kartooner

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.