While Ross Hill, a.k.a. cyberhill, is an ex-weblogger, he's still a frequent commenter over here. We talk over IM now and then as well, a couple of days ago he taunted me with the fact that he had a Gmail account, and I hadn't. Thinking about it carefully, perhaps he, in fact, didn't taunt me per se, I was just really jealous.

Without me even asking him to do so, it turns out he convinced Jason Shellen to invite me to the service, which I'm very grateful for. Thanks Jason, and thanks Ross. Now, before we're completely mesmerized with the atmosphere of this, let's take a breather and remember that Gmail is not an all-you-can-drink buffet of invulnerability-juice, it's just a webmail service.

Using Gmail for, well, a day now, I've come to appreciate it quite a bit. Comparing it with Hotmail is not very fair. In fact, doing so is sort of an insult to Gmail, as far as I'm concerned, because it's entirely different, and it's on the exact opposite side of the sucking scale.

Conversations

Perhaps the most prominent feature of Gmail is the fact that conversations are grouped into, well, conversations, as opposed the familiar lengthy list of free floating messages from different people, concerning different things, it's a concise list of conversations.

Reading an e-mail conversation like you would normally read a flat forum actually makes a lot of sense, especially since Gmail let's you expand and collapse individual messages without even reloading the page. Some forums I've seen, like the one over at Kuro5hin, also allow you to dynamically expand and collapse individual messages, but it's not as friction free as the experience with Gmail, with which there are no bugs, no hickups, it's very fast and it's completely transparent.

It also makes it very easy to check up on what has been said earlier in the conversation; instead of having to find and open a different e-mail, in a new window at that, you just scroll up and track through the messages in chronological order. It's far, far, easier to find a given message you're looking for, buried somewhere in a conversation, since you don't have to open each message individually, but instead scan over each of them effortlessly.

When a conversation becomes lengthy, like over six or so messages in total, the list is collapsed even further, but is of course readily available at the click of a button, without the page reloading.

Grouping individual messages into conversations like this, while only a superficial change at first glance, will probably change the way people use e-mail. That does sound like a bit of a cliché, doesn't it? Perhaps it's just me, it could very well be, but I've already noticed that I perceive and think of e-mail conversations differently using Gmail, than otherwise. When using other e-mail clients, both web based and native ones, conversations aren't grouped with each other, but rather scattered and interspersed with other conversations, they're not really like conversations at all, but more like separate, detached messages.

I'm not sure if this change of perspective has only had this drastic effect on me, but having e-mails grouped into conversations has kind of had an encouraging effect on me. Since e-mail conversations don't get interspersed with others in Gmail, since they don't get scattered all over the place, they don't seem to want to die. Not in and of themselves, at least. I would say, I think, this will make people more likely to keep an e-mail conversation alive, as time goes by and other unrelated e-mails comes in, because the conversation is still there, it doesn't get dissipated. I'm pretty sure that it will have that effect on me, it has had a little bit of that effect on me already, but perhaps it's just me.

Technically

Overall, page reloads are notably scarce in the Gmail interface, compared to other webmail services, and web applications in general, really. When clicking on a conversation in the inbox, and then back on the inbox, and then on the same conversation once again, the switch between the two interfaces is so fast that a roundtrip to the server cannot possibly be occuring. I suspect that the interface previously viewed is stored in an invisible frame, and that when you click between the two views, some javascript code switches between the current and previous view without any roundtrip to the server at all. It doesn't necessarily have to happen exactly like this, but I'm fairly certain that it does something to this effect. It's very fast. Between these switches, the state in which you left the conversation, such as expanded/collapsed messages, is persistant.

Like any other webmail interface, there is a checkbox next to each item in the inbox, only in Gmail the items are conversations, whereas in other webmail services, they're individual e-mails. When you check a box, the row is hilighted in yellow and Gmail remembers that you've marked that conversation throughout the entire session.

There is also the concept of "starred" messages and conversations; items which are labeled with a star. I suppose the feature will be used to mark especially significant conversations or messages, for quick and easy access. To mark an item as starred, you click on the white star next to it, but that doesn't make the page reload, and Gmail does in fact know you've starred it, even if you shut down the browser at this point. So how does the server know what you're doing on the client? Page reloads in a hidden frame? Perhaps, but I suspect there is some sort of RPC/RMI thing going on here, via a Java Applet proxy perhaps, because the interface is so extremely alert, it's almost like a native application.

These are technical issues, certainly very uninteresting to non-geeks, the point I'm circling around is that Gmail very often uses javascript and little bits of magic to make the service feel anything but web-like. It feels almost like a native application. I actually don't really like web interfaces at all, well that's not entirely true, I do like web interfaces, but I don't like the fact that they're slow, due to all the page reloads which aren't necessary with native applications.

Just recently, I stopped using Outlook in favor of Mozilla Thunderbird, and I do like Thunderbird, much better than Outlook, but I like Gmail even more, in spite of it being a web based application. Grouping e-mails into conversations is, as simple and obvious as it may seem in hindsight, quite ingenious.

