Using Gmail
Apr 17, 2004
I found a Yahoo Group via my referrer logs earlier, and since I had to join it to be able to see what they were saying about my previous post, I figured I would. After all, using Gmail, as opposed to Hotmail, I'm not really worried about spam anymore.
In order to join the Yahoo Group, I first had to join Yahoo. In order to join Yahoo, I had to tell Yahoo all sorts of things about who I am. They wanted to know my name, where I live, what I do for a living (and rather specifically at that), how much I earn, what my interests are, etc and so forth. Let's just say they were really interested in a lot of specifics regarding who I am. Filling out the form was a bit of a drag, but it's a really common thing nowadays so it's not anything to get all hot and bothered about.
According to information on the sign-up form, spanning several pages, Yahoo wanted to know all this information about me so that they can, and I'm paraphrasing just a bit, "serve me relative ads".
All Gmail wanted to know about me was my name and my secondary e-mail address.
Having joined Yahoo, it was actually the first time for me, I noticed how there were ads pretty much everywhere I looked. Ads all over the place. That's alright, they, like everybody else, have to generate revenue somehow. But Yahoo doesn't just serve unobtrusive text ads, they don't even stick to somewhat obtrusive banners, they even interrupt your surfing with full page advertisements, every now and then. It really can't hardely get more obtrusive than that. I wouldn't say it's quite like having a billboard in your home, but it's plenty annoying and obtrusive.
Having used Gmail for what feels like a while now, I've come to a few conclusions:
To begin with, the behaviour of hierarchically sorting one's e-mail is a very deeply rooted instinct. I had a bit of a conversation with fellow-tester Adam Lasnik, he is having a harder time adapting his behaviour to Gmail's flat storage model than I am. But, I must say, for me too, it's tough to think "out of the box" and use Gmail like (I presume) it's supposed to be used, as opposed to try to think of ways to trick Gmail into acting like a traditional e-mail client.
Instead of having a hierarchical directory structure, Gmail has a flat system of labels. But it doesn't feel like it's quite enough. I'm going to try, real hard, to not want to sort my e-mail, or to want to navigate through it, hierarchically. But I'm not entirely sure it's even possible.
The composing of e-mail in Gmail is rather slimly featured. There's recipients, there's a subject, there's attachments, there's a message, and that's it. However, I don't really feel like I need anything else, so I guess I don't mind. I wouldn't be surprised if Google fleshed out this a bit later on though.
The Gmail address book lacks very many fields; it's just the name of the contact, the e-mail address and a free text field with whatever notes you might want to keep about your contact. I'd like them to, at least, add a home page field, and I'd also like that field to be accessible from when you're reading e-mail, not just from the address book interface itself.
I'd also like to be able to quickly look up all e-mail sent by a given person. I can do that now, but I have to use the search form, I'd like to be able to click on or near the sender's name.
The view of all e-mail is nice, but I'd like to be able to view all incoming e-mail, too. Most of the time, I'm looking for an e-mail that was sent to me, not one I sent out.
I noticed a rather cool feature; when I sent an e-mail to the previously mentioned Yahoo Group, I used the form at Yahoo. Since Yahoo verified my e-mail address, by sending out a confirmation e-mail, the e-mail I sent from Yahoo's form uses my Gmail address as the from-address. Since I'm a member of the Yahoo Group which I sent the e-mail to, I to receive the e-mail sent from myself.
Thus, the e-mail I sent, from Yahoo's form, had the following recipient: GoogleGmail@yahoogroups.com, and the following sender: tomasj@gmail.com. Because I'm a member of that group, I received that e-mail in Gmail. And get this, Gmail handles it as an outgoing e-mail, not an incoming one. This means that Gmail trusts the SMTP headers, and handles it accordingly, right? I did recieve that e-mail, but since it says that I was the sender it handles it as such.
In this case, that's a good thing. But I'm not entirely sure what the potential dangers of it might be, perhaps it can be used to somehow evade spam filters and tings like that, or perhaps it can't. I'll have to test that some more.
Finally, as I mentioned earlier, Gmail is very conversation centric, unlike all other e-mail clients I've seen. It's not like the thread view in some clients, not at all, the conversation centric approach permeats the whole experience with it. Conversations will go on and on, and they'll evolve into conversations into something entirely different than they were initially about. That's why, as I've said before but am all the more certain of now, Gmail needs the feature of splitting up a given conversation into two separate ones.
All things considered, Gmail is still my favorite e-mail client, counting both web based and native ones.
Comments
I just had a similar experience signing up for the SpyMac email account which has 1gb of storage and has been listed on many sites as a gmail alternative. Signing up wasn't a simple username, email address, password job - they asked for everything about me, some of which I didnt' even know myself! After going through the bloated image-filled pages I finally finished the process only to wait half an hour for the validation email to come through! So much for a gmail alternative they don't have the hardware to support it!
