I got a chance to play a bit with Gmail today...
- Holy crap it's fast.
- I only had a dozen test mails in the system and I already felt like they were getting lost. Or I was getting lost. I think the "just search for stuff" approach will take a lot of getting used to.
- What's with the top quoting?
- It doesn't work with Safari.
- I didn't realize how much I love the "quote selected text when you reply" feature of Mail.app until I didn't have it here.
- Man that's a lot of javascript.
- And frames! Bloody frames everywhere.
- It really doesn't work with Safari. I can login but not click on anything.
- This is the least "web-like" web application I've seen. Ever.
- Cool keyboard shortcuts everywhere. That works really well.
- I don't care it's not web-like, this stuff works too well. As I said: Fast. It'll be interesting to see if it'll scale as well as their web search.
- Lots of ideas to
stealconsider for my next web application. - Will the billion kilobyte javascript make it slower on modem-speed connections? I should try it via GPRS ...
- "six letter minimum" usernames, so no ask@gmail.com. Suck.
- I can't setup a signature?
- How do you access Gmail when you are offline?
- I'll stick with Mail.app+imap for now.
- I can't decide if the Gmail interface is crazy or brilliant. If you vote crazy, then Fastmail is still be my recommendation if you need an email provider.
1) Attachment handling is pretty poor, at least in my browser (Firefox on OS X). 2) The spamfilters are letting 10-25% of the spam into my inbox (I get much more spam than real mail to that address). I hope they learn from all the "this is spam" markings I'm doing. 3) The mail composing interface isn't great. They made everything else fancy, but composing is just a textarea.
As Justin pointed out, the constant show in context is really fantastic. You mark everything but the most utter junk as "archived" and when something new in the same thread comes in, it'll be shown in context of the archived mails. Having that in Mail.app is now number 1 on my mail.app wishlist!
I'm also starting to like how it doesn't show quotes, but rather shows you the original mails in the thread. I want to subscribe to a busy mailing list and see how it manages the threads there ....
Apologies for letting my current frustration hit you in all their boredom.
