GMail

I've been using gmail for a couple of weeks now, and I've got to say that it's well worth the hype. It's got a nice, clean interface (I didn't appreciate how good it was until I logged into hotmail for the first time - eeeuuuww!).

The conversation threading is incredible, I don't know how we did without it for so long. Sure, sometimes it gets a bit confused, but it'll be even more incredible once they allow you to manually merge and separate conversations (which apparently is on the way).

And it does other cool things that are so natural and so right that you don't even notice, at first - like automatically hiding the quoted text in an e-mail. You don't really need the text, because the quoted text is right there in your conversation view anyway, but if you really want it back all you need to do is click the "show quoted text" link. And similarly to hide it again.

Their "reply" functionality is great, too - easy to get to, but out the way until you want to use it. And the best part is that because messages are grouped into conversations, you can reply to any message and have it automatically fill in the other person's e-mail address - even if the message you're ostensibly replying to is one you sent. For example, this is something I do frequently:

• Message from Bob: I'll get back to you with an answer
• Message from me: OK, thanks
• Message from me: Oh, and don't forget ... (quoting the "OK" message).

In most e-mail clients, to get that third message you have to reply to the second one, and replace your e-mail address in the To: field with Bob's. But gmail's smart enough to figure out that you're more likely to be replying to Bob than to yourself.

This seems to be their overriding philosophy: cater for the most obvious, most frequently used situations, BUT make it easy to do something more complex as well. For example, when replying, there is no little box with the subject line - it just picks up automatically from the conversation headers. But if you want to change the subject line, it's not a problem: just click on the unobtrusive link and go for it.

One thing that takes some getting used to is that there are no folders: just labels. And predefined label views, so it works pretty much like a folder, except that a conversation can have more than one label and thus can sort of be in more than one folder at a time. If you know what I mean.

There are some bad points: while you can easily search through your messages, you can't sort your inbox or All Mail/Label views. And you can't search by label, so if I want to see all messages that have a "important" label as well as those that have a "critical" label, I can't. Unless I just haven't figured out how yet, which is not impossible. No POP3 access, but they're working on it and I've found that webmail is actually more useful for me anyway. Advertising: I don't even notice it, most of the time. It's there to see, and it's easy to click on something if you're interested, but it's not obnoxious at all. Legal issues: this is a more difficult one. There's a pretty good article about why it's an issue; I'll try to find it and link to it here.

So that's my opinion of gmail. And notice that I didn't once comment on the 1Gb of space ;-)

Go out and get yourself an account - if you can! Of course, that's another issue surrounding gmail. More on that tomorrow, though; now I need to go and earn a living.