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| BrendanMcKillip.com brendan mckillip's daily journal |
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daily journal
Google's Gmail - A Review  I've been using Google's new Gmail email service for a couple of weeks now, and to be honest I haven't been too impressed. While others are heralding it as a "thing of beauty", I find it horribly awkward in its usability and lacking in key features.For the uninformed: about a month or so ago Google launched a free web-based email service called Gmail that is designed to compete against Yahoo! mail and Microsoft's Hotmail. Beta testing of the service was an invite-only arrangement (I earned mine by being a frequent blogger using the Google-owned Blogger.com service). The key selling features of Gmail has been the enormous 1 gig (1000 mb) of storage space for email (Yahoo! only offers users 6 mb for its free email service), the incorporating of the Google search engine into the email service - making searching through your vast amount of email easier, and Google's claim of superior spam filtering. To make their money, Google is also scanning all incoming email and placing their now famous Google text ads along the right-hand column. Privacy advocates have screamed bloody-murder over this feature, claiming that Google is prying into the private communications of its users. On the contrary, Google is scanning the email in much the same way Yahoo!, Hotmail, or any other email client now does in order to filter out spam. It's just that in addition to filtering out the spam, Google is using the scan to serve up ads relevant to keywords found in the email. No person is reading the email. Nothing is being stored. Google is just looking for words it can use to serve up ads - then they're through with the email and its contents. Now that I've gotten to use the service for about three weeks, I ready to weigh in with my impressions on Gmail - and the results aren't as fantastic as others would lead you to believe. For example: Gmail does not consistently use buttons or text links for similar types of actions. A major no-no that any web design half their worth would never commit. They do not allow you to create sub-folders to file emails away in. All your mail sits in the Inbox - you're suppose to use the unparallel Google search function to find what you're looking for in your Inbox or apply labels to like emails and then view only those emails assigned that label. All of which I find very awkward. Gmail automatically ads to your contact list any person you send an email to. This is nice most of the time, but when your just sending the email to sign up for an email newsletter, do you really need end up having Kyle Baker Publishing Newsletter Confirmation from ListManager sitting in your contact list? I don't think so. So now I have to go in and delete that from my contact list. It's a hassle. The kicker is that by default the Gmail email client does not show any images in HTML emails. I know some consider it a spam security risk - but I'm not too worried about it. I want to see the images right off the bat when I open the email. I don't want to have to click on a "Display External Images" link. All of my email is not just text correspondence between family and friends - I get HTML version of newsletters. I know it probably sounds like I'll be dropping Gmail like a bad habit. On the contrary, I'll probably hang on to the email address, because I do like some of the features that Gmail offers: how the group "conversations" or the back and forth of emails that occurs when writing people about something, the huge amount of storage space (1 gig), and the clean and simple email address that hasn't been picked up by spammers yet. I'll just grumble through the other items and offer feedback to Google. posted by Brendan | 9:23 AM | permanent link |
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