Tuesday, June 22,
2004
Using Gmail
I'm in the process of switching my primary email to Google's Gmail. Thanks to a recent invite from Wendy Koslow (the Redhead), I was able to secure an account and receive six invites of my own. Don't ask; I'm not handing them out willy-nilly. There won't be contests. There won't be money involved. One of them will go to my wife; the rest--I'm not sure. Beats paying for .Mac at this point.
My impressions of the service are not what I expected them to be. At first I was critical, probably needlessly so, but as I put "load" on the system things got better. It's truly a liberating experience to not have to worry about deleting email. I label the stuff from mailing lists (automatically through the interface as it comes in) for simpler reference later. What I'm finding is that I read and use email in a fundamentally different way: temporary conversation storage.
I've started to use the gmail as a place to have a short conversation but one that I don't care try to remember. Google is doing that for me. If I can't remember what email message had server advice for Rogers Cadenhead, then it's a short search away. No longer do I fret about saving and deleting, categorizing and filtering or watching and wondering. Better yet, it *finally* doesn't matter from where I check my email: sent and received are in the same place.
Apple's Mail.app will become an offline storage facility for my mail archives. I've got a ton of stuff from 1998 and on that I haven't sorted.
Neat Gmail stuff:
--It checks mail and refreshes the display at regular intervals --built in address checking against a list of contacts --only shows you information you need to see
