MindlessCode.net

(Well, almost, anyway).

I decided to try GMail about 3 weeks ago “just for fun”. I kind of liked GMail’s interface and was sick of Thunderbird. So I started forwarding all my emails to my GMail account.

I was hooked. The “Conversation” concept is brilliant. It lets me see all the messages in an almost “threaded” way, and keeps my inbox somewhat more sane. The key shortcuts are great, and the spam filtering is almost perfect. In my 3 weeks of using GMail I have had 0 false positives AND 0 false negatives. Pretty good considering that all my taj@wildgardenseed.com mail is getting run through the GMail filter.

The message composition window is very intuitive. For example, when attaching a file, instead of selecting the file, hitting upload, and then send (I usually miss the upload step), you can simply select your file and hit send when you’re ready. The file is automatically uploaded and attached when sent.

Spell checking works pretty well, with the exception of the fact that you can’t add words to your own dictionary. GMail always thinks that “Taj” is spelled wrong–but other than that, it “worgs gread!”, like any spell checker.

Oh, and did I mention the speed? I know, usually webmail gets bad rap for being sloow–but not GMail. It uses AJAX and DHTML to make the interface blazing fast! Heck, it’s even faster than Thunderbird!

The one problem? If I want to sign/encrypt messages with GPG I need to do it manually. But that’s not really a problem–I don’t need encryption or signing.

Will I keep GMail? I think so. It has a nice “Standard HTML” interface as well, so that I can check my email from something like lynx or Konqueror. It’s been a fun experiment and I think Google has actually done something cool!

(Look, a post with no <blockquote>!)

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 18th, 2005 at 4:32 pm and is filed under The Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.