Why GMail?

June 14, 2004

GMail [Logo]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. 

14 comments

First off, thanks for the account Erik.

I’m impressed with the ser­vice so far. The con­ver­sa­tion thread­ing is great and it runs smoothly. I do have to agree with you on the address book and the mul­ti­ple e-mails func­tion. I do think that Gmail can only improve over time with the feed­back they’re getting.

I wrote a lit­tle bit about the AdSense fea­ture and I’ve been dis­cussing this at work with some peo­ple (many who don’t like it), but I don’t have any prob­lems with it right now.

If it con­tin­ues to improve, I can see Gmail being the best free, web-based e-mail hands down.

by Todd on June 14, 2004 at 12:18 pm. Reply #

I’m pretty sure GMail is not Java-based; I think you mean JavaScript. :)

Other than that, I’ve been sub­scribed to your weblog for a while now and I like it a lot! (Too bad you don’t have a full-text feed.)

by Manuzhai on June 14, 2004 at 1:23 pm. Reply #

You’re right, Manuzhai. It’s all in the details (java-based ver­sus javascript) and some­times, regret­fully, I miss those details. Only human I sup­pose. ;)

Also, I’ve updated the feeds as well. The feed out­put should dis­play full feeds from now on.

by kartooner on June 14, 2004 at 3:15 pm. Reply #

Erik, I have to agree — espe­cially the address book fea­tures (or lack thereof).

The other weak area I’ve noticed is the spell check, but as it has improved 5-fold since I’ve been using Gmail, I think it’s safe to say that both of these fea­tures will be built out in the weeks/months to come.

by Linda on June 14, 2004 at 4:41 pm. Reply #

The group email fea­ture bet­ter be built into the app, or Google will be hear­ing from my wife.
;)

by kartooner on June 14, 2004 at 5:23 pm. Reply #

Well-written. Keep up the good work.

by Colin D. Devroe on June 15, 2004 at 3:58 pm. Reply #

Since I’ve received my account (thanks, Erik), I’ve been hit­ting email like some peo­ple hit the buf­fet line. There’s some­thing about Gmail that turns me into an ado­les­cent with their first email account. I don’t know if its nov­elty or the inter­face; what­ever it is, I’m hooked.

by max on June 15, 2004 at 5:30 pm. Reply #

Thanks a lot, much better!

by Manuzhai on June 15, 2004 at 5:38 pm. Reply #

Max: Same here, my friend. It’s like email crack!

Munazhai: If only I could afford a copy edi­tor. Tsk. Tsk.
;)

by kartooner on June 15, 2004 at 5:52 pm. Reply #

I must say, I have been look­ing at the GMail site for quite some time and I have been wait­ing their e-mail (yes, I have signed up to get one) say­ing I can join.

What about spam? Are there any fil­ters? Can you add your own?

by Andrei Maxim on June 16, 2004 at 7:03 pm. Reply #

Andrei, yes, you can add your own cus­tom fil­ters. Spam isn’t some­thing I’ve tried with GMail just yet, nor do I care to see if it works. :)

I’ve already got­ten my share of SPAM. To give you an idea, I used to get about 10,000 spams every 23 weeks.

by kartooner on June 17, 2004 at 8:25 am. Reply #

Thanks for the account Erik. Gmail? Its like hot­mail on acid. Fabulous.

by Root on June 22, 2004 at 3:24 pm. Reply #

[…] Michael: I wrote about my expe­ri­ence with GMail on my site in the arti­cle, Why GMail? It pretty much sums up my impres­sions of GMail. […]

by Got Gmail? at Binary Bonsai on September 28, 2005 at 7:42 am. Reply #

Pls i need a Gmail invite Urgent i will be glad if u send me one to my email address larrybid2005@yahoo.com Thankx so much

by Ote on June 1, 2006 at 11:50 pm. Reply #

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