[sociate] Learning to love Gmail

I recently helped my Mom start using a Gmail account, after years of using
AOL's mail. (Disclosure: I'm a small-potatoes investor in Google.) The
transition hasn't been that easy for her, between her normal concerns about
having to notify people about a new address, to figuring out Gmail's
interface (how do you really use labels? how do you store a draft message?)
and grooving new use habits over well-grained, quirky ones. But I'm Mom's
tech support (as are many of you, I bet), so let me describe the many
problems Gmail does solve, and beautifully:

*       Over the years, I've had many problems with AOL's Personal File
Cabinet, a poorly written, completely closed application that holds each
user's e-mail (and more), and now and then gets corrupted and creates chaos
for the unwary (I dislike this file only marginally more than my own Outlook
.pst file.)

*       AOL allows a max of 1000 messages in the inbox. Mom subscribes to
quite a few mailing lists and spends considerable time just keeping her
inbox from shutting down. Can you say "one Gigabyte"?

*       Every day, Mom saves to her hard drive a variety of news stories
from the Web (in their infinite wisdom, too many online news sources put
their stories in paid archives, making some money for their owners, but
making it practically impossible to look at historic documents; this is
fodder for a different piece). For the same reason, I e-mail myself a bunch
of stories every day. But AOL's editor, for reasons we and AOL tech support
can't ever seem to figure out (or fix, through myriad "upgrades" of AOL's
software), often saves a separate folder alongside each saved story -- even
though we're taking pains (and extra mouseclicks) to save them as text only.
Anyway, that problem goes away with Gmail. 

*       Then there's the search thing. Native in Gmail, don't even think
aboudit in AOL. 

*       Since Mom's saving text files on her drive, to find them again or
maintain where they are, she has to learn both AOL's funky approach to the
file system and Windows' native version. After more than eight years of
trying, I still can't teach her how to move and find files in Windows
Explorer. 

*       Filters and labels in Gmail aren't as simple as they might be to
understand and implement, but next to no advanced features at all, they
rock. 

I know many people who still use their AOL accounts as their primary
business e-mail bins. Given how difficult and limiting that is, I foresee an
exodus. 

With Gmail, Google has created a beautiful, subtle experiment in UI design
and Web-hosted service. Keyboard shortcuts on a Web interface? Everything
perfectly searchable with Google's search power? Yowza. Everything Google
swift? Sweet autotyping of e-mail addresses? And with WiFi springing up in
so many places, connectivity is getting juuuust about good enough to
contemplate switching. Of course, then you can't do e-mail on airplanes, at
least not until something like Boeing's  <http://www.connexionbyboeing.com/>
Conexion service becomes available everywhere (hey, what's the holdup
there?). And Gmail's not set up yet to manage mail from my own domain. But
give them a little time. 

I am concerned about privacy, but I worry less about Google here than about
Yahoo or MSN, or our legal system and other organizations that may not want
to pry today, but will want to later on, a concern that affects all online
e-mail providers pretty much equally. For a great, nuanced look at the
privacy issues, read Brad Templeton's
<http://www.templetons.com/brad/gmail.html> essay. 

In its recent
<http://www.businessweek.com/print/premium/content/04_18/b3881001_mz001.htm>
cover story about Google (requires subscription), BusinessWeek describes
Google's ballsy move to put advertising in e-mail. Eh? Have they ever used
Yahoo Mail or YahooGroups? Don't they see flashy ads taking up more and more
screen real estate there? Sure, Google's method is different, but it's not a
new thing. Not by a long shot. 

By bouncing around the issues, I think I've addressed all of Google's major
competitors so far: AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft. None comes out looking good.
Yahoo just upgraded its storage to 100 Meg, fully a tenth of Gmail's Gig. 

Gmail is the first outside service that's made me stop to consider leaving
the Outlook/POPmail combo I'm using now -- in fact, leaving desktop
computing for services that live on the Net. I look at my 1.6GHz Schmentium
M machine churning away helplessly while it tries to deal with incoming
spam, Outlook filters, Lookout indexing (nowhere near as sweet as Gmail
search) and the odd virus attack. I look at Outlook's .pst file on my hard
drive, and it strikes fear in my heart. I know I may never see that data
again. Tell me you know how you'll open that file ten years from now. 


posted by Jerry Michalski at 10:41
<http://www.sociate.com/blog/archives/2004_06_01_archive.html#10878840820561
4573> PM

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