Journal ClippyHater's Journal: GMailin'
When it comes to networking (in the human sense of the word) and making things happen, I leave a lot to be desired. Fact is, I'm more comfortable making a computer dance than I am making lasting, personal contact with other folk. With that in mind, my initial stab at getting a GMail invite were painfully bad. When I realized that I would only get a GMail account once it leaves beta, I decided to cave in and ask my wife to do her networking thing.
Now, my wife is a human networking machine. She seems plugged in EVERYWHERE. But I'm thinking that only geeks manage to get GMail invites (making my failure that much more troubling), and she'd never be able to get one.
Well, a few days after I asked, she sent me the invite. Maybe there's more to this human networking thing than I'd imagined!
GMail is an interesting service--it seems to perform the task of e-mail client pretty nicely, though I have sent an occasional e-mail that the recipient swears up and down they didn't receive (I'll chalk those up to growing pains, but if it continues past the beta, then GMail will be pretty much useless as a business tool). However, it handles the task of e-mail client in a decidedly different manner than your typical e-mail client.
I'm comfortable with creating folders and categorizing my received e-mails by dragging them to their respective folder. GMail simply doesn't do this. You create labels and apply them to various received e-mails. These labels are then used for viewing all of your "saved" e-mails. Think of a label as a displayed e-mail filter. You can click on a link having the name of a label, and your inbox will then display only e-mails having that label. I suppose it's a lot like creating folders, with the exception that ALL of your e-mails display in your inbox until your choose a label.
What is a good idea is that of threaded e-mail message chains. For instance, you send an e-mail with the subject "Have you finished your quarterly report?". The recipient replies "Re: Have you..." and asks a question to help him finish. You give him a reply to the question. Basically this back in forth produced by clicking the Reply button instead of creating a new e-mail represents a conversation between you and the recipient, and all e-mail clients I've used before GMail display each Reply as a seperate e-mail. GMail displays the e-mail chain as a single e-mail message, and when you look at the e-mail you see the entire e-mail conversation thread. This is quite excellent, and cuts down on a cluttered inbox; however, it does NOT work if you have people (my wife!) who start totally different conversations in a thread. When that occurs, no longer is an e-mail conversation about a particular topic, it's about every single thing that's popped into someone's head. So, I could have a thread whose first subject is "What do you want for dinner?", and later in the thread suddenly is a conversation about christmas present ideas for my daughter, or information about people that I need to contact. In these cases, the idea of an e-mail thread loses its effectiveness and starts to become a hindrance to efficient e-mail usage.
Overall, I'd say that I'm pretty pleased with my GMail account. Once I get more use to using Google's particular brand of e-mail client, I'll probably never want to use another system.
And nothing says big ol' geek more than my.name@gmail.com :)
Now, my wife is a human networking machine. She seems plugged in EVERYWHERE. But I'm thinking that only geeks manage to get GMail invites (making my failure that much more troubling), and she'd never be able to get one.
Well, a few days after I asked, she sent me the invite. Maybe there's more to this human networking thing than I'd imagined!
GMail is an interesting service--it seems to perform the task of e-mail client pretty nicely, though I have sent an occasional e-mail that the recipient swears up and down they didn't receive (I'll chalk those up to growing pains, but if it continues past the beta, then GMail will be pretty much useless as a business tool). However, it handles the task of e-mail client in a decidedly different manner than your typical e-mail client.
I'm comfortable with creating folders and categorizing my received e-mails by dragging them to their respective folder. GMail simply doesn't do this. You create labels and apply them to various received e-mails. These labels are then used for viewing all of your "saved" e-mails. Think of a label as a displayed e-mail filter. You can click on a link having the name of a label, and your inbox will then display only e-mails having that label. I suppose it's a lot like creating folders, with the exception that ALL of your e-mails display in your inbox until your choose a label.
What is a good idea is that of threaded e-mail message chains. For instance, you send an e-mail with the subject "Have you finished your quarterly report?". The recipient replies "Re: Have you..." and asks a question to help him finish. You give him a reply to the question. Basically this back in forth produced by clicking the Reply button instead of creating a new e-mail represents a conversation between you and the recipient, and all e-mail clients I've used before GMail display each Reply as a seperate e-mail. GMail displays the e-mail chain as a single e-mail message, and when you look at the e-mail you see the entire e-mail conversation thread. This is quite excellent, and cuts down on a cluttered inbox; however, it does NOT work if you have people (my wife!) who start totally different conversations in a thread. When that occurs, no longer is an e-mail conversation about a particular topic, it's about every single thing that's popped into someone's head. So, I could have a thread whose first subject is "What do you want for dinner?", and later in the thread suddenly is a conversation about christmas present ideas for my daughter, or information about people that I need to contact. In these cases, the idea of an e-mail thread loses its effectiveness and starts to become a hindrance to efficient e-mail usage.
Overall, I'd say that I'm pretty pleased with my GMail account. Once I get more use to using Google's particular brand of e-mail client, I'll probably never want to use another system.
And nothing says big ol' geek more than my.name@gmail.com
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