Idea Portal: GmailMart

April 28, 2004

GmailMart

Well, at last the gmail arrived!
actually it has net yet been made public. but since google has bought blogger.com. blogger users who have been active users in the past can get gmail account upon going to their blogger.
My blogger acount was not active too much and therefore I did not receive this message. Thanks to one of my friends Ali Azimi I got mine.
I was looking around the service and thought to share my first experience. Obviously the system is different from other free mails on the net, not just because it is offering a huge 1 GB space, but in the way it makes you think of your emails.

The first point is that the service as other services by Google is designed real simple, and therefore very efficient. Although it might not look very fancy, but it is absolutly usable.

There is no pop3 or forwarding facility currently available, but in the helps section they have promised to deliver this options in near future, BUT! probably with some costs!

The idea is simple, when you receive a new mail, it comes in your inbox. you can then delete it or archive the mail. when you archive the email you will no more see it in the inbox. you may also set some tags or add it to a favorites style folder which is called starred. there is no folder thing available. you may also define some automated filters, so that upon receiving a new mail, an action would be taken.

there is no such a thing as sorting the mails. you have to search for the mail you are looking for, which sounds rational. the bad point is that you can not search the archive or inbox with message size! you can just search for those emails that have an attachment or not.

This way if someday your quota would be exceeded, it would be almost impossible to do anything! you can not search for the big attachments that have taken your quota.

another bad thing is that the archive is not a compressed entity. I have been using outlook for about many years now, and all of my emails, that are not few, are compressed and archived therefore overall they don't take a big storage. defenitely not a gig.

Although I am yet impressed with 1 Gig storage, and yet have to play with other functionalities of gmail, it seems like a wallmart that is trying to give you everything bigger! but who will win at the end? do we get addicted to use big storage?!...

Posted by Shauheen at April 28, 2004 01:54 AM

One of the most important features that you missed is the way it stores e-mail messages, it saved them in groups called "Conversations". It's very similar to the way Apple Mail client shows e-mails in groups, called "Threads".

Also, it took me 5 minutes to realise that there is a "Move to Trash" menu command, instead of a plain "delete" button.

I quite like the minimalistic design, works very fast.

Unfortunately it seems that GMail has some problems with the KHTML engine, you get an incompatibility warning when you use Safari too use GMail. Although it has a link saying "Login anyway", I feel it is very slow on Safari, comparing to Firefox.

Posted by: Ali at April 28, 2004 10:44 AM


		April 28, 2004 GmailMart Well, at last the gmail arrived! actually it has net yet been made public. but since google has bought blogger.com. blogger users who have been active users in the past can get gmail account upon going to their blogger. My blogger acount was not active too much and therefore I did not receive this message. Thanks to one of my friends Ali Azimi I got mine. I was looking around the service and thought to share my first experience. Obviously the system is different from other free mails on the net, not just because it is offering a huge 1 GB space, but in the way it makes you think of your emails. The first point is that the service as other services by Google is designed real simple, and therefore very efficient. Although it might not look very fancy, but it is absolutly usable. There is no pop3 or forwarding facility currently available, but in the helps section they have promised to deliver this options in near future, BUT! probably with some costs! The idea is simple, when you receive a new mail, it comes in your inbox. you can then delete it or archive the mail. when you archive the email you will no more see it in the inbox. you may also set some tags or add it to a favorites style folder which is called starred. there is no folder thing available. you may also define some automated filters, so that upon receiving a new mail, an action would be taken. there is no such a thing as sorting the mails. you have to search for the mail you are looking for, which sounds rational. the bad point is that you can not search the archive or inbox with message size! you can just search for those emails that have an attachment or not. This way if someday your quota would be exceeded, it would be almost impossible to do anything! you can not search for the big attachments that have taken your quota. another bad thing is that the archive is not a compressed entity. I have been using outlook for about many years now, and all of my emails, that are not few, are compressed and archived therefore overall they don't take a big storage. defenitely not a gig. Although I am yet impressed with 1 Gig storage, and yet have to play with other functionalities of gmail, it seems like a wallmart that is trying to give you everything bigger! but who will win at the end? do we get addicted to use big storage?!... Posted by Shauheen at April 28, 2004 01:54 AM