Steve Gets A Life

gmail testing

so an old friend of mine hooked me up with a gmail account. pretty neat. some of the cooler features (ignoring the obvious 1Gb of storage):
note: if this post violates the gmail agreement (i read most of it, but i'm no lawyer), i will remove it upon request.

• conversations: a nice way of looking at a thread of messages. better presentation than normal email threading (see screenshots). puts a clickable, one-line header (with fancy round corners) containing the sender's name, a short blurb of the content, and the date (including relative time) for each previous message in this thread. very slick, should be quite useful.
• labels: better than folders. allows you to mark messages instead of file them away. sounds a bit lame (why can't i file all my work stuff under a "work" folder?) until you think a bit more. instead of filing messages, you just mark them and archive them (makes them "invisible"). later when you want to see all your work stuff, pull up the "work" label. just as you would pull up the work folder.
  • killer: mark one message with multiple labels. essentially allows you to file a message in two folders at the same time. thanks google.
  • feature request: allow the labels to be arranged hierarchically.
• "star" messages. you know when you get an email and say "ok, i need to get on that." but then it works its way down your inbox till its off the screen? and moving it into a "todo" folder just doesn't work for ya? just "star" the message (zero reload time, just like clicking a button) and its on your "special" list.
• filters: now this might not be all that new of a feature, but combined with labels, its great. everytime i get a message from family, mark it as family. when its my mom, mark it as mom. if it has the word "italy" in it, mark it as "italy trip 2004". don't have to think "ok that message about eurail passes from mom.. did i file that under 'family', 'mom', or 'italy'?" because it is "filed" under all of them.
• address completion: using some sort of mighty (hidden) trickery with javascript / DOM / something, they have managed to accomplish the holy grail of webmail: address autocomplete. you know, like i type "stev" and i get a list:
  • steve@there.com
  • steve@here.com
  • steve@ctu.gov
  very cool. in my opinion, this is a killer feature. that is, it kills other webmails. then again, i dont use many other webmails, so maybe im just behind the times.
• spellcheck: now this might not be all that neat if you're like me running OSX 10.3.3 (spell check built-in in almost all text fields in any app), but odds are, you're on windows so this applies to you.
  whenever you write an email, you can click on "Check Spelling" and the window will change (but not reload, awesome, see below for more comments on that) to a read-only version of your message, with typos highlighted in red. clicking on a red word will pop up a tiny box of suggestions. i swear im typing emails on a native email client when this happens. i have no idea how this works in a browser, but i love it.
• it's fast: webmail clients in the past have imitated native-client interfaces through clicking on buttons, waiting for a new page, then clicking on another button, reload, etc. not gmail. enter some obviously smarty-pants XHTML/DOM/ECMAscript engineers and you have a webpage that responds to your commands instantly. no going back to the server for a whole new page, no reloads. spell-checking, email address autocomplete, that whole conversation unhiding thing, application of labels, resizing and altering all sorts of GUI elements is all done instantly. its really kind of creepy. at first i thought i was just getting really good bandwidth/latency.
  this browser voodoo is awesome. finally, somebody is using the power of our modern browsers.

of course, i have some requests as well:

• IMAP: no way this will happen for free unless the body of the emails have ads appended. in text? html? im betting this will be a pay-for service. first (optimistic) guess: $20 a year.
• mailbox imports: if this works so well, i'd like to move all my old mail into it. the best way i've found to move mail is via IMAP commands. maybe they will allow some sort of limited IMAP calls? this also might not happen because of storage space. sure, 1GB is enough to store 5 years of mail. but what if i've been using email for 7 years now? and ive been good enough to save all my old mail, from all my old ISPs? as a consumer, id love to have all that mail in one place, searchable. as google, id say "no way". The way this 1GB thing works is that almost nobody is going to use even close to that 1GB limit, not for the first year or so, at least. but if you offered a way to let every geek import their entire previous mailboxes, half your userbase is going to suck up their limits and start saying "1GB isn't enough!" so i predict.
• addressbook imports: now this is a lot more plausible. let us upload our thunderbird/mozilla/outlook/turba/squirrelmail/whatever contact lists. support as many protocols as possible. allow for merging of addresses (unique key: primary email address). do it right. allow some kind of synchronization with users' home machines (when i get a gmail from somebody, i might want their address on my palm the next day). they've got the right idea with the auto-collection of addresses you send to / receive from already. just take it another step.
• pay-for no-ads: i predict this will happen pretty quickly. either use this for free with ads, or pay us $50/year to not place ads (but they might still parse your mail, hey i bet yahoo does that anyway)
• hierarchical labels: see explanation above.

interesting tidbit: the source of these pages are very obfuscated. that is, attempting to see how the page is laid out brings you to a bunch of seemingly gibberish such as:

D(["ct",[["gmail",0]
,["jobs",0]
]
]
);
D(["ts",0,50,2,0,"Inbox","fc1310ac71"]
);

this is done in an attempt to dissuade/prevent people from writing automated tools to go out and fetch their mail, bypassing the revenue-generating ads. pretty smart, assuming it works. and knowing google, thats a pretty good assumption.
if i were google, id have an interface to programming the content / layout of gmail that allowed the obfuscation to be totally interchangeable. that way, if the obfuscation were to be "broken" it would simply be a matter of supplying a new method, or even simply passing it a new key of some kind. of course, this is probably exactly what they do.

conclusion: looks interesting. the security nerd in me stops me from really using it very much right now, but we'll see.
i would recommend this to those people i know that are currently stuck on Yahoo! mail or Hotmail (especially hotmail). and, of course, that is exactly what Google wants to hear.

Posted by Steve on April 22, 2004 10:00 AM