Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Gmail

Having been offered the chance to play with Google's new mail service a few days ago, I've been looking around and seeing what it's really like behind all the hype and media hysteria about privacy. I don't believe Google mind people with beta accounts talking about it in public, so I thought I'd write up my thoughts.

Whatever people are saying about it, the one thing that's perfectly clear is that there's hardly anyone out there who doesn't have an opinion. The packrats are drooling over the 1GB (well, it's 1000MB, the hard drive manufacturer's definition of a gigabyte) storage allocation. The tinfoil hats claim it's a gross intrusion on personal privacy. Amid all the hoohah, nobody seems to be worried about what it's actually like to use. Others have already produced their own reviews, but here's mine.

The first thing to notice is that Gmail is pretty browser-intensive. A lot of the nifty features which make it good are implemented using some industrial-strength Javascript. For most users this isn't a problem - in reality, just about every Internet café on the planet will provide you with a copy of Internet Explorer running on a Windows box. Mac users will need to use either a recent version of Netscape, Mozilla or Firefox as Safari's not yet supported. I did my testing using Firefox 0.8 on MacOS 10.3.

The second thing to notice is that it is fast. A lot of operations (usually ones which don't require network access) complete instantly from the user point of view, and as a result Gmail behaves more like a desktop mail client than a webmail service. This makes it usable as something other than a standby for when a desktop mailer isn't available. Even better, it supports keyboard shortcuts for many functions, which for power users is a big, big win.

The 1000MB storage allocation is really no big deal. I get the impression that the number was chosen as a value equivalent to "Enough that you don't have to worry about it", as part of Gmail's philosophy is that you shouldn't have to spend ages worrying about trimming out unwanted mail to stay within quota. While there is a "Delete Forever" option, the default action for mail you're no longer interested in is archival rather than deletion and 1000MB is enough to store a very large amount of mail, particularly if you're not too wild with the old attachments. My hunch is that the vast majority of people will only use a fraction of this allocation anyway. The most important thing about it is that it should simply be Enough. My experience as a sysadmin is that very, very few people will want to store more than a few hundred MB of mail, and most of them will be people who don't know how to delete attachments once they've downloaded them.

I had heard say that the best way of getting a feel for how Gmail works is to direct all your mail to it in order to see how things are filed and arranged, so I've done exactly that. Right now, more or less all my personal mail's ending up in my Gmail account, spam and all. And boy, there's a lot of spam. The spam filtering does a pretty good job of tagging spam load, but it's possible (using the ! keyboard shortcut, among other ways) to manually tag spam which gets missed. I don't know whether this gets fed back into the filtering mechanisms, but it would make sense to do so. It's also easy to flag false positives. I do get a lot of spam as my primary mail account is the delivery point for a lot of aliases, but if you want to see exactly how much then this is the depressing sight with greeted me upon logging in a couple of nights ago. All the messages highlighted in yellow are about to be tagged as spam. (And the rest's list traffic. How tragic.)

The index looks like a standard webmail client at first sight, and it takes a while to figure out the important differences. Firstly, messages aren't stored consecutively in folders. Related messages are stored together in conversations and presented sequentially as with other threaded mailers. What's nifty, however, is that it does its best to present the conversation in sequence with quoted text hidden by default so it reads like a real conversation rather than repeating itself constantly. You can turn quotes back on if you want or even read raw messages if you want to look at the headers, but the defaults work nicely for organising mail.

There's more to life than the inbox, and to keep mail organised conversations can be tagged, which is akin to filing them in a folder. Tags are more powerful than simple folders, though. For instance, it's possible to set up a filter so that your comics-of-the-day mailshot's automatically tagged as, say, Comics. It'll appear in the inbox view so you don't forget to read it, but once you've read it and hit 't' to archive it it disappears from the inbox. It's still there, though - just look under the "Comics" tag and there all your comic mailshots are. Nifty stuff, especially when you're trying to dig out that cartoon you saw just a few days ago but can't find it because you're in the habit of deleting mail once it's read to keep your inbox tidy.

It's also possible to tag mail through filters without it being shown in the Inbox at all - useful for traffic from lists which you subscribe to because you feel you should but rarely get around to reading. What I'm getting at here is that while tags initially just look like yet another way of doing folders, their simplicity belies their power.

The default action for mail you don't want to see in your Inbox or wherever else it's ended up is to archive it, but it's possible to delete it forever (with the aptly-named Delete Forever) option. This doesn't delete it from everywhere at once as it'll still be on various backups - well, I hope Google are taking backups - but neither, I presume, is it filed in a super-sekrit Illuminati-controlled database for future blackmail purposes once you become ruler of the world. That's enough to keep me happy from a privacy point of view, as it's just about the same position you'll find anywhere else. Backups eventually time out and tapes get overwritten, and when that happens I don't see any reason why a deleted mail message won't be gone, gone, gone forever.

Oh yeah, I forgot when I posted this originally - some people apparently compose mail as well as receive it. Well, the composition window is just about what you'd expect, with the exception of the fact that it auto-completes addresses from the address book - everyone you send mail to is automatically added, so when you mail them again it's just a case of typing the first few characters. This is pretty neat and probably not yet that common on web applications.

And yes, you do get faintly relevant adverts displayed with your mail (one issue is that they sometimes obscure inline images such as those in the above-mentioned comics mail), but they don't bother me. I trust Google's past record in dealing with these things, and don't believe that any evil will come out of this.

So what did I think of Gmail? Well, all my mail's still going there. The speed and simplicity (and those keyboard shortcuts, whoa BABY) make it a plausible alternative to a desktop mail client, and the KISS approach works for me as someone who's rubbish at keeping mail filed neatly into folders - usually I just let it pile up for ages and then go on mass-deletion frenzies when the Inbox starts to get ridiculously big, and Gmail seems designed to accomodate habits like mine while making it easier to track down that mail message from three months ago which is suddenly important again.

However.. a couple of things are needed before I'll love it as much as Apple Mail. There are a few browser issues (ads rendering on top of embedded images, for instance) which I trust will get sorted out, but what would really, really sell it to me (and I'd be prepared to pay for this, probably to replace my .Mac account) are two things:

a) Universal browser support, even if that means using a cut-down version of Gmail on browsers which don't do the nifty stuff the full version needs

b) IMAP access! I work on various machines, and it would be useful to have access to my Gmail account on my main machine through the instance of OSX Mail which also handles my work account.

Apart from that, I really love Gmail's simplicity - a clean approach to mail with Enough Storage You Don't Need To Worry (tm?) and concentration on providing mail service rather than value-added portal services (tried using Hotmail recently?) surrounding your mail with banner ads and links to other services you don't care about. I hope that the privacy concerns some people have can be addressed, and I also hope that the few nags I've complained about go away, but even if they don't I can see few reasons not to like Gmail. Works for me, as they say.

Posted by mpk at April 23, 2004 12:38 PM | TrackBack