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??
Hello, I'm Tim. I'm a geek working in social software who also takes photographs and messes around with technology. This is my personal website.
You can find out more about me and this website, or browse through the full archives. I also take photographs, hack around with things and work for a living. You can find me elsewhere on the interwebs, get in touch, or subscribe to a feed from this site.
The site's content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License, unless indicated otherwise. Please don't steal it :-)
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
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.
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.