We have, at work, what I can only refer to as a ‘somewhat paranoid’ IT department. And God bless them, we wouldn’t want another Half-Life 2 like sourcecode leak or anything. But it does lay out a couple of bumps in the road from time to time. Take my mail for instance. I can’t communicate with external mailservers. So whenever I lug my Powerbook to work, I’m unable to send or receive mail from it, which is most annoying, as it pretty much serves as my communication nexus to the world!
Currently I have a number of active and semi-active mail accounts. Mostly I use my Binary Bonsai account, which works great. But with Gmail having now finally been brought into the grown up world of POP3 access, perhaps now is a good time to reassess whether I should be using a webmail solution for my mail. This way, I can send and receive mail from anywhere, as well as through the mail app of choice. And with Google’s notifier app, I can even feel at home while working.
But before I go through the ordeal of letting everyone in the world know that I have changed my address, I want to just send out a ping to see if any of you have any experiences with Gmail you’d like to share?
I have almost only had pleasant experiences with Gmail. I’m not using it for my primary mail, I’m mainly using it as “middle storage” between work and home mail.
Some issues that has been plaguing Gmail are login problems, and sometimes even unavailable service. This can all be excused by it still being Beta, though. As for the “label” system, that does take a bit of getting used to, and if you ask me, some minor design adjustments. Still, all in all, it’s by far the best web-based email solution out there.
As for the POP support, that’s all fine and dandy, but what I’m really looking for, is the ability for Gmail to download to it’s inbox, from my other POP mail sources — that is, the other way around of what’s supported now.
Yup, been testing GMail for some months now, and so far, so good.
To be avoided if you’re on a slow (dial-up) connection, though… But there are some “light” interfaces around the web allowing you to access GMail more quickly (even through a wap phone!).
And anyway, rumors are that Google will introduce proper mobile/wap/xhtml access at some point in the future.
As for POP access, it works like a breeze. Although I personally would prefer IMAP, but de gustibus…
I havent got Gmail, but are you aware of mail2web where you can log into pop servers and even set up a free account for easy access.
Its like webmail for proper email accounts.
Gmail has been served quite well for me so far. The only real issue I had (and a lot less lately) was that sometimes logging in would either hang/take forever/or behave differently on Safari/Firefox/Mac/PC. I use Gmail as a sort of utility webmail. I have a paid account at Fastmail that acts as an aggregator for my mac.com address, my ISP mail address, and my “commercial personal” account. I run my “personal personal” (emmott.net) mail account at home with Squirrelmail, but for everything else (and a lot of ecommerce lately), I’m relying on gmail. I wish I could manage other email addresses through their interface – that would be nice.
Labelling with Archive versus Filing into Folders is a different mindset to get used to, but I think I prefer it – it also allows multiple categorization, which can sort of be done with Outlook but is a bit of a kludge. What is nice is a conversation “dearchives” itself if you get another reply to the conversation.
I also hooked a bunch of people at the office on Gmail – and many use it often, some as their main personal email, and they’re happy too.
I was among the very first batch of public non-googler beta testers and I’ve been loving Gmail since the day I got it. I’ve never been interested in a pop3 interface to Gmail, because its fantastic web interface is one of the things that make Gmail so great. Accessing Gmail via pop3 is a bit like artificial insemination.
Btw, I totally love the new design. Very nice work.
GMail seems fine to me. I’ve been using the auto forward feature to send all mail from my GMail account to my own server account for a while. But now with POP3 I’ve turned that off and access it through Entourage. No issues whatsoever. I think every 1 in 20 attempts to access my mail it’ll throw out an error, but trying immediately afterwards seems to work fine.
Wherever I am with my Powerbook I can get access to my mail. It feels familiar if you know what I mean? But as all my mail is archived to my GMail account, even without the Powerbook I can access mail wherever I am.
What blows my mind is that I still can’t grasp I’m getting a service like that free of charge from a ‘beta’ service.
Have you had a look at this?
http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com
I’ve used Gmail since the beginning of September as a semi-primary email. I think it works fine and the label system is pretty clever (and much more useful than folders).
http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com: they say that Google can build a DB with keywords associated to email adresses and then sell it. I guess every ISP can do that…so we should give up email! right? hehe… :D
I’m definately enjoying Gmail and haven’t gotten used to the pop3 but have it turned on.
I have not had any bad experiences thus far with my Gmail account. Not even the “I can’t log in” or the “No service” some people have suffered. It has been a great solution for me to have in between work and home.
