I don’t get gmail - am I missing something?

October 15th, 2004

A bit of a confession here - I’m not sure I get the excitement over gmail.

It seems to be a perfectly well-designed online mail system, and the search facilities are neat - but why does this make it so different and wonderful? I use an IMAP-based service - Fastmail - and it gives me the best of both worlds, online access and offline replication. There just doesn’t seem to be a killer advantage to gmail in comparison - so am I missing something??

Filed under Clutter Management |

3 Responses to “I don’t get gmail - am I missing something?”

  1. travis on October 15, 2004 10:41 pm

    Gmail is neat because, they are allowing developers access to their API’s, which allows people to create something like the GMail Drive Shell Namespace Extension. http://www.clinedblog.com/node/view/231

  2. Harold Jarche on October 16, 2004 2:19 am

    I like it because it has 1 GB of space, which makes FTP obsolete for me. It also acts as my spam filter, and is the email address that I post on my website. Not exciting, but a practical tool.

  3. Jonathan Sanderson on October 20, 2004 11:47 am

    If you’re missing something, so am I. So far as I can make out, Gmail is web-based email that doesn’t suck, with a decent indexed search system. For people reliant on Hotmail or the like, that’s a significant step. But for those of us with decent personal mail systems and/or ‘good enough’ fallback webmail, I don’t see what the big deal is.

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