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Google's GMail Revolution

Thanks to Robert from bump.net I now have GMail account. So what's the BIG deal? Well, to start off you're given 1000MB of space! Google significantly upped the ante on storage space (in comparison Yahoo offers 100MB and Hotmail's limit is a paltry 2MB). In terms of what it takes to manage incoming email Google has whittled it down to just 3 main actions: 1) Archive, 2) Report as Spam or 3) Move to Trash.

Also, there are no folders instead you classify your email with a labels (if it's an important email you can mark it with a 'star' which is the same as flagging. So let's say I receive 3 emails, one is work related reminding me of a lunch appointment for Friday (the email contains the address and phone of a new restaurant), the second email is a pretty good joke from a friend and the final email is organ enlargement related.

The first email I'd label as Work and 'star' it, the second I'd label as Personal and archive and the last one I'd report as spam (which helps Google block future junk mails from that sender). The inbox would now just contain my lunch meeting reminder because the joke will have been archived and the spam deleted. Once my lunch meeting has passed I could also achive that email. Now what if two weeks later a friend wants to try out that restaurant. Well, that email has been archived and is now in 'All Mail'. So do I go in there and look 2 weeks back until I find the email. Of course not, this is Google - the search engine company so I run search for that email - I'd type in restaurant's name (since it was starred it'll be even easier to find).

GMail strives for a cleaner inbox and to reduce the time people spend organizing and retrieving their emails (email conversations are also organized by threads which isn't new since some email clients have had this feature for years but GMail is the first of the webmail services to offer it). Now I'm a multi-folder junkie, I must have at least 40 folders in my Outlook but I must admit when I'm going to look up an email from some-time-ago I generally right-click on the folder that I think the email is in and run a search. Sometimes I guess wrong or don't remember which project a certain piece of info is in and resort to running a complete inbox search anyway.

GMail will be a free service when it launches (which I anticipate will be pretty soon since they've been ramping up the # of invitations they've been sending). GMail doesn't include advertising footer messages in emails you send but it does show targeted google ads on the right-hand column. People have been complaining that it's an invasion of privacy since it scans your email messages to determine what ads to display. Well, email is not private period (unless you're using PGP). So I wouldn't use any webmail service to send extremely personal/private information. One java developer noted that he switched all his tech mailing lists to his gmail account and doesn't mind seeing ads for the eclipse IDE or other java related products/services.

One concern is whether Google will allow POP email clients to connect to GMail, I'd say probably not since that would get around the targeted ads (perhaps as a paid feature?). I like what I've seen of GMail so far and have high expectations for the service. If they can keep the spam count low (what drove me from my Yahoo account) it'll definitely be my new webmail serivce of choice. Now if only Google released an instant messaging service ;)