As the others have said the label and archive system takes a bit of getting used to, but all in all it’s not that big of a hassle. They are constantly adding new features so it can only get better.
On a side note, I currently have 3 Gmail invites available so if anyone reading this would like one, just get in contact with me.
@Michele: I agree with your last statement 100%.
Add me to the list of satisfied Gmail users. I’ve also been testing the POP access and it’s fantastic.
Currently, I have all my mail coming in through Thunderbird, including Gmail, and I couldn’t be happier.
I’ve also phased out my Hotmail. At this point, who needs it.
The Gmail Notifier, Pop3, Forwarding definately make Gmail awesome. I’ve heard it’ll be free but I’ve also heard forwarding won’t be. We’ll just have to see.
another contented Gmail user here too…
works just fine in Firefox on my work Windows XP laptop or from Safari on the iMac at home, and not even the (very) occasional sign-in problems have dampened my enthusiam for it so far.
I am also quite satisfied with Gmail. Been using it for quite a while, and mostly just felll in love with the web-based interface. Have yet to even bother trying pop3 with it simply because the UI is so fun.
I use a Firefox plugin that shows the number of new messages and opens a new tab if i click the icon.
Take a look at FastMail. For $15, you get SMTP access from anywhere, and you can send through their proxy server over pretty much any port. I’ve been using them for over a year and am very pleased.
Only thing that holds me back is the lack of “identities” (those found in squirrelmail and horde). Because of this i’m unable to use it with my work emails, and it would be too much of a hassle for me to handle gmail as just my personal email.
I’ve tried it though, and found no issues.
To second what Alex said, I have been very happy with my Fastmail account as well, and at my current rate I get 600 MB of space, 30 MB of web space (not that I’d use that since I also was a Textdrive VC200), IMAP and POP access.
Lately I have REALLY been wishing I could merge the two, including features and paradigms from both, and I would happily keep paying for it.
BTW, love a lot of these new features on the bonsai, Michael.
Have you thought of using fetchmail to gather all of the mail for your various accounts and put them in a single message store like Google (or wherever)?
I like Gmail, a lot actually, but before I go to that trouble you mentioned baout telling the whole world I have changed my address, I would like to see Gmail develop the ability to check my other accounts as well. To archive all my mail ever in one place, that would be nice. Right now other accounts – those that are able – can be set to forward to Gmail, but that isn’t all of them.
Am I right about that, or has Gmail already got that?
I have been using Gmail for all of my personal email for about 4 months now. When I heard they were enabling POP3 I thought it would be great. However, once it tried using thunderbird I found that I liked the web interface better (and it’s way better than Outlook express). Having said that, I will still download all of my messages to thunderbird regularly so that they don’t dissappear or google start charging.
I don’t use Gmail, I was eager to get an invite for a while, but, to be honest, I figured I have so many flippin email addresses to track the moment I don’t need another.
I’m curious though, does your web host not have it’s own web mail? My hosts are all Cpanel run and what-not and I can access three web-based mail apps by simply typing in my domain name plus /webmail on the end.
Not sure how complex you want to get, but why not run your own mailserver from home (I assume you have a high speed connection). If you have an old PC lying about, you can throw linux, apache, postfix, courier-imap and horde-imp on it, and you have IMAP email, with horde webmail. IMAP gives you access to the same messages and folders wherever you log in from, be it Outlook, webmail, or Thunderbird on linux. You can also add WAP interfaces, and since it’s YOUR mailserver, do whatever other tricks you want. I use fetchmail on my server, so every five minutes it downloads mail from my yahoo and other accounts, files the mail in folders, and forwards a copy onto my Blackberry. My ISP blocks some of the required ports, but dyndns.org has various forwarding solutions that work very well for about $10 – 40 US per year.
I’m by no means a linux guru, and this can fairly easily be accomplished over the course of a weekend. I’ve had a harder time getting a decent design than building this type of server!
There’s plenty of documentation on the packages I mention above, but I’m happy to give you a bit of an overview and point you in the right direction if you or anyone else on the site is interested. You can PM me at (on my own mailserver of course!) pgray at patandmeg.com.
Good luck! It’s a fun project if you’re into that sort of thing, plus you’re no longer at the mercy of gmail or your ISP if you want to add features, or if they decide to charge for service.
Actually, I can tell you they do, I just tried it. The common packages leave a little something to be desired in the design stakes though. You could use any of the remote services listed above of course.
Personally I prefer to use an email client, but it’s useful to havethe option if nothing else.
