Google’s Gmail service is wildly popular and quite good. And while this should not be considered a review of the service, as much as a commentary about one aspect of it, I will point out a couple of my observations.
It’s fast. At least the bulk of the time, in about the same time that a normal search with Google returns results, clicking a message opens not only the message but all related messages as well. This includes messages that were sent in response to a previous message. To be sure, Mozilla’s Thunderbird and Apple’s Mail have been using message threading for years, but I never used a mailer that “grafts” sent messages into the threads as well. It’s a sort of neat feature. I’m not sure if I prefer to have it, but some friends have told me they love it.
There are no folders! Google has taken the concept of a folder and converted it to one of labels. You don’t move a message to a folder, you apply a label to it. The benefit is that a message can be associated with both the “Inbox” and “Banking” label. The POP and IMAP equivalent would be to copy the message to the “Banking” folder.
Access by desktop clients is the point of this commentary. Some time back Google started to make IMAP access available. Not being a huge fan of web-based email, this was great news for me. I immediately set up Mail to use it and haven’t looked back, except for those times when the IMAP service has gone missing.
In baseball terms, the natural mapping of labels to IMAP folders, mail being continuously synchronized between the desktop client and the server, and despite not being apparent from the web-based client, the ability to create sub-folders on the desktop client, are all “big hits.” The foul ball however is that for some reason, every week or so, I have to fight with lost connections to the IMAP server. When this happens, I’ve noticed that I can still access mail from the web client, and the outages generally don’t last too long. So, it’s not so disruptive that I’ve been unwilling to contend with the problem.
Since I’ve been using the service, I haven’t been able to figure out what the trouble is or what causes it. I also use AOL’s IMAP access without issue and have had an Outlook-using colleague of mine tell me he experiences the trouble as well. So, I’m fairly certain that I’m not somehow bringing the trouble on myself. And while I will keep using the feature, it has continued to be a frustrating aspect of an otherwise great service.
It’s fast. At least the bulk of the time, in about the same time that a normal search with Google returns results, clicking a message opens not only the message but all related messages as well. This includes messages that were sent in response to a previous message. To be sure, Mozilla’s Thunderbird and Apple’s Mail have been using message threading for years, but I never used a mailer that “grafts” sent messages into the threads as well. It’s a sort of neat feature. I’m not sure if I prefer to have it, but some friends have told me they love it.
There are no folders! Google has taken the concept of a folder and converted it to one of labels. You don’t move a message to a folder, you apply a label to it. The benefit is that a message can be associated with both the “Inbox” and “Banking” label. The POP and IMAP equivalent would be to copy the message to the “Banking” folder.
Access by desktop clients is the point of this commentary. Some time back Google started to make IMAP access available. Not being a huge fan of web-based email, this was great news for me. I immediately set up Mail to use it and haven’t looked back, except for those times when the IMAP service has gone missing.
In baseball terms, the natural mapping of labels to IMAP folders, mail being continuously synchronized between the desktop client and the server, and despite not being apparent from the web-based client, the ability to create sub-folders on the desktop client, are all “big hits.” The foul ball however is that for some reason, every week or so, I have to fight with lost connections to the IMAP server. When this happens, I’ve noticed that I can still access mail from the web client, and the outages generally don’t last too long. So, it’s not so disruptive that I’ve been unwilling to contend with the problem.
Since I’ve been using the service, I haven’t been able to figure out what the trouble is or what causes it. I also use AOL’s IMAP access without issue and have had an Outlook-using colleague of mine tell me he experiences the trouble as well. So, I’m fairly certain that I’m not somehow bringing the trouble on myself. And while I will keep using the feature, it has continued to be a frustrating aspect of an otherwise great service.
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