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ISSN 1568-2218 | Established 1999

Gee, mail

… and I still have a couple of gmail invites to spare. I’ve been forcing them on people who had no idea of gmail’s indescribable coolness. A few people refused. One or two already had been invited. Others ‘already had an e-mail address’.

I must say it’s great to have one e-mail address that is, as yet, completely spam-free. All my other addresses have to go through Knowspam first and having the gmail account for online buying/selling, registering, etc, is nifty as it avoids the challenge/response barrier.

And ‘cvodb’ was too short…

‘Caroline’ was already taken (grrr aarrgh), but I’ve gots myself a gmail account to play with. So um, send me stuff – if you can make out the address in the screenshot.

gmail-screenshot.gif

  • The welcome message says ‘Gmail is different.’ It is and it takes getting used to.
  • The advertising is inobtrusive. It’s fast and smooth. No image bloat. Yay.
  • Threaded e-mail is cool. See Matt for for info about that.
  • I like the nerdiness of the keyboard shortcuts (j & k for previous and next conversation). I have never been keen on web-based e-mail and generally check my mail using telnet & mutt or pine whenever I’m abroad. These shortcuts are a nice throwback. I’m sure they’re bewildering to a lot of people.
  • My first completely selfish gripe: It would be nice if they reduced the username limit from six to five characters. So I can get ‘cvodb’ to work. I can’t help having such a lousy name. ‘cvoosten’ just doesn’t do it for me.
  • Can I import my old mail? Not yet. Export, too would be groovy.
  • I’ve forwarded one of my e-mail accounts to gmail and it’s not recognising the vast acres of spam coming in through it. Could be the forward.
  • Something about that blue screams ‘Yahoo’. Not good.
  • On shorter messages, the ads run over the bottom nav bar.
  • Privacy stuff… e-mail was never particularly private, was it?
  • It would be great if there was a popmail feature where you can read your e-mail on other accounts, but I’m guessing that’s not the point of gmail.
  • No draft posts, yet.
  • feature request: ascending AND descending threading (for mad webloggers who have got used to reading stuff the wrong way around)
  • There’s an ‘expand all’ link. Would be great if it did ‘collapse all’ too.
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