I’ve been using gmail in the middle of my two email accounts and so far I’m pretty happy with it. I’ve always liked the way google does things, no fluff, nice, clean, quick and simple.
The way the emails are sorted by conversation does take some getting used to, as does the label system. But once you get your head around it (lets face it, you’re no slouch in the computer department :P), it really is a more intuitive way of sorting email. I have no problem with their ad words, although if you’re concerned about privacy issues I guess that’s something you should think about. I would move to gmail, but that would mean shutting down my oddpost account which I don’t want to, if for no other reason than it’s a pain to change email addresses.
As others have said on this page, do have a look at fastmail.fm. It’s hardcore gmail for want of a better word and is worth a try if you want more bells and whistles.
I think the big plus and simultaneous negative about linux is that there is almost no user-interface “design.” You’re wading through text files, stopping and restarting services everytime you make a config change. The plus is you can do everything I just described on a Pentium 133 mHz (notice I said PENTIUM, not Pentium II or III, etc.). The elegance is all under the hood in terms of high performance on minimal hardware, and once you get everything up, it just works.
I don’t access email on the server unless I’m in a really odd situation, the joys of hosting your own IMAP server is that you get the same folders and mail everywhere, since it’s all stored on the server. Where as POP3, if you download everything from the server to your desktop, then download again from your laptop, you only get new messages. With IMAP you get everything, and can also “replicate” so you can work in a disconnected mode.
I use Outlook primarly on my laptop and desktop to get mail, and horde-imp webmail (very functionally rich, despite a somewhat “hokey” look) from everywhere else.
At teh end of the day, it’s the classic question of how much functionality do you want, versus how much time you want to spend. As I say to my clients, with enough time and money, anything is possible!
I have been using it for awhile now, and must say, I do not really like it. Don’t get me wrong it is a hell of a lot better than say “Hotmail”. But It is not worth it.
I would guess that even your e-mail address at “binarybonsai” has some kind of webmail feature you can use anywhere. I have my domain mail set up through my mail client, but if I am out of the country I check the same a could through my webmail….
i.e. http://www.domain.com/webmail/
most domains have something similar set up, that is what I would suggest. And stay away from GMAIL, the only thing special about it is the fact is records everything you send and everything you receive.
Hmm…as I said before, I guess every ISP can record everything you send and receive. So IMHO this is not something to base upon when you have to decide (at least if you don’t have to decide between using a public service and using a homemade system)…
Paranoia is good, Miguel you should know that…
And i’m not a big fan of Gmail myself but thats already been said here so i’ll just spare you.
Well I think the idea is not that they save the data, but what they can do with it. In Canada ISP’s are not allowed to release any information they collect or hold from your account. But with GMAIL durisdiction is not regarded. And GMAIL has left it wide open for say United States secret service to use any and all of that information against you.
Not that I am planning anything against the United States (yet :p), but if I do I am not going to do it using GMAIL :D
I’ve been using it extensively since mid-April, and aside froma few glitches with the labels I have found it to be very good. The added pop support just perfects it. It’s very useful to be able to organize and search the email so easily. I like it.
Why not set up an SSH tunnel to your home machine? That way, you can pretty much use every app you want, mail or otherwise, without having to change habits. See http://www.buzzsurf.com/surfatwork/ for a howto.
Personally, I wouldn’t look forward to changing my e-mail address (because that’s what you’d have to do), and certainly not to a system which is free now, but may cost you money in the future — GMail still is in public beta, but it doesn’t say “this thing will stay free forever” anywhere. It certainly is a great webmail app, though.
In the end, I ‘d use a tunnel, or webmail-on-a-home-box (as suggested above).
Good luck!
I would feel uncomfortable moving my primary email address to that of a free beta service that will, more than likely, turn into a pay-per-use system. I don’t mind paying for good services or products but I believe the same principle applies to Gmail as the ideologies I use for web-browsers. For example, Opera is no doubt a great web browser but I know I will not be using it because I feel that Firefox offers the same product, features, support, et al but for free. To me, email is meant as a free, unique and long lasting identifier on the world wide web. I hate to change my email address and forcefully, the last time I was during the @Home switch.
To be honest, although I appreciate the Gmail features, I do not like the interface at all. I find it to be unintuitive and very “unclean.” I understand that a lot of the features require a special mindset; for example, I do understand that items should be archived more so than deleted, but I really dislike the fact that the application does not trust my judgment and it requires me more than four buried clicks to delete an email. I suppose with most web applications, ymmv.
