g-mail

So while others were telling me I was falling victim to an April Fool's stunt, I instead got moving to try and procure my own g-mail account. Thanks to a friend, I just got my invite today, and so far I am impressed.

Here's a link to G-Mail's getting started page, which has info on the service. More first experiences and impressions are in the extended entry. I'm looking forward to using this service more and getting a deeper opinion, so e-mail me there (gmail.com), under the heerforce moniker.

First off, I get 1GB of mail space. Sweet. Next, the interface design is quite good, introducing great features while keeping a simple design. Google is pushing integrated search as a major feature, but since I just started the account, it was the other things that stood out.

One change from most e-mail clients is that g-mail automatically groups e-mail threads together into a single entry in your inbox. This means that when someone writes me, I reply, and then they write back, these are all grouped together and move to the top of the inbox when a new message arrives. Furthermore, when viewing an e-mail, all the previous messages in the thread are there, too, just waiting to be expanded with a single click. This includes all your replies, so no more digging through the sent mail folder if you don't want to. Reply and forward features are also integrated on the page, allowing you to respond in context (no new pages or windows popping up, unless you want to).

Another nice touch is that inbox entries don't just show the sender and title, they give a short list of the conversation history (i.e., not just the current sender, but previous ones as well), and after the title, the entry includes as much of the message body as fits. Other nice touches: instead of folders there are "labels" allowing multiple categorizations, auto-complete for address book entries (sorted by usage), integrated spell checking, and an easy flagging mechanism ("starred" mails) for keeping track of important messages.

All in all, it's a lot of little UI tweaks that I suspect will add up. It looks like the designers did a good job of optimizing the interface to make things faster and simpler. At this point I feel like a freakin' Google ad, but what can I say, I am impressed so far.

Which brings up the last point... Google includes ads along the side of the page, which are triggered by the content of your e-mail. While perhaps this may be unsettling to some, advertisers never see your content. After all, it's not as if Yahoo! or Hotmail can't read your content, too, and in those services the advertisers can actually use their banner ads to track you with cookies. G-mail's advertising is much more subtle... there are no annoying banner ads, and the text only ads, just like the ads on their search pages, are pretty easy to tune out.