Gmail

monkeysblood

born to cry
is it any good, or better than bloody hotmail in some way?
or am i just drawn to it cos you gotta be invited and i'm not?

and there's google talk, hmm.
 

Melchior

Taking History Too Far
I'll invite you if you want to try it out. PM me your emaila ddress.

It's loads better than hotmail. Threaded conversations, POP mail if you want it, fully searchable, masses of storage space. It's great.
 

Canada J Soup

Monkey Man
I love Gmail. I'd always previously preferred accessing my email via software clients like Entourage or Outlook and was pretty pissed off when Hotmail started to charge for POP access forcing me to use the slow, cludgy web interface. Since I started using Gmail I have come to prefer reading my email via the web. It's fast (esp. using IE on a Windows machine), has an amazing search function and the use of auto-filtered 'labels' vs. folders combined with Gmail's archiving function quickly proved to be a better way of managing messages and conversation threads. I don't care if Google's bots are reading my messages and laughing at them while figuring out which ads to show me, Gmail is just too good not to use.

To echo Melchior's offer above, anyone who wants a Gmail invite is welcome to PM me with an email address for me to send the invite to.
 
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Omaar

Guest
anyone checked this out?

http://base.google.com/base/default

gmail is great but the text scanning/matching to advertising content thing is dodgy as - though somehow less intrusive than the graphics used in the advertising on other webmail services. don't like the direction it's taking advertising though.
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
Canada J Soup said:
I love Gmail. I'd always previously preferred accessing my email via software clients like Entourage or Outlook and was pretty pissed off when Hotmail started to charge for POP access forcing me to use the slow, cludgy web interface. Since I started using Gmail I have come to prefer reading my email via the web. It's fast (esp. using IE on a Windows machine), has an amazing search function and the use of auto-filtered 'labels' vs. folders combined with Gmail's archiving function quickly proved to be a better way of managing messages and conversation threads. I don't care if Google's bots are reading my messages and laughing at them while figuring out which ads to show me, Gmail is just too good not to use.

To echo Melchior's offer above, anyone who wants a Gmail invite is welcome to PM me with an email address for me to send the invite to.


You can still use a POP client with Hotmail, so long as it's a Microsoft one - I use entourage with my hotmail account (standard free one) no problem.

Although i think gmails extra features are pretty cool.
 

ripley

Well-known member
Omaar said:
anyone checked this out?

gmail is great but the text scanning/matching to advertising content thing is dodgy as - though somehow less intrusive than the graphics used in the advertising on other webmail services. don't like the direction it's taking advertising though.

Actually, most major email programs do this - they just don't talk about it. It is also robots/spiders scanning for keywords, not humans reading your mail, so the content isn't necessarily reaching anyone. It may be dodgy, but Yahoo and them all do it too.

I like Gmail because it's visually very simple.

There are still some kinks (the contacts book and lack of address lists is lame), but it's easy to use, and quick too.

My favorite feature right now - I have several email accounts set up to fwd to my gmail, and gmail has an option where you can send emails as if they are from other addresses (that you own) - the from and reply-to are both the non-gmail address.. this is handy for more official correspondence. It's still not perfect because it defaults to gmail when you reply to someone who wrote to the other email.. but it's pretty handy even so.

the most dodgy feature (although I'm also not sure other services don't do this) is there's no way to find out how your emails are stored on google's servers - there seems to be some evidence that they don't delete ANY of it, even if you do, which is creepy.
 
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Omaar

Guest
ripley said:
Actually, most major email programs do this - they just don't talk about it. It is also robots/spiders scanning for keywords, not humans reading your mail, so the content isn't necessarily reaching anyone. It may be dodgy, but Yahoo and them all do it too.

really? that's intersting .. where did you read about this, i'd previously thought only gmail did this.

what bothers me about it is not that a robot might be reading my mail, but that the information gathered by these machines is used to tailor advertising to be more effective at manipulating me.

it's pretty user friendly though, although i'm not that keen on email threading. anyone know if you can switch it off?
 

Canada J Soup

Monkey Man
spackb0y said:
You can still use a POP client with Hotmail, so long as it's a Microsoft one - I use entourage with my hotmail account (standard free one) no problem.
Really? I thought they'd stopped allowing that...I'll have to try it again so. I barely use the account anymore, but it still gets the occasional email from people I've not been in contact with in a while. (That and about 50 penis enlargement / teen sluts / ch34p pi11z spam messages a day.)
 

ripley

Well-known member
Omaar said:
really? that's intersting .. where did you read about this, i'd previously thought only gmail did this.

mmm.. I know that most major email companies scan all emails as part of spam blocking and virus blocking. they could use that capability for evil as easily as google could.

Omaar said:
what bothers me about it is not that a robot might be reading my mail, but that the information gathered by these machines is used to tailor advertising to be more effective at manipulating me.

Ah. well, that does seem to be more particular to google. But I haven't found it to be an issue - you just have to not read the ads, and I guess you won't be manipulated. Being all text and small, rather than blinky and floaty pictures like Yahoo has, I find this pretty easy. I've noticed the ads only when they are funny because they've wrongly picked up on a word and given me a weird ad in response.

Omaar said:
it's pretty user friendly though, although i'm not that keen on email threading. anyone know if you can switch it off?

I think the threading is one of the main points of gmail. If you don't want threading, maybe another service is better.

(Well, that and the total searchability in various fields, and the labeling rather than folders (which is quite handy), and the general user-friendliness)
 

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
ripley said:
My favorite feature right now - I have several email accounts set up to fwd to my gmail, and gmail has an option where you can send emails as if they are from other addresses (that you own) - the from and reply-to are both the non-gmail address.. this is handy for more official correspondence. It's still not perfect because it defaults to gmail when you reply to someone who wrote to the other email.. but it's pretty handy even so.

This is extremely handy and what made me switch to Gmail.

The user interface is a bit klunky - ie the number one or two activity with email
is replying to email, but the reply "button" is just a tiny link on the buttom of the page.
Annoying.

2.5GB storage is handy (compared to Hotmail) - and send a few invites to yourself and you have 10-20GB of online storage (for backups of photos, music etc).
There's also something called the Gmail filesystem if you use Linux (not used it, but I do like the idea).
 
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Omaar

Guest
Ness Rowlah said:
There's also something called the Gmail filesystem if you use Linux (not used it, but I do like the idea).

There's a PC version around too, it's incredibly useful if you sign up for several accounts.

The threading only annoys me when you have multiple replies coming back from a group email. The individual replies can be easily missed.

And I do think the text analysis thing is potentially quite a frightening turning point in the history of advertising and propaganda. I'd be interested to see what their click through data looks like.
 

johanek

Member
Ness Rowlah said:
The user interface is a bit klunky - ie the number one or two activity with email
is replying to email, but the reply "button" is just a tiny link on the buttom of the page.
Annoying.

At the bottom of the message thread, click in the large blank box & you instantly start writing a reply with the last message quoted & you can still read the message thread on the same page at the same time. I think they made replying super easy!
 

In Moll

Active member
Speaking of gmail's email scanning/advertisements, I got this email a couple of weeks ago and found the ad amusing enough to take a screenshot ;D

snake.jpg
 
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