Google Mail
March 13, 2008
I’ve been using gmail for a few months now, and must say that I am thoroughly impressed.
Until recently, I’d always been a die-hard anti web-based email person, just because it always seemed like it was somewhat “clunky” compared to a simple, clean pop client. I’m not sure exactly what it was about it, but I’ve never really liked the look of hotmail, yahoo, etc.
But I was getting fed up with spam. I had tried solutions like spampal, and that worked out ok for a while, and thunderbird, which worked out pretty good…for a while. Something would always manage to get through though, spam made out of images was the latest problem that I just couldn’t find a good solution to. Until gmail. I don’t think that since I’ve been using it that I’ve had an email get tagged as spam that shouldn’t have been. It’s incredibly rare that a spam email makes it through to my inbox. And I get several hundred per day sent to some of my older email accounts.
The feature that (I believe) makes this work so well is the “report spam” button. If a brand new junk email makes it to you, that hasn’t been figured out yet, you simply check it, and click “report spam”. That helps Google filter that spammer for other users. The community working together clicking a simple button has come very close to totally eliminating junk email.
You can set it up to check up to 5 other accounts, so in my case I’m checking my ISP provided email, my tysonbryner.com email, etc. It then tags those messages with a tag telling me what account they were sent to, and integrates those messages into my gmail inbox, making them available to me just like regular mail incoming to my gmail box. In addition, you can actually send mail from any of those accounts through the gmail interface. So if I wanted to make a message come from tyson@tysonbryner.com, I don’t have to log into a pop client or something else tied to that account, I can do it directly from gmail with a drop down box.
So the spam issue was what made me move. I took me a day or two to get used to the idea that you don’t put the mail you want to keep into folders, like you do with pretty much every pop-based email client. Instead you “label” emails, either yourself, or with a filter as the emails come in. See the colored boxes below for an example. (The “Comics”, “Work”, “Newegg”, etc.) After trying it out for a bit, I think I like this system much better.
Here you set the color and tag name that you want to use.
Also the way I use my computers has changed over the years. It used to be that I really only checked my email at work, and just didn’t bother from home. When I did from home, I would set my pop client to leave mail on the server, so it would still be available at work.
Using a web interface to check makes that situation totally irrelevant. As with any web-based email, your email and address book is available to you from any computer on the internet. Gmail gives you a big chunk of space, you basically never have to delete another email, just send it to the archive. As for access from portable devices, Google has done a pretty good job. It works really well with my Ipod Touch, and I would imagine looks as good on other portable devices as well.
If you use gmail, I’d suggest getting the firefox plugin “better gmail 2.” It does a few things, skins, hide the spam count, etc. But the main reason I use it is for the “force encrypted connection” option. Basically if you log in to http://mail.google.com/ by accident, it will redirect you to https://www.gmail.com/ and force your browser to use a secure session while communicating with gmail’s servers.