GMail on Path to Perfection
December 13th, 2006Michael Arrington thinks that Gmail Just Got Perfect with its new Mail Fetcher feature. Jackson West demurs to that notion, citing almost-there and missing features that make Gmail fall somewhat shy of perfection.
Either way, GMail continues to impress me. I’ve been using it extensively over the past couple of weeks since I turned my main domain mail over to Google Apps for Your Domain.
I’ve used Outlook Express (OE) as my mail client for a long time. I’ve avoided the full Outlook client because it doesn’t give me access to raw messages for debugging, and well, OE gives me almost everything I need without any of the bloat and dreck.
One of the (very few) drawbacks to avoiding Outlook is that OE doesn’t support the meeting invitations that people who use Outlook and Exchange send around. I get a badly formatted text version of the invitation and have to manually respond.
I got just such an invitation yesterday in my GMail inbox. I responded manually, but later in the day I noticed that my Google Calendar had been populated with the meeting and upon opening the calendar slot, I was given a form to respond to the invitation.
So, maybe GMail’s not yet perfect, but it’s really coming along.
One feature I’d really like to see Google offer is better integration with Gmail and Google Apps: i.e. If you receive a Word or an RTF as an attachment, it should give you an option to open it with Google Docs. Same goes for XLSes & CSVs with their Spreadsheets app.
I am a proud Gmail user. Never worrying about email size, incredibly fast reply (powered by AJAX, a technology often used by Google), Web Clips,
automatic forwarding, one button – click search, advanced filters, labels and not folders, message preview, automatic refresh, auto-save messages,as-good-as-yahoomail spam filters, not one executable to be sent or received, feeling of having a different technology? A definite recommendation for
anyone that reads more than one email per day.
Have you tried Gmail? If yes, what's your taste on it? Why do you love it/hate it?
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I’m a big Google fan! The only really bad thing I expierienced with Gmail was two years ago when I was in a supermarket and needed to check mail badly. They had IE5 installed and Gmail refused to work. Later on they added the option to use Gmail without all the AJAX stuff, just plain HTML.
Desktop programs are history 🙂
Although I reeeally like gmail and gCal, I dislike the way they really seem like seperate ‘satellite’ applications and they don’t integrate very well the way calendar it just ‘part’ of outlook. Also, I find calendar to be a bit clunky and slow sometimes.