Ok, so I'm a late adopter. (Well, for an early adopter, I'm a late adopter.) This means that there's already a lot of GMail reviews out there. (Here and here and, well, generally, here ).
But last week I got a gmail account, and so early this week I started all1 my mail forwarding to danyel-at-gmail.com, and--after a week now--I have 232 messages in there. Which is nothing, really, but it's enough to start making a meaningful statement about the service.
I should comment that I am not contrasting Gmail to (free) Yahoo mail or Hotmail or mail.com or any of the free services. If you want a disposaccount to catch spam or register for personal ads or whatever, you can do that fairly easily. And there's no question that GMail is head and shoulders above those systems: fast, responsive, lots of storage, unobtrusive ads, it's good.
What I'm doing is comparing GMail to my day to day mailer (Mozilla Thunderbird). My conclusion is that it's a close matchup: see below the fold for more.
1 My procmail script seems to be slipping up once in a while; four or five crucial messages didn't get forwarded. I still haven't figured out why.
Update 6/26 under "Search"
You know, by now, the basics. GMail provides you--by invitation only--a gigabyte of free storage space for your email. In exchange you get unobtrusive2 but nominally targetted ads. (Incidently, a gigabyte isn't really that much email. Even without big attachments, I seem to collect a megabyte a day. If I start sending out drafts of my papers with any frequency, I'd expect this to be done in about a year.)
Rather than having a folder system, GMail uses a label system (like Lotus Notes!): you tag a message with labels, which allows you to dig into folders to retrieve them. The difference is that messages can be multiply-labelled, and so the same message can live in several folders.
(This means that you should probably not delete messages--it might exist somewhere else. The UI makes it clear that you shouldn't, but why set bad habits? You've got a gigabyte to play with.)
Once you see the world from a "label" perspective, a few things make sense. Messages can be "starred" (a label that has its own folder, and has a visible user-interface widget); "sent" mail is just another sort of label. So is the "inbox": you move things out of the inbox and they just drop into the endless pool of "all mail", referred to as the "archive".
Irritatingly, "spam" is also a label. I've found messages in my spam folder that were labelled with a filter (see below): that is, I had told the system I wanted the message, and it was tagged as spam anyway. How rude!
Oops, a correction: "star" applies to a single message, not a thread. But the starred folder holds all threads with stars in them
Unread messages are bold-faced; in addition, any labels that contain unread messages are bold-faced. Except "all mail", which means that things that you don't read because you aren't really interested can go away. Drop to your all mail view, hit "select unread", and you've got them to go surf the CompUSA weekly specials from March. The window title--something like Gmail - Inbox (1)--indicates the number of unread inbox messages. (Even when the user is reading a different folder, the page label counts inbox messages.)
GMail makes an effort to lump together messages in the same conversation. It seems to be mostly right: it seems to be a little bit relying on heuristics, a little bit on the "in-reply-to" header, and a little bit on content. I haven't seen it slip up yet.
On the other hand, I wish I could manually intervene ("These three messages? Same thread. Really. And that one? Isn't.") when there are things to be lumped together. I suppose that's partially what labels are for, but I also like seeing things in one continuous set.
The thread visualization, however, is weak. It's just a stack of headers. (See image). I'm spoiled by good work at Microsoft and IBM and even Google Groups to understand why I can't get at least some texture to reply relationships.
Email threads aren't flat, and participation changes, and it would be nice to have some way of knowing what the connections between messages are.
Gmail comes with a straightforward mechanism for labelling messages automatically, and shuffling them out of the inbox automatically. This allows you the workflow of "deal with all messages about that side-project all at once, and LATER". For example, messages that come in about JUNG:"http://jung.sourceforge.net" get both labelled and moved directly to the archive: essentially, they are tucked directly into my JUNG folder, and I try to heck that only once a day. Unread messages that have been moved to the archive don't show in the window title. It's also possible to label, to move directly to archive without labelling, and to delete messages.
Rather elegantly, the filter comes with a search. When you create a new filter, the system shows you all messages that the filter applies to, so you can judge whether it's correct or not.
The filter system seems to run all messages through all filters: that is, if the message is to be labelled (due to, say, the subject line) and it's to be moved to the archive (due to the sender), then both those actions will be performed. I don't know how the "move to trash" option works in conjunction with the other flags.
I like inline, powerful full-text search. It's good. After I graduate, in my Copious Spare Time ™, I will write a powerful full-text search for Thunderbird, and then my life will be much better. (The inline is important! Don't make me read my email from some other application!)
