On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 14:17:23 -0500, Dan Drake <dan at dandrake.org> wrote: > I'm pretty sure many of us here store email on our computer at home and ssh > to it to read email -- so I have many, many gigabytes of email storage. I > use mutt, which does threading, and there are programs like grepmail that > search through email very effectively. Lots of small, efficient programs > that work together...very Unixy. If you really like mutt and always have access to it, then Gmail isn't for you. But if you use GUI email clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, etc., or worse, a user of traditional webmail like Yahoo!, Hotmail, SquirrelMail, then you will almost certainly like Gmail better. > Gmail seems like any other webmail system. For those of you who use it, > why? I'm just curious why it is such a big deal. http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/benefits.html http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/screen1.html http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/screen2.html In addition to what Adam Maloney said, Gmail is FAST. You might not notice it if you only test Gmail by reading a couple of messages, but once you start using Gmail it will be very apparent how much faster it is than all other webmail. It's a perfect example of Javascript / DHTML done correctly. And before you start saying, "ick Javascript", try it out. On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 14:45:53 -0500 (CDT), Adam Maloney <adam at whee.org> wrote: > Lots of other interface niceties that make e-mail navigation "smooth" I > don't know how else to describe it. I have to use Outhouse at work, and > it's like a train-wreck for e-mail. I agree 100%. After using Outlook Express for five years for my personal mail, I switched to Gmail after trying it for less than a week. > While completely useless as-is, I can > conceive of someone creating a very large and robust file-store using > GMail accounts Perhaps in the future Google will offer a direct file storage service, similar to .Mac's iDisk. > They encourage moving inactive messages from the Inbox into an Archive > folder, rather than creating a folder hierarchy and (either manually or > automatically) sorting messages into folders. This is completely > backwards from what most people are used to, but it works well. You're missing a huge feature of Gmail: labels. Instead of placing a message into a single folder (effectively assigning it a single label), you assign multiple labels to a message. The list of labels is displayed similar to how traditional email clients display folders. You can click on a label to view all messages with that label. You lose the hierarchy of folders with labels, but it's completely unnecessary. Think of labels as meta folders: messages can effectively be in multiple "folders". > The archive folder is actually a pretty good system. The "All Mail" folder isn't actually a folder at all. It simply displays a list of all messages that don't have a Spam or Trash label. There is only one real "folder" in Gmail. Labels are used for everything in Gmail. Starred messages simply have a Starred label. You can create labels called Read and Unread to display all messages with those properties, too. > More on the interface - most people have heard about the ads. Just like > the ads in their search results, they are non-intrusive and barely > noticable. It's very cool, because it adds both ads and search results. It's very funny to see a newbie ask a question on a mailing list and then see the answer right there in the search results. -- David Phillips <david at acz.org> http://david.acz.org/ _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list