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GMail - First Impressions · 16. June 2004, 23:16

I’ve been invited to join GMail ! I won’t link to the inviter here lest they get bombarded with invitation requests. (You know who you are, thank you again). For the record, I have no invitations.

The GMail interface is spartan as one would expect from Google. It is therefore quick to load on both high and low bandwidth lines (tested on DSL and modem). Googles servers are, as usual, blazingly fast. This is not really that surprising when you see this article on Google’s infrastructure That article is already certainly out of date though. You don’t think they ever stop innovating in Moutain View, do you!?

I particularly like the threaded view and the dynamic feel of the pages. Just enough information is shown to the viewer at any time. For example in the threaded view, it is possible to ‘Show Options’, this reveals the mail headers and the standard Reply buttons etc. Clicking reply opens the reply area just below the message you are replying too.

The address book is very basic, but I guess it is a Beta service and their aim is to create the best e-mail application – address books will come later.

There is also no way as yet of downloading messages – I therefore won’t be using this for any mail I’d like to archive. I refuse to become tied to any proprietary service (since I own my own domains, my use of off-site web based e-mail has been and will continue to be limited to a few specific purposes, even then I don’t want to become locked in though – someday I may need to retrieve those e-mails!).

I haven’t yet got much mail to my Inbox so I can’t yet comment on the searching for messages. I have subscribed to a couple of lists that I otherwise not have bothered (low signal to noise ratio – not worth downloading over 56K modem). Some of these lists are high traffic and they are reasonably diverse in content. I will write later with my impressions of searching the messages.

For now though, I would rate GMail as better than average. The storage will be useful, of that I have no doubt. For me though, a method of downloading messages is essential and slightly less important is a good address book.

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