Google Mail Review
I was introduced to Gmail recently by a work mate, he invited me, I thought I’d give it a try. I have put my previous situation in the appendix.
The best thing about Gmail is the conversations feature. Emails are sorted into conversations. These would be sequences of back and forth replies between you and another person, or a mailing list thread. This means your average mail folder is neater and more concise. Best is clicking a conversation, it shows all mail that has been involved, your replies included, all-in-one-page. Being all in the same page saves you so much clicking around, it’s great. Mail you have read is wrapped up with AJAX, clicking displays the contents. Stuff you don’t need every read is also wrapped up, like full from and to information, when wrapped up Gmail shows a small concise info box.
There are no folders, just labels. They work like folders but mail can have multiple labels. There is also the archive, which hides things from the inbox. Labels can be assigned to incoming mail with a filter. Filters can archive and assign a label, and this is the best way to handle mailing list traffic and emails from Amazon, Dabs, etc. as it keeps your inbox clean and ready for important mail.
Folders show snippets of the conversation inline, to remind you of the content, or give you an idea about a new mail.
The number next to labels and the inbox show the number of unread or partially unread conversations, not the number of unread mails. This is so great for mailing lists as you now know when new threads start, which is the more interesting kind of mail when it comes to lists.
Spam filtering is great, better than Thunderbird. Presumably because Google learns about new spam daily since they have all the mail on their servers.
The famous contextual ads are often hilarious and well worth clicking. But easily ignored for those who are less tolerant.
You don’t need to click refresh, new mail shows up on your screen as Google receives it.
The title text reflects the unread inbox count, so you can just glance at the browser-tab to see if anything new has arrived.
Replies are inline, so you can read the conversation you are writing about as you type the reply.
As you compose mail, a draft is saved to Google’s servers every few words. Does Outlook do this? No? And even if it did you couldn’t stop writing at home and continue writing when you get to work without having to even think about clicking the save button. Not only that but drafts are saved attached to the conversation you started them at. So next time you visit the conversation, in list view or expanded view, you see “Draft” written in attention-grabbing red text.
Because all the work happens on another computer far away, the interface is frankly more responsive than any other mail client I have ever used. I think the future is totally thin-client and browser-based.
Google show great attention to detail, removing what limitations a browser based application would normally experience with clever solutions. Eg selecting all mail in a folder. You click the select all button, it selects the 50 conversations on the page. Then a small text is shown asking if you want to select everything else in the folder too. In a rich client you’d have all conversations in a big widget and would have selected them all by default. Google’s solution is an extra click, but you can still do want you want. There is a toolbar, and it is appropriately concise, but it scrolls off the top of the screen. Google have it replicated at the bottom too. Perfect.
In fact the limitations of the browser medium mean Google have innovated all over the interface. No menu system means they have had to be frugal with the interface, consolidating wherever possible and taking care with positioning. And they have succeeded. There is no menu for selection, but you have a row of links to allow selecting messages based on more criteria than most browsers allow. And yet nothing feels cluttered or unnecessary. I take my hat off to the UI team.
Apologies for the review being an large lump of text - I may improve it when I have motivation.
Appendix
Until then I was struggling with Thunderbird for personal mail at home on my linux box. Now it seems to me XUL products run like shit on Linux. *Soooooo Sloooooow* I blame GTK and Mozilla crapness. It’s annoying because XUL is so quick on Windows and OSX. Get your game together GTK for fuck’s sake, I’m fed up waiting for you to catch up with Qt’s speeds.
Anyway. It was annoying not having access to that email at work and at home, and consequently I was very behind with my personal mail. I tried to set up FreeNX, but gave up, despite having set it up successfully on another ArchLinux box at work. I needed a decent webmail solution.
I have 193 unread converstations and I don’t know how to retrieve them to read in my Inbox, please can you help me
Search for label:unread in the gmail search box.
no bulk forward capacity for labeled conversation makes labels and whole Google Mail a very much unusable for any productive tasks besides using it for casual and private emailing.
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bulk forwarding = forwarding in one click selected emails, or preferably whole group of email having same label
GMail was designed to be useful to the 90% bracket. And there it succeeds. Most people have probably never lived through a situation that required them to forward multiple emails.
But lets say that occasionally everyone needs to. It is still OK for this feature to be missing. For one, you can forward them individually, so it is still possible to complete the task. And for two, if GMail added every micro feature that power users demanded, GMail would have been almost certainly an unusable mess that never would have seen such heavy adoption.