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Project Insomnia

Project Insomnia is many things, but in this context it is simply a "braindump" of whatever I happen to be thinking/reading/watching/doing at the moment. Parental guidance suggested.

Monday, April 19, 2004

A Week With GMail

Michael Bazeley of the Mercury News has been playing with Google's new Web mail service, GMail, for more than a week. After running several hundred work and personal messages through the system, he discovered some interesting quirks:
The conversations feature is perhaps the best Gmail innovation. Gmail threads together related messages and replies into one ``conversation,'' moving it to the top of the inbox whenever a new reply comes in, greatly reducing inbox clutter.

The big glitch is that conversations are apparently grouped by subject line. So otherwise unrelated messages that happen to have identical subject lines will get lumped together.

Indeed, Gmail is not perfect.

Google's attitude toward deleting messages, for example, is baffling. Because they're giving users a huge amount of storage, Gmail engineers apparently view the delete button as a quaint time-waster. Gmail hides its delete function in a non-intuitive pull-down menu and discourages people from using it.

Instead, Gmail offers an ``archive'' button that allows you to move messages out of your inbox and into permanent storage.
I predict that last issue will be resolved before GMail goes into public beta or general availability. Until and unless a perfect spam filter is available (impossible given current technology), there will always be a need to delete messages. Still, I'm looking forward to using the service.
|| Andrew, 9:36 AM || ||

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