Silicon Valley Musings

Robert has started a discussion about email and GMail. I used Outlook and Exchange for over a decade at Reuters. During my DV fellowship, I was lucky enough to get a very early invite to Google GMail. Over the last two years, I have become a GMail convert. Below are some of my reasons.

Things I like about GMail:

1. Instant access to all my mail on the three machines I use almost every day: my iMac at work, my MacBook Pro laptop for home and work, and my Windows XP PC at home.

2. Wicked fast search of the nine thousand email messages I have received and seven hundred and fifty that I have sent over the past two years. For example, GMail found my 190 email messages that include the word “Robert” in less than three seconds. The oldest received in 7/04, the newest received yesterday.

3. Very reliable, seamless spam filtering.

4. Automatic harvesting of every email address from which I have ever received or sent mail into my contact list, currently over 550 contacts.

5. Conversations. This was the hardest feature to get used to but now I find it difficult to follow email threads in Yahoo! or Hotmail without this UI feature.

6. Ability to group emails using tags or Labels. This feature is similar to Outlook’s folder, except an email can be associated with more than one label.

7. Really nice Ajax-based spell checker.

8. Awesome email access on my Sprint-based Nokia 6225 mobile phone.

9. Automatic parsing of email for events or addresses to be included in the integrated Calendar or Google Maps.

10. SMS alerts for calendar reminders.

11. Optional forwarding to another account. I do this to my free Yahoo! account for redundancy.

12. Over 2.7GB of available storage and growing every day.

Enhancements I would like to see:

a. Better POP support for disconnected Email. I would like to be able to download the last couple of days of email to my laptop, ideally to a Google Desktop version of GMail. I don’t travel that much or commute on public transit. If I did, this would be much more important to me.

b. When I archive or delete an email that I am currently reading, I would like GMail to display the next email instead of the current list of emails. This is the one behavior I really miss from Outlook.

c. Ability to get an annual archive of my GMail that I could keep locally for my own personal records. Theoretically, I can download my email using POP, but is practically very difficult.

d. Have GMail search also index the contents of attached documents.

Some things I do differently now that I use GMail:

1. I don’t keep an address book anymore. I just have people email me their address or phone number. It is easy to just search for their name and the word address.

2. I use my USB thumb drive much less often. Most of the time it is faster to GMail a document, spreadsheet, or project to myself across the room than it is load and unload it on a thumb drive. I also get the added bonus of having an archived version of the document as well.

3. I don’t keep a daily to-do list. I just email myself a list of things to do and select the email’s “star.” I can quickly see all my pending action items by selecting “Starred.”