Have got a gmail account recently (Thanks to Shankara kedar who sent me the invitation).
Though the over all look isn’t very good, the thought of not having to delete an email is very excellent. When I did delete a bounced email, it first moved into the trash. I browsed to the trash and deleted that mail too, gmail simply says ’’who cares to delete mail when one has 1000MB’’. At each and every stage we are reminded of the large amount of space available.
I liked the ’’auto address filling’’ feature very much. I hadn’t installed the yahoo auto-address feature, mainly because it needed me to install some software in my comp, which I didn’t wasn’t interested in. As we just start typing an email id, a menu come up with all possible email ids to choose from which start with the letters we just typed.
Another good feature is that we can export the address book from other accounts. This enabled me to have the whole list of addresses from my yahoo account into gmail account. Also any email I send to a address not in my address book is automatically added to the gmail ad-book. The negative part of the gmail address book as of now is that it has only 3 features, name and email id. The other details exported from yahoo address book like, birthday days, addresses, additional email ids, contact numbers etc are all put into a ’’misc’’ category. Maybe it will not be long before google makes the address book into a more complete one.
Another interesting feature of gmail is that we can use only ’’keyboard’’ to do all the email-ing. There is a long list of keyboard shortcuts that are posted and which can be used to traverse through the emails and also to use the services. This enables us to send/read/traverse through the email without moving our hand to the mouse. This feature will seem exciting to any one used to using ’’Vi’’ editor in Linux.
Gmail lets us have all the replies to an email stacked together. They call this as having ’’conversation’’. And I feel this is an excellent feature. All my email/replies for a message are in the same folder so we don’t have to going back in the browser or searching where the original email and replies exist.
Gmail is using labels instead of folders, and says that using this we can better advantage than folder, which I have’nt yet explored.
The only drawback I see in gmail is that it cannot be used in older versions of browsers. I tried opening it on Mozilla-1.2, but it says it cannot open as gmail will function only on Mozilla-1.4 and up. Maybe I will check this out ones I update the browser.
The help files given are very informative and I suggest that everyone using gmail MUST read them to use the gmail service in the most effecient manner.
Hope I won’t have to delete a mail in the next 5 years, the time, an average user will need to fill his 1000MB of space, as said by gmail.