It’s a simple answer to a dead-simple question; GMail is a better alternative to any other web-based email service out there and I’ll explain why.

When Google announced their web-based email service in early April, on April Fool’s Day in fact, the Internet was buzzing with rumors. There were those who believed Google’s announcement was an elaborated April Fool’s joke, attributing their reasoning towards Google offering 1000MB (equal to 1 Gigabyte) of space, an unheard of amount for webmail and the fact it was coupled with the announcement for a proposed lunar outpost (which, surprisingly turned out to be a hoax).

Then Google’s Vice-President of Products, Jonathan Rosenberg, confirmed that Google’s web email service was indeed real. Real enough that Google opened exclusive beta-testing to employees and then offered sporadic invitations to their testers to invite other people to test the product. This viral campaign proved successful, to the point where many of these invitations have been sold on Ebay and swapped for other items and services on the web site, GMailswap.

Last week, I received a GMail invitation from a friend and proceeded to sign up for the service. The process was extremely smooth and streamlined and it didn’t take long before I was in awe of what GMail had to offer; notably how quickly the Javascript application works and the threading features of email conversations. In a nutshell this is akin to how threading works in forum services, wherein each post of conversation precedes the current reply.

GMail also offers ‘labeling’, similar to archiving your emails into folders except with labels you can more effectively archive information because you can apply more than one label to an email. For instance, if your friend from Hawaii sends you an email about an island resort you could attach ‘friends’, ‘hawaii’ and ‘vacation’ labels to the email. GMail would then sort this email into these respective areas, for easier reference on a later date.

In short, it all works exceptionally well save for a few features that need to be implemented in order for it to be a full-featured web application. For starters, I would love to see a more robust address book allowing for additional contact information (address, birthdate, etc.) other than just name and email. GMail also lacks a group email feature. Moreover the ability to select a group of contacts in your address book to send an email to.

My wife became frustrated with this, especially when she was attempting to inform people of her new email address. Due to the lack of a group email feature she had to manually select each individual contact as opposed to clicking a checkbox next to each record, selecting ‘Email All’ and then sending off the email.

GMail is understandably in the beta testing stage and Google has already received valuable input towards bettering their service. I would imagine several of these features will be available before the service launches for public usage thus the reason why it’s still being tested.

All in all, it’s fun to watch the service flourish on a daily basis and already GMail is a worthy contender for a serious email application.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2004 at 9:41 am and is filed under Resources, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.