I found that the search fit right into my workstyle: I just tap a few letters, and whatever it was reappears. We'll see how that extends over a year of mail, rather than a few days. (I also found myself missing it when I used my desktop client.)
*Update, 6/26: Ok, I have a real annoyance with the search system. I got email from someone with a weird email address: "markjenols-at-aol.com". (Not really, but close enough.) It's from my aunt and uncle "Mark" and "Jenny" "Olson", who have an AOL account together. Now, I can't easily remember whether it's MarkJenOls, or MarkJennOls, or MarkJennyOlson, or what. So I did the obvious thing, and entered the name "Mark and Jen Olson" into the contact book. When I compose a new message to "Mark", it auto-corrects to allow me "Mark and Jenny Olson" (same for "Jen", or "Olson"). But I can't search my mail for "Mark", "Jen", "Jenny", "Olson", or "Ols." Google neither does substrings for "from" lines, nor does it search contacts.
I ultimately found the message through searching on (of all things) "AOL".
Gmail tracks contacts who you send to or get email messages from and lists them all. You can correct the information, but you can't merge them ("bob@ics.uci.edu" is the same guy as "x.bob@uci.edu"). You also can't currently upload your contact list from some other source. However, the name completion for contacts is very elegant, and it even checks things like middle names.
There's also no easy connection between GMail and the rest of my archives. All messages from before last Thursday still languish in my IMAP folders. A couple of tools have emerged that are meant to help with that, but I haven't tried them out yet.
(Note that there's another GMail:http://packages.debian.org/stable/mail/gmail.html out there, associated vaguely with the Gnome project. It also has tools like
Mbox2GMail and GMail2MBox but they are for the wrong GMail as far as I know.)
When it comes down to it, my biggest gripe with gmail is its best feature: it's online. I send a lot of my best emails offline: without a 'Net to distract me (mmm... strongbad), without news to check, and with a couple years' archives to surf through, I can write interesting, thoughtful responses to things. When I next plug in, I synch up, and the email disappears to the aether. Yes, I can fake that with an external notepad, and maybe keep a copy of my gmail around to check, but it's really not the same experience: online-only email encourages me to write one-line responses, quick messages.
The interface encourages these one-line messages: between the automatic folding-away of old message content (pages of little arrows disappear into a single link "- Show quoted text -"), and the convenient type-to-reply box at the bottom, there's really no reason why I should edit my response much when I can dash off a post-it. Many times, a post-it is exactly what I need, and I have found the interface extremely convenient.
On the other hand, when I'm writing a longer email, I don't like the fact that I can't save an intermediate draft, that I can't freeze the computer and wander away, that I need to stay logged in and online throughout composition.
It gets a little worse. Even though you can pull a response into a new window, you need to do so before you start typing. Gmail can't transfer a draft into the new window. Which means that the one line-response that has suddenly morphed into a half-hour project is blocking your other email from being visible! You can't return to the inbox while you're working in an entry box without losing what you're doing. For those of us who really do use their email as a workplace--as a storage for short thoughts, long thoughts, and everything in the middle--gmail forces us to create a new window before we start typing, or lose out on inflow. (And on outflow: I can't compose a second message while I work on the first.)
Update 6/23/04: This seems to be recently fixed.
My work around has been to open a second window with a GMail inbox. It works, but it doesn't feel elegant.
Bear with me a moment: perhaps I live too much inside the space of my upcoming dissertation. But when I'm looking at my contact list, I need to exit it and then start a new search in order to get messages from or to that person. I fairly strongly feel that everything should be able to be turned into a query on the database. That would give me one-click access to my conversations with X when I see their names. Indeed, Gmail doesn't allow "sort by" anything except date.
I like Gmail. I think I like it enough to keep it as my primary mailer for the next few weeks while I work on my dissertation: it might discipline me to send shorter messages more frequently, and to stay off email more easily the rest of the time. After I'm done, I suppose I'll use Pop Goes the Gmail to get mail out of Gmail and back to my desktop. If I stop using it soon, it's most likely because I find forwarding to it too unreliable--which wouldn't be gmail's fault.
Of course, when I get proper synchronization between Gmail and the offline world and my del.ico.us and someday, StuffIveSeen then I will be in a position to not care where my data is, because it's all available. Someday.
2 On my 18" monitor the ads are so far over that I never see them:
I'm too busy looking at the left side of the screen, where the content
is. So I can't say whether the ads are any good or not.