Jennifer Grucza

Well, since Mike P asked, here are more of my impressions of Gmail.

1. The spam filtering is not as good as my Yahoo Mail account. I’m not sure how Google filters spam, but if it uses some sort of neural net, it should get better with time as more and more people report messages as spam (or not spam for the ones that were incorrectly classified). Hopefully this is the case.
2. When you have messages in your Spam “folder” (they may be labels, not folders, but the interface lends itself to either way of thinking), a “Delete All” link shows up next to the Spam folder link. What’s weird is that clicking this link doesn’t actually delete all your spam messages. For some reason, I have to click it two or three times for all the messages to be deleted. Very strange behavior.
3. When an email has a URL in the message text, Gmail puts a link to that site, as you would expect. However, they’re using Javascript to open a new window, and whatever Javascript they’re using opens a new window even if you Ctrl-click on it to open a new tab in Firefox. You get your tab, but you get the new window too!
4. There’s no way to apply a new filter to old messages. I have to manually search for those messages and label them myself. Sometimes I don’t realize I’m going to want to apply a label to a set of messages until I find myself getting a lot of them.
5. It won’t let me edit an existing filter. I have to delete and create a new one. It would be nice to be able to change the options on it, such as whether to skip the inbox and move it straight to the archive, without going through the hassle of cutting and pasting my search parameters into a new filter.
6. A minor nitpick, but the positions of some controls aren’t consistent in different views. For example, the “Apply label” dropdown is off to the right in the message list view, but on the left in the message view. And that dropdown doesn’t even appear in the footer, even though the Archive button and “More actions…” dropdown both appear both in the header and footer. It’s not a big deal, but more consistency would make it easier and faster to use.

I’ve submitted some of these comments to Gmail and have received acknowledging emails, so hopefully the official release will be much more polished.

I just realized I’ve only been saying negative things so far, so maybe it comes across that I don’t like Gmail, but actually, I do. The conversation grouping is a great feature, and it’s nice how they color code the names of senders in the view of the conversation. I also like how you can see the first bit of the email message in the message list view (you can turn this option off if you don’t like it). Another cool feature might be to have the ability to color-code your labels, and display labeled messages with those colors (maybe as a background for the table row, or the text of the subject). I know Eudora had this feature the last time I used it, back in 1999. I really liked the immediate visual impact it gave.

I wonder what the people at Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are thinking right now, and what their reaction will be (has there been any reaction from the yet?). Their current offerings are no competition to 1000GB of free storage. Will they end up dying off?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 7th, 2004 at 5:34 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.