I also do not feel the necessity to run own my mail server, although a modest idea, it would deem itself impractical for most users (that, and I don’t want to pay for the electricity bill). I do not however entirely understand your problem… my host offers several “open source” webmail applications to use that will access my email from anywhere in the world. Which, in addition to having an IMAP connection at home through Outlook 2003, I do not need any other intermediary application. Am I missing something here, or does your host not offer a webmail solution for you? That way, you could just as easily use your @binarybonsai.com account without any worry. In fact, with your own domain, and a catch-all, you can create ingenious email addresses on the fly — and — create virtual spam-boxes which you can disable as well. I think it’s the best solution, if available. Adieu.
I do webmail only now.
I pay for mine, because it has some features I adore.
netaddress.com is who I use. they let you create aliases so you can filter your mail even more.
I am not wild about gmail.
I love Gmail. I’ve been using it for several months now instead of Hotmail or Yahoo, and I’d definitely say, without a doubt, it is the best free email out there. It’s pleasant to use, good-looking, and offers 1GB of storage space. There’s not much to complain about here, except that the amount of storage space makes it too easy for me to have large amounts of clutter in my archives. Only real problem is that anything under IE 6.0 or Safari 1.4 cannot use Gmail, and I believe Konqueror cannot either although I haven’t tried recently. If you use whatever computers are available in random locations, this may be a problem.
Ahh, another Brendan (who’s probably been posting comments for far longer than I, so have added my last name to avoid confusion).
Gmail is very usefull, and does what it is designed to do. I do actually use it quite a bit.
Personally, I have a qmail mail system setup at home, and squirrelmail as the web interface to read email. It has support for (via a plugin) to check external POP accounts & draw down the content.
One mail server to rule them all so to speak :)
I suspect that Gmail as it closes on the final beta stages will include the ability to centralise by supporting remote POP access & therefore allow mail to be drawn in from several locations.
I have pretty much nothing but good things to say about GMail. The ‘thread’ system is very intuitive, it’s very easy to search through old messages and the labeling system is useful.
It is down every once in a while for short periods of time, so if you absolutely need access to your e-mail that could be a problem. I’ve never timed how long I’m unable to access my mail, but it never seems to be that long.
Still, I really like it, certainly enough to pay for it if I have to. You should try it out.
Not unlike your workplace, our IT dept. is also quite paranoid. So much so that I still haven’t been able to convince them to give my (personal) iBook access to the corp. network yet. On top of that, any email with attachments gets automatically quarantined. This is a problem since I need to constantly email myself large project zip files to copy them to the corp. shared drive. The solution? Gmail. It’s like using an FTP server. Email files from my iBook to my Gmail account, then download the file from my PC. Presto.
Since receiving an invitation back in June, I have been using my gmail account for just about everything. I still have several others (work, isp, etc.) but I am using those for specific tasks. Last week, I needed to transfer a 10MB zip file between two notebooks inches apart. Since one of them refused to browse the network, I finally hit upon the solution: use gmail to e-mail the file to myself. 6,000 physical miles to transfer a file but it worked perfectly.
I love my gmail account. I love the search feature…which has, in fact, come in handy! Nothing but a great experience so far. I have had it for the last 5 – 6 months, and yes I like the fact that I can get my mail at work as well without cluttering my “Work” Outlook with any other mail but work related so I can stay focused.
I use my domain email, and Gmail…
Michael, I love the look of the new design, and this auto pre-view…very cooll!
–AdamStac
For me, Gmail rocks. I’m using it now for a couple of month, and after getting used to it, I think it’s the best web mail available. The spam filter works perfect.
The only thing I don’t like is the new POP3.
At first; you miss all the good features of organizing you mail the google way (and I do not want more folders in email client),
and second; I can’t send mail over POP3.
Greetz Axel
You can send mail over SMTP, which gmail has a server of course. Both the pop3 and SMTP are encrypted with SSL.
i’ve been using it as my primary email for quite some time now and it’s addictive. the best part of it is that you will automatically see your conversations as threads. i’m used to reading forums, so it feels like a personal private forum. it’s great! there are so many wise design details. you will love it.
I’m a big fan of google and it’s services. Here are all the tools you will need to use Gmail: CreativeBits: Gmail ideal for designers.
I really wish that Google and Apple would work together in integrating iSync with Gmail. That would be perfect.
Michael: I wrote about my experience with GMail on my site in the article, Why GMail? It pretty much sums up my impressions of GMail.
