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Speak, Gmail

by Bud Parr on March 04, 2008

Hardly exciting to write about Gmail after it’s been around for years now and has millions of users, but despite having a Gmail address dating from when you had to get invited and wait for one, I’ve only really just embraced it. Here’s why: Spam filtering, tagging, easy filters, and very fast search – to start.

The life of someone who gets hundreds of emails every day just got easier and I just uploaded over 6,000 messages from Apple Mail into my Gmail account (if you want to know how I did it, just drop me a line at budparr AT gmail DOT com). Bye Bye Apple Mail, I’ve moved to “the cloud.”

I have quite a few email accounts, one for personal, one for business and others for various projects. It wasn’t until I thought of using them all through the Gmail client that I started my love for Gmail. Now they all get the benefit of filtering, tagging, spam filtering and search and I get them through my iPhone via my one Gmail IMAP set up so I no longer have to check each account individually and changes there (read mail, etc) are automatically reflected on my computer.

So, access is big – Whether I’m on my iPhone, my computer, or any computer I’m looking at the same thing without any synching (I’m an anti-synchite).

The filters, which I always struggled with in Apple Mail are simple and fast, but the search function works so quickly that you only need them for all but your most common emails. The tags are so easy I’m tagging everything now (I’ve gone a little tag crazy like an administrative assistant on his first day with post-it notes).

Apple Mail’s spam filtering was okay, but never really kept up with things. Gmail’s is actually pretty amazing.

Searching, at least for the six thousand message I have (only 4% of my allotment), is very fast. I do try to delete unnecessary messages as they come in, both to keep my space clean and my search results better.

Keyboard shortcuts – learn ‘em. Navigating email is faster.

Gmail is a Web app, meaning that I get improvements as they hit without having to think about updates (why should I ever have to think about updating my software?).

Gmail is smart: Integration with the Gmail Calendar program is nearly seamless to the point it’s almost scary. It detects events in your emails (the same way it tries to present contextual ads) and asks you if you want to add to your calendar.

Integration with contacts (which in and of itself is not fully fleshed out yet) is also pretty clean. When you look up someone in your contact list or even just hover over their name in the inbox you can click to see your “recent conversations” with this person, either “to” or “from” them, something I’d have to set up in Apple Mail, which does either, but not both without setting up a smart folder. I don’t know how “recent” is defined, but for example, if I filtered to see conversations with my friend Mitch, it would list “1-20 of hundreds” etc.

It also integrates with Google Reader, another app I’ve come to rely on (more anon).

What I don’t like about Gmail

1) Ads. But as everyone knows, when you look at them every day you tune them out.

2) It’s a little scary having your life sitting on someone else’s servers (I have another post in store on that).

3) And, related to that, the potential for security leaks, the potential for government access (which, at least in principle is disturbing, although I don’t know how much of a threat that is). If I had concerns for critical data loss, I’d probably run a backup copy on my computer, but that’s not an issue for me.

4) Apple’s Mail handles attachments much more seamlessly. Nice when you’re sending photos, but I do that less because I use Flickr and other services now.

5) On the Mac, clicking a “mail-to” link doesn’t work. This is something that’s broken, so I suspect it will be fixed in time.

Enough Already

I haven’t even really gotten into the chat function, but I probably should and I’m sure there are other things to talk about. The only reason I post about Gmail at all is that I suspect a lot of other independents like me spend a lot of time grappling with an overload of email and I’m also going to be writing about Google Apps soon, so this, you might say, is an entry into that subject.

p.s.

The title of this post is an elliptic reference to Nabokov’s memoir, “Speak, Memory”. Email becomes for many of us a form of technological memory, recording events and conversations accessible in far more linear and accurate ways than the human memory.