Jan. 2005--Google is trying it's own "Google approach" to providing an online email service. A lot of talk has been about two issues: (1) it provides a full gigabyte of mail storage and (2) it uses Google's famous search facilities to allow the user to locate stored mail AND to provide targetted text advertisements to the user. The first issue has astounded some observers, but in the era of cheap storage shouldn't be too surprising. What is surprising is that others don't offer the same. Those who are familiar with the way shared network resources work will understand that some users will use the full 1 GB in a week and others will never use a fraction of it--so on average, it is unlikely that Google will ever need to set aside a full GB for every email user. The privacy hype raised by the second issue is somewhat more interesting, although over-blown. In reality, email is generally NOT a secure/private means of communication. Each message bounces around the net from server to server on its way to the recipient and could theoretically be intercepted and read by anyone on any of these various servers. So, realistically, if you're concerned about email privacy--you need to read up on encryption tools for email and/or use a service like http://www.hushmail.com HushMail.

I decided to give GMail a serious try over the Christmas/New Year holiday of 2004-2005. I hoped this would accomplish two things: I'd be able to keep up with my mail during the week that I was away from work, so as not to be swamped when I returned to work, and I'd be able to learn a bit more about this service. So, with some minor trepidation, I forwarded all mail from work to my GMail address just before leaving the office. After a week, I'm very pleased with what I see.

First, while I was skeptical that ANY web based mail system could match the performance of a local client based system, I have to say GMail is FAST. Labeling or deleting an item or multiple items takes a second or fraction of a second, screen rewrites are just as fast (by the way, this was over a 56K dial-up line). Turns out that my expectations of sluggishness were based on experiences with less well developed services offered by other webmail providers (not mentioning any names here).

I also had some concern about Google's "search don't sort" philosophy. As a library professional, I'm trained to sort things into folders and files and add metadata, so I can more easily find them later (yeah, I know this is only an illusion of the user interface--file systems aren't really made up of "folders" and don't keep files organized in them; but it is a comforting illusion). GMail addresses this need by providing "labels". Labels aren't folders--rather, labels provide a means for adding metadata to a message. In turn, this allows canned searches to be run later to locate every item with that metadata. The resulting functionality is every bit as good as having folders. But there is one major improvement: an item can have more than one label, meaning it can appear to live in several "folders" at the same time. One particularly useful pre-defined label is "starred." This can be applied with one click and provides a handy way of marking high-priority items. Very useful!

Another handy feature: linking messages in "conversations." This is very similar to "threaded" correspondence available in some email clients. Essentially, messages pertaining to the same subject are gathered together under one "conversation" or thread. This makes tracking messages related to a particular topic easier and provides a bit more organization to the mail store.

What about filtering incoming mail? Again, labels provide an easy way to do this: set up a filter to apply a specific label and not to show the message in the "inbox"--and voila! As I'm coming to expect from Google, the process of setting up a filter is characteristically easy and works very well.

Yeah, but what about those advertisements?! The fact is this approach to funding an email service is not really new. Qualcomm, among others, has provided "sponsored" versions of its Eudora email client for years. GMail just does it better. The ads are unobtrusive and some are genuinely helpful. Reading an email newsletter from SANS security? Three or four text-only links show to the right of your message pointing to security sites and products. True, it is a little eerie that the links are so "on target"--but that only points out how well Google's relevancy ranking system works.

There is one thing that had me worried: what happens if GMail goes away? Will all my email be blasted into virtual particles never to be seen again? This is a truly frightening thought to someone who spends a fourth of his waking hours working email. Fortunately, I found a way to sleep better: GMail allows POP access to its service, as well as access through their web client. That means I can configure Mozilla's Thunderbird client and go into my GMail account once a week (or hourly if I wanted to) and download all my GMail. There it is, safe and sound--a copy of my messages on my local hard-drive (yes, I DO back my hard-drive up daily!). Very decent of Google to allow POP! Still, it would be nicer to have a way of archiving messages locally directly through the web interface. Maybe in a future version . . .

I'm not as impressed as I would like to be with the address book features. True, it is very easy to add an address. It is not so easy to add a group contact list. In fact, I haven't even been able to find a workaround yet. I have registered with Google to have this feature added, though. Gee, it should be easy--just add another metadata tag to the individual contacts and setup a canned search & select . . . I bet it won't be long before this problem is solved.

One last "first look". I REALLY like the GMail Notifier applet. This is a downloadable app that runs in the background. It checks your GMail account periodically (even if you're not logged in) and lets you know if you have new mail. Most impressive: it scrolls the sender info, subject, and first few lines for each new message it finds. You can then decide whether to log in to read the whole message or not. Why don't all "newmail" apps do this???!!!

So far: I'm very, very impressed with this service.

Jody-- Dec. 31, 2004