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On Gmail...

I freakin' love GMail... it's all I've wanted in an email tool. Some observations that I'll add to as my use goes on:

  • GMail seems to accept anti-GMail sponsored links... so even they have a sense of humor!

  • One thing that I mentioned at the GMail plenary at CFP 2004 was that most of the privacy concerns with GMail center around people who haven't consented to the GMail privacy policy having their emails scanned (then there's also the ubiquitous storage issue).

    That is, if you send an email to me at joehall at GMail you haven't specifically consented to the GMail privacy policy, but your writings will still be scanned and indexed by Google. The answer that I proposed at CFP was to allow email senders to include an "X-dont-scan-me:" field in email headers that Google would recognize as being the email equivalent of a robots.txt file. That is, if this header field was present, Google would make a good faith effort not to scan the given email. This has various drawbacks and such, but one big plus is that it can be used by all sorts of applications that scan email text for one reason or another.

  • Conversations are neat. In GMail, responses to emails are all clustered in one place so that you can find all the emails in a given string of thought. However, if anyone changes the subject line of an email, the conversation is broken and I haven't found a way to add an email to an already-started conversation.

  • The ads aren't that bad. In fact, I don't notice them that much... and the ads already in emails sent in Yahoo groups and the like tend to set off more of the GMail ads than anything specifically said in an email. (for example, I thought it would be spooky to be having a conversation about abortion and then to get served up ads about RU-486)

  • The interface is quite usable and it's great to be able to effectively save emails in multiple folders... using the GMail labels feature, you tag emails with labels and then you can sort via labels. The trick here is that you can add multiple labels to a given email.

Posted by joebeone at Abril 25, 2004 10:58 AM | TrackBack