Comment by cyberhill at 07:48, 18 Apr, 2004 #
Frustrating/Confusing...
Comment by MaThIbUs at 09:53, 18 Apr, 2004 #
I guess they figure since they're giving you a gigabyte of mail storage, they're qualified to ask you for anything they want.
Comment by swimp at 13:54, 18 Apr, 2004 #
swimp: Please, read the post before you comment on it. I said, and I think it was quite clear, that Yahoo asked for a zillion details about me, while Gmail didn't want to know anything about me.
Yahoo is not giving away no gibabyte of nothing.
Comment by Tomas at 14:26, 18 Apr, 2004 #
I think Swimp was refering to Cyberhill's SpyMac post. SpyMac is the one asking a tons of questions for their lame 1GB offoering.
Comment by David Collantes at 14:45, 18 Apr, 2004 #
David: You're probably right. Mea culpa.
Comment by Tomas at 17:07, 18 Apr, 2004 #
No worries :)
Comment by swimp at 17:51, 18 Apr, 2004 #
Yes that's correct. It's free. It's your choice whether or not to use it, so if you don't like the deal that you're being offered you don't need to take it. I'm just happy that Google have decided to give such a good service for as free as they get. A few measly ads, and people don't read your email!
Comment by cyberhill at 10:40, 19 Apr, 2004 #
Interesting post.
I don't personally don't feel any deep rooted instinct to arrange emails heirarchically. I'd much rather have a huge flat inbox that I can sort or search in many different ways... so I can't wait to use gmail (and desktop email clients when they adapt its interface design).
Comment by bruce at 19:57, 21 Apr, 2004 #
This reminds me of the article "The myth of navigation", by Andrei Herasimchuk that discussed the false perception of hierarchical organization. While I think that a searchable flat inbox certainly has merit, I would be sad to lose the immediately apparent categorization allowed by automatic sort rules. I have a number of rules set up in my client to send my abundant email to different mailboxes depending on the sender/account. When new mail comes in, I can see exactly where the new mail was placed, and thereby make the judgement to either read it or ignore it. I've not used gmail, but I should think that even if some rule based tagging system was included, it would not be anywhere near as elegant as what I'm used to.
That being said, I applaud Google for keeping the question asking to a bare minimum. I've always thought Google was an island of hope in today's seething torrent of malpractice. I host my own email, so I have no need for a free email solution, but I think yahoo and hotmail are going to see a lot of people jump ship once gmail goes mainstream. I'm curious though, does gmail have restrictions on the size of the attachments you can send? I have a client that is using Yahoo's free mail service, and is limited to 3MBs of attachments AFTER base 64 character encosion (no, that's not really a word). That tends to be ~2.3 MB before conversion. Which frustrates me to no end, especially since he needs to send Photoshop and Illustrator files quite frequently.
Comment by Tom Werner at 09:25, 22 Apr, 2004 #
Tom: Gmail does not lack what you call automatic sort rules (however, we're constrained to twenty rules at this point).
As far as I know, Gmail has a 10mb restriction per e-mail.
Comment by Tomas at 11:48, 22 Apr, 2004 #
How about signatures in Gmail? I can't seem to find any setting for making one...
Comment by swimp at 19:11, 22 Apr, 2004 #
I have used Gmail now a little bit. Sometimes I am a lucky guy; I have experienced good luck several times: when I met Kim, when my child was born, when I first flew over the Atlantic. This time my...
Trackback from collantes.US at 04:52, 23 Apr, 2004 #
Spymac does not force you to enter any of the zillion details. All of them are optional. Of course, it is VERY VERY slow and definitely not comparable to Gmail.
Comment by Badri at 00:40, 10 May, 2004 #
Wouldn't it be nice if Gmail offered a way to pop other email accounts so that we could use Gmail as our default email client? I want badly to be able to use Gmail for all my emailing activities, work and personal.
But of course if this was possible one day, we would need the opportunity to choose the from address for each message?
I have like 7 email accounts that I use for work and personal and have successfully converted to Gmail for all personal email's, but am lacking the ability to use it for work.
I can't wait for a plugin or program that can handle this functionality.
ske
Comment by skebrown at 19:21, 29 Jun, 2004 #
skebrown: "Wouldn't it be nice if Gmail offered a way to pop other email accounts so that we could use Gmail as our default email client?"
Absolutely, that's exactly what I think is missing from Gmail. If I could do that, Gmail would be my exclusive e-mail manager.
That would, of course, mean that you'd have to be able to compose e-mail using those other addresses as well, as opposed to just forwarding your e-mail from the other accounts to your Gmail account.
Comment by T. Jogin at 21:06, 29 Jun, 2004 #
The discussion has been closed on this entry. Thanks to everybody who participated.