Ads and Related Pages

And then there's the ads. I almost forgot to mention them. There's a reason for that, and that's because they're completely unobtrusive. I even doubt they'll generate any income for Google, because they're almost invisible, and they only show up occasionally. And that's all I have to say about that.

There aren't just ads though, there are also so-called Related Pages (displayed underneath the text-ads), which, I'm sure, aren't paid for at all, because I've seen weblogs among them. When Ross and I were talking about the dangers of nature in Australia and Sweden, for instance, the following links showed up in Ross' Related Pages:

Dr. Beach's Survival Guide
Sharks of Hawaii - An introduction to sharks that are prevalent in Hawaiian waters ...

In my experience, the ads and the Related Pages are only related to the latest message, not to previous ones, not even previous ones in the same conversation. Just the very latest message.

Spam

A very underreported feature is the one of Plus Addressing, I've only seen it mentioned here and here, Google themselves don't seem to acknowledge that it exists (at least, I can't find anything about it in the Help section).

It works like this: beside your usual Gmail address, mine being tomasj@gmail.com, these also work: tomasj+crap@gmail.com, tomasj+april2004@gmail.com, etc and so forth. These "Plus Addresses" don't have to be created, they all just exist. Which, by the way, might lead to extensive joking. Why e-mail your friend at yourfriend@gmail.com, when you can e-mail him, or her, at yourfriend+asshat@gmail.com instead?

Now, the thing is that in Gmail you can create search filters which are executed when e-mail are received by the system. With these search filters, you can, for instance, automatically move all incoming e-mails addressed to username+crap@gmail.com to the Trash. Or, label all incoming e-mail addressed to username+list@gmail.com with the label "mailinglist", or whatever you may come up with. Of course, the search filters aren't limited to only searching the to-field.

This gives you the side effect of having an unlimited amount of throwaway e-mail addresses. However, I suspect that spammers will find this out and chop of the Plus Address.

Irrespective of this, Gmail has it's own built-in spamfilter. I haven't tried it out much, but Ross has and it seems to work quite well.

Downsides

The downsides I can think of are few and far in-between. There's the accessibility issue, but Google has already stated that they're working on those issues, assumably by building an entirely separate interface using traditional page reloads instead of javascript magic, hidden frames, etc.

The greatest downside I can think of, honestly, is that the username has a 6 character minimum limit, which means I can't use tomas@gmail.com, and had to settle for tomasj@gmail.com. I expect a few spambots to find and take their best shot at that one. I'd love to hear from other Gmail users as well, to hear what they think of the service, what they like and don't like, and so forth.

There are, quite expectedly, a few bugs in there. Sometimes when you quote someone's text, and put quotes around it, parts of the quote show up as purple. Just parts of it. That's pretty weird. Sometimes it fails to group conversations, like when you reply and enter a different subject. But I'm sure all the little quirks will be weeded out during the course of this beta testing period.

There are also features missing. Some more important than others. For instance, you cannot manually break a conversation into two separate ones. The help section even explicitly acknowledges this, saying that "once messages have been grouped together, there is not a way to ungroup them."

I'm not worried that Gmail's conversation grouping algorithm will mistakenly group two separate conversations, I'm fairly sure it won't. But there are still very good reasons to manually split a conversation. For instance, I have a lazy friend who is too lazy to write an e-mail address, and even to use the address book, so instead he just finds any e-mail from the person he wants to send one to, and hits reply to that e-mail, even though his e-mail has nothing to do with the one he's replying to. He doesn't even bother to change the subject either, so it can be quite confusing. Google would have every reason to make his unrelated e-mail a part of the previous conversation, for sure, but it really is not.

Not everybody has friends as lazy as I have, of course, but there are other reasons too. For instance, conversations tend to turn into conversations about something else. Ross and I were having an e-mail conversation about Gmail that has now turned into one about the dangers of nature in Australia as compared to the ones in Sweden. They've got man-eating and/or poisonous animals, and we've basically got lakes with weak ice which you can fall through if you skate on them. Certainly, this has nothing to do with Gmail, yet it's all part of the same conversation.

As I mentioned earlier, Gmail kind of encourages these conversations to continue, because they don't get dispersed and they don't get interspersed with other e-mail. This, in my opinion, only increases the need for a way of manually splitting conversations, because they will go on and on, and they will evolve into conversations about something entirely different than they were about initially. In my case, I'd like to be able to split the conversation about Gmail, and the dangers in Australia and Sweden respectively, into two different conversations, because they really are, even though, from a purely technical standpoint, they're not.

Gmail does seem to evolve quickly though. I remember reading (but I don't remember where) that someone said that the keyboard shortcuts doesn't work with Firefox, because of Firefox's type-ahead feature, for instance. Well, they do now. For me, at least.

I'm sure I'll write more about Gmail in the future. Let me know if you have any requests for comments on specific things, or screenshots or anything.

Other people's comments on Gmail:

• Slate: Read My Mail, Please
• Mathowie: Google's New Promise
• Mark Pilgrim: I Dream of Gmail
• Bag and Baggage: Gee! Mail
• Kevin Fox: Obligatory Gmail Screenshots
• Jason Shellen: Gmail Redux
• Adam Lasnik: Google's Email - An In-Depth Look
• Tim O'Reilly: The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy

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