Gee mail

I started using Google's web-email client round-about half a year ago. The hype over it at the time wasn't really the reason for me to open an account there. It was the fact that my other email accounts were a decade old and had gotten onto way too many spam lists to where I was beyond annoyed. I made a brief reference to that in a previous post. Time to start fresh. Might as well see what this new email thing was about.

I've used it for a long enough time now to where I have to say, I'm quite pleased with it. I got comfortable with it fairly quickly. With many things there is an evaluation period. At first the interface was, it seemed, just a departure enough from the norm of email clients that it did take some getting used to, despite it's fairly intuitive interface. I remember seeing several complaints on the interface posted in the obvious places. I think I had many of the same "complaints" in my head at the time though they weren't major enough to gripe about. I adapted to the style and remain more pleased with it than not. And kudos to them for re-thinking the way I deal with email. Some of my own highlights:

• Conversations: The emails are organized by conversation/replies or what should really be called threads because that's what the original name was and what most people still call them. They're all grouped together in the same line on the main list page which has the added benefit of fitting more email history on the same page. Unlike threads in other mail programs, you get to see all entries at once on a single page with the option to click them hidden. It's nice having everything relevant right there. It's fairly clean.
  
• Labels instead of folders: Google did away with folders and instead made just 2: Inbox and not-in-inbox (or Archived). Most email clients have folders you can move messages to. Google instead uses labels (that you can name yourself). There was a little anxiety to overcome with this and some complaints still regard this. I realized however that, indeed, labels are more flexible and powerful than folders. Basic reason: One can assign more than one label to a conversation, something that you cannot do with folders without making duplicate entries (most email clients don't really give you the option). For example, I currently have all emails with picture attachments automatically assigned a "pictures" label. Should I ever want to see all emails with pictures, I can simply click on the label and voila, there they are. This will be useful when I reach the max disk quota and I want to start deleting the largest emails.
• Search instead of sort: The Google philosophy appears to be "save everything, search for what you want." As with the labels it sort of violates the internal notion of aesthetics where things are properly put in there place. However, it works just fine, is a little more powerful and lower stress once you get past that notion. Google is the master of search and so far this style hasn't failed me.
• Speed: Of course as far as web-based email clients are concerned none of the above would have been truly usable if they hadn't written a surprisingly fast interface. I mean, I was impressed at how fast and functional it was compared to, say, the Yahoo mail where email is organized in pages of 26 entries and I keep having to click next page over and over (and their thread features are measly).

Of course it has the other standards such as filters, contacts, POP access, spam filtering, and such. There are clever hacks to turn that 2Gig of space into a file system, that I find impressive.

Some things I find a bit less to my liking are:

• It doesn't let you sort by the things I'm used to like date, sender, etc. There are still uses for this.
• There doesn't seem to be a way to assign an email out of the conversation that it determines for you. Same applies to labels, it seems to apply to the whole thread.
• Inability to open any of the interface items in a new window with a right-click. E.g. it would be nice to right-click-open my contacts while I'm in the middle of composing, not because it won't find email address through it's very good auto-completion but I have to remember the names I want to put. There are other uses too. I'm sure the Java code could allow that but it's not in there yet.
  
• Merging contact information is a no-go, but then again nobody gets that right. A lot of people have multiple accounts and I wish there were a simple, quick, and effective way of merging them into the same contact entry.
  

There are other little things too that could easily be added to make some tasks a little more convenient. Allowing expansion of the sender's previous emails in the contacts page comes to mind; I'd really like to cut and paste contact info from emails I get. They get to escape full criticism by keeping it in perpetual beta though. (Is that a criticism?) Their system of account-by-invitee is a bit interesting too. I can see some advantages.

But all in all I'm loving it. I just wanted a fresh email address but surprisingly it keeps me using it in its web client form rather than simply downloading my email to Thunderbird and organizing it there like I do with my other email accounts. I like it that much. The unfortunate thing is that it require my internet connection be always up, and there are times when I don't or don't want to and would like to use it offline, like on my laptop. Plus it would be awesome to be able to use this technology on my other accounts, like my work one, where I see great benefits for my handling all of the email regarding the various projects and back-and-forth RFC's. So what I would really like is for my Thunderbird (which I love, especially with all the cool extensions) to behave more like the Google client... which basically means, Google should make a standalone client for personal computers and workstations (including a Linux version, thank you very much).

Hear that Google? I'm sold. Make gmail a download, and for all platforms.
(Don't say it. I know their not listening.)