gmail

I’m probably asking for another title wave of invite requests, but I need to get rid of these things somehow.

I just started using Gmail again recently and I’ve got 5 invites sitting around doing anything. If you’ve somehow escaped getting a Gmail invite, leave me a convincing comment describing why you need a Gmail account.

However, do not email me asking me for an invite. I’m training Gmail to recognize emails begging for invites as spam. If you want an invite, comment, don’t email.

Stop sending me requests for Gmail invites. I have no more invites, so no matter how many times you email me or how much you plead, I have none to give you.

Thank you.

Just after my last Gmail posting, Google opened up so many new invites that now just about everyone that wants one can get one. So much for selling them on eBay…

So if you want one, email me and I’ll hook you up.

Update: Alright already! You can stop sending me requests for invites. I’m out now. :) Didn’t quite anticipate the demand… Update: No seriously. I’m out. Stop asking.

So I’ve been using GMail for about a week now after getting set up with a beta account. I thought I’d spend a few minutes and talk about the things I like and don’t like about the service:

Things I like:

• The conversation paradigm. I used to think I got a lot of mail. Now I’ve realized I just have long ongoing conversations over email. GMail keeps mails indexed by “conversation”, so every reply, whether it goes to the whole group or just one member, ends up in a threaded view that tracks the whole thing. Simply wonderful.
• Archive. Contrary to everyone’s fears, GMail does give you the ability to really delete mails. I don’t know just how “gone” they are if you delete them, but they’re not in the mailbox anymore. But having the ability to simply “throw mails over the fence” and not delete them is nice. Having a full gig of space included helps. Haven’t you ever deleted a mail thinking you’ll never need it only to discover there was some crucial bit of information in one?
• Labels. GMail gives you the ability to apply an arbitrary number of “labels” to conversations. That way, once they’re “archived”, you can still quickly and easily find them based on the labels you’ve applied. You can also create filters to automatically apply labels to mails as they come in. I use filters to label incoming mail from all the mailing lists I’m on.
• The interface. The interface is simply awesome. Clean, simple, and very dynamic. Its exactly what you’d expect from the guys at google. You very quickly forget that you’re using a web application. They even included keyboard shortcuts, which seem to be heavily based on the vi editor keyboard commands.

Things I don’t like:

• Lousy spam filtering. I get a whole lot of spam. I’d been using SpamAssassin on my personal mail server to block spam, and had been having quite a bit of success with it. GMail, no matter how much I train it, fails to catch many very obvious spam messages. It probably only catches about 70% of the spam I recieve. I really expected the guys and girls at Google to be better at catching spam.
• Awkward filter creation. Evolution includes a “create filter from message” option. It lets you use a specific message to automatically create a new filter. Google needs this feature too.

Thats about it for now. Overall, its a great service and I see a lot of potential in it. I’ll post some screenshots and write some more about the general experience soon.