Jennifer Grucza

Haha! I am now one of those lucky people to get a Gmail account before the rest of the world, thanks to a friend of a friend who works at Google.

Haven’t had much time to play with it yet, though I have already sent in my first suggestion (to have some sort of message notification like Yahoo mail does with Yahoo Messenger).

Thanks to EFL (email forwarding for life) from MIT, I can now get most of my mail messages in Gmail without even telling anyone my new address. Once I get a few mail messages, maybe I’ll write more about what I think of the interface.

So far I have become confused a couple of times. The first was in trying to send the aforementioned comment. Presented with a radio button for type of issue and a small text box labeled “Question”, I figured I had to squish my whole message into that text box, which I thought was annoying (I was going to ask them to make it a textarea instead). But then I pressed the “Continue” button and was presented with a page asking for more detailed information. Now, they could have made it more clear that they would be doing this, so I wouldn’t try to type all my thoughts into that tiny text box.

The second moment of confusion came when I was trying to create a new filter for the comments I get on this website. I was presented with several search boxes, for the From, To, and Subject fields (as well as boxes for “Has the words” and “Doesn’t have”). What I wanted to do was filter messages beginning with the text “[Jennifer Grucza]”, which is what WordPress prefixes my comment emails with. But presented with this form, I wasn’t sure whether entering that would end up only matching subjects with those exact words and no more, or whether it would match messages containing those words plus others. I guess I’m just used to seeing a dropdown with “Contains”, “Begins with”, “Ends with”, etc. for each field. I guess I will have to get used to the paradigm that the filters work like a Google search. But still, it would have been nice to have a little more explanation in the Help page, at least. I’m still not sure if there’s a way to specify that that text has to be at the beginning of the subject line (I don’t know of any Google search syntax to do that - does Google handle regular expressions?)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2004 at 5:03 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.