Friday, September 10, 2004

First Thoughts on Gmail.

What can I say? Gmail is great! For someone who has never been a fan of web-based email, that is high praise indeed!

A couple of weeks ago I finally received an invitation to start a Gmail account. Gmail is Google's web based email service. Currently, I think you can only get a Gmail account via an official invitation. I believe this is Google's way of rolling out the new product in a controlled and sensible fashion. So far I'm very impressed. Now that I have an account, I get to send invites to a few other people.

Gmail has some quite innovative ways of handling web-based email. It is also very fast, and has a massive amount of storage space. Very powerful search facilities make it easy to find exactly what you want. I'm planning on using it for some of the ezines I subscribe to. With a 1000mb of storage and excellent search capability you could store 100’s of issues of a newsletter and find the article you're after very quickly.

Gmail is still new and will need some improvements in some areas, but I'm sure it will just get better and better. One thing that bugs me at the moment is that it won't work correctly in Opera 7, which is the browser I mostly use.

I haven't had time to fully explore Gmail yet, but I'll write more about the product in the near future.


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