Behind the curtain
Tuesday May 25, 2004 – 10:01 pmHey, I got a Gmail account! Somebody who liked the Demos release offered it to me in return for my "gift of music". God, the hype has been so intense that I’m actually kinda excited right now. I got a COOL name too!! Which I won’t tell you here, ‘cuz I don’t give out e-mail addresses on the web. Too bad for you, web!
At this point I can’t even think about using Gmail seriously, as they have no POP access yet… it’s a data graveyard no matter how big the graveyard may be. Also at present there’s no way to access other POP accounts from the inside. Which means I wouldn’t be able to use my newly-paid-up Death2Spam account, and that would be unacceptable. Hell, you can’t even auto-forward your Gmail yet. I guess they really want the beta testers to stick around and use it for real instead of forwarding everything outta there and using it only as a vanity address.
Still, it’s pretty cool. Looks nice. Similar to Yahoo, but faster and more elegant, I’m sure you’ve seen the screenshots. I don’t see a link anywhere to invite other people to join, or I’d surely invite YOU. ;-)
May 26th, 2004 at 1:48 am
I figured out what I’m gonna do! I’ll forward my mail from here to there, whilst leaving mail on the server here. Just for a week or so, to see how it goes. I can still archive my mail locally that way.
My mail folder, btw, is 300 megs, and that’s for sent and received mail since 1996 when I first started archiving it. So I’m not worried about filling up that gig anytime soon! I’m not crazy about my own archiving method either (a zillion folders) so we’ll see, maybe I’ll end up liking Gmail’s way of doing things better. I’d really feel better if they’d start to offer POP access though, and/or give me a way to upload older mboxes. I like to keep my archives in one place, that’s all. I must say using anything other than plain-vanilla mbox format to store my mail, makes me a little nervous! Am I just being old-fashioned?
May 26th, 2004 at 6:41 am
Ohhhh. I am so jealous, I could spit!!
May 26th, 2004 at 10:16 am
i saw this today re: GMail via POP3, no idea how well it works since I’m not cool enough to have a GMail account yet :p
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=169789&hl;=
May 26th, 2004 at 11:38 am
After a few weeks, you get two invitations you can send out. I don’t think you can get more, though.
I like gmail to some extent — I’ve been an ardent Pine user for the past decade, and I’ve slowly been using the OS X mail client since people ask me questions about it. But like most webmail systems, I can’t quite get used to the interface. That said, Gmail is fast, the conversation model is kind of neat (though it takes some getting used to), and even the controversial ads aren’t particularly prevalent.
At this point I’m using it as an address for comments and the occasional personal email. Once IMAP (or at least POP) functionality is added, or the ability to sync folders with my other clients in general, I’ll use it more.