In a nutshell, I dig it and that’s all I have to say about that.
It works great for me. Both via the web and via its secure POP3 & SMTP. These days I’m using it as my primary address. I highly recommend it!
Here’s the most annoying thing I’ve noticed with Gmail so far: If you’re trying to log into Gmail, and the last person to log in to Gmail was someone else, it’ll ask you to type in some warped letters, presumably to deter spammers or whatever.
The catch? Rikke and I share computers at home, which means that we have to do this almost every fucking time!!! It’s driving us nuts!
waves to the other Brendan :D
I guess we will have to see if it stays free.
Re: The warped text:
Really?
I have a couple of gmail accounts (I’m selfish I know :P), and I’ve just tried to reproduce the effect and it let me straight through. My gf also uses the comp sometimes to check her gmail, and I’ve never encountered this. Does it happen everytime? Just curious.
Gmail’s much more enjoyable for me now, with two editions:
1. the Firefox extension WebMailCompose, which allowed me to set my mailto: preference for both my gmail account, and the squirrelmail install for my domain’s email. Nifty.
2. gcount, a freeware Apple Menu and/or Dock gmail friend. gcount also plays nicely with growl (also growl.info), which is a fun new (and also free) OSX shiny. :)
*waves back to the other Brendan” :)
Michael, as far as the warped letters thing goes, I’ve not seen it myself.
Have you chosen to “save my password for the next two weeks”? that may create a cookie, which could mean anyone else using gmail will have some hassels :)
Having said that, and that while obviously it’s annoying, at least gmail are taking user security relatively seriously.
As an aside, I’m really getting to like Freya’s look.. It’s now inspiring me to refresh the look of my web log, which has been kubrick based for a while.. it’s all your fault! :)
I use gmail for my secondary mail, but have my own mail-server hosted on my computer/server. This way I can connect anywhere using pop3 access, along with having a webmail interface.
You can setup your own webmail interface for any pop3 or imap server easily (contact me if you need help), then you could even use your current email online. That’s what I do. It actually works quite well, because all my email, gmail and my own, both go directly into my email client, and I can check both easily online.
It works quite well, and I’d suggest it to anybody.
I love my Gmail. I have had no problems with it at all. The ads do not bother me, and the service could not be better. I used my POP3 access for a day, but decided I love the threaded conversations, and went back to the web interface.
Paul
I am really enjoying my gmail acount. The amount of space is awesome, but my favorite feature is the ability to search my mail. I can’t remember how many times I have wanted to read an old email, remembering only a few words in it, but couldn’t find it for the life of me. Gmail is great!
Being perhaps overly dependent on POP acounts that Apple Mail checks for me, I was slow to use Gmail. (Takes time to go log in!) I now use a Konfabulator widget Gmail Status to check for me.
How do you get a gmail account? Do you have to be invited? It would be greatly appresciated if anyone could help me out.
thanks
NJH26@aol.com
“We have, at work, what I can only refer to as a ‘somewhat paranoid’ IT department.”
Ha, that’s nothing! At least yours will let you access webmail accounts! ;o)
I started using GMail about a month ago and started noticing some things that I didn’t really like:
1) Google is actively keeping all of my email to use as a marketing database for me. Is that good? I’m not sure. Do I want to be actively marketed to every time I want to view email? I guess it’s better than the Hotmail garbage on the screen.
2) Importing contacts is a total mess. I tried to import my Outlook contact list and got all of the linked notes and extra info all messed up in the GMail contact list.
3) It’s obviously part of Google’s larger domination plan. But what that is is anyone’s guess.
I have had nothing but an excellent experience with GMail. It sorts my mail well; a gig of storage; neat, orderly conversation view; Google search for my mail.
What’s not to love, especially now that they have POP access? IMO, the advertising concerns are overrated.
If you can’t access GMail’s web interface for some strange reason, you can use mail2web, as someone else here suggested, to check and manage your mail.
I’ve been using Gmail since last July.
I’ve been enjoying it, especially the “conversations” function that lets you link up all emails into a dialogue.
However, there are still bugs that are being worked out. For example, some emails I receive from my friends will go straight into the trash can, unread. It won’t go into spam.
This has happened to emails from corporate accounts, to emails from free webmail services and to school accounts.
So, I have to periodically check the trash can to make sure I haven’t received a message from a friend. Further, when I respond back to a message that initially went to the trash, the whole conversation will stay in the trash, even if I’ve moved it to the Inbox.
Hopefully they’ve fixed it by now, but it was still an issue a month ago.