contact frequently.

Now, for my gripes. These two are bad enough to make me consider returning to a conventional desktop mail client.

* GMail has no way of using information contained in an email message to determine which from address to use when responding to certain messages. This means that it always uses the same from address unless you change it manually each time. I could simply use two GMail accounts — one for each email address — but then I have to deal with logging in and logging out. If GMail would let me combine two accounts into one login, allow me to share an account with other logins, or allow rules to determine which from address should be used, that would solve this problem.

* GMail will not let me remove a message from a conversation or add a message to a conversation. GMail doesn't always get conversations right. You also can't throw away a single message. So, if you just want to throw away part of a conversation, you have to throw it all away. The same goes for labels. If I could rearrange conversations at will, it would quite a bit easier to use.

And the less important gripe.

* At times, GMail's incoming and outgoing mail seem to operate slowly. I've seen as much as an hour go by before getting a message I sent myself. Generally, it's really fast. But, it seems that when I really need it to be fast (testing an email notification system, for instance) it isn't.

The following gripes are GMail and Google Talk integration issues:

* If Google's official talk client offers notification upon new mail, that's great. However, when using "Gaim":http://gaim.sf.net/ to connect to it it does not. It'd be really nice if it did.

* Since GMail is all about storing "conversations" why not add logs of my IM conversations to the mix (optionally, of course). The conversations could be searched and retrieved just like email. In fact, IM and Email should almost be integrated so closely that, if I got an email notification from GMail, I could respond right in Google Talk and have that response sent back via email. Why not?

All in all, I'm quite happy with GMail. It has so many rich features that you do even know exist until you need them and that's really good. But, with a few of these gripes, it's quite annoying to the point where it might just outweigh the benefits.

If I had Yahoo! Mail Beta access, I'd certainly be willing to give it a go.