Teach42

I recently got myself a GMail account and have been toying around with it. So far, I’m sold. Yes, it’s just another email account, and no it won’t wash the dishes for you, but it does have some very nice time saving features.

My first day of test driving it, I had a lovely conversation with my wife through email. A total of 13 emails were sent back and forth between the two of us. It kept the entire conversation in one nice neat package in my inbox. With one click, I could follow the entire conversation back. Not only that, but since we both leave the ‘quote’ feature on, there’s a whole lot of wasted space being taken up by quoted text. It hides all of that by default. So all you see are what the person most recently wrote. Slick, eh? So even though I didn’t delete a single email from her that day, it still only appeared as one line in my inbox. And that one line included the emails that I sent to her as well.

What else do I like about it? The fact that you add labels to emails instead of putting them into folders. Yes, in most email programs you can put an email into more than one folder, but usually you create duplicates of them all. Gmail doesn’t create a duplicate of emails, it just adds labels to them. It’s very similar to del.icio.us. Once you get the hang of it, it’s a far superior way to keep things organized.

Finally, perhaps what I like best about it is the search capabilities. My wife Jess loves the search capabilities of Outlook. Jon loves the little search window for doing quick searches through a folder. I can’t stand either of them. Here’s my beef. I started a search through my deleted items folder about 20 minutes ago. I have about 10,000 items in there. It’s around halfway done now. It really takes forever. With Google, it seems to be able to do such searches in seconds. My issue with the quicksearch window in Outlook has to do with the way it searches. If I have it search the From: field for a name there, I expect it to pull out emails that begin with the name, contain the name, have the name in the email address or have the name as the label (for example <"Steve Dembo" steve@dembo.org>. Outlook doesn’t do that. I can’t remember which it actually pulls, but I know I’ve had to do multiple searches to find an email from a specific person who’s email address I actually know already. Drives me crazy. Google handles those kinds of searches in a superior manner.

Point being? I’m still playing with it, but I think Google really has a fantastic product here. Leaps and bounds better than Yahoo and Hotmail, and IMHO it’s eve better than full featured email clients like Outlook and Entourage. Go figure, eh?

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