Gmail Review

[ignatz]

Gmail has gotten a lot of hype, both positive and negative. When it was introduced right around April 1 it was widely thought to be an April Fools joke. Subsequently privacy issues have received a lot of press. And through it all people have been clamoring for accounts, even paying as much as $75 on ebay for one (though now the market there is so flooded accounts are going for closer to $10).

I received an invite to join Gmail from a largely inactive Blogger account. I thought I'd give it a try just to see what it was all about, not to mention the thrill of having something that everyone wanted. I actively use my email from multiple locations, mainly work and home. After a little dabbling with it I decided to begin forwarding my other email accounts there.

I found to my surprise that I really like Gmail and it has become my primary email client. I will review a few key points of the service:

• The servers are fast and there is never a lag when accessing the Gmail pages. Accessing individual mails is also fast. They have greatly improved on the slow speeds that I have experienced in the past with webmail. [edit: It should be noted that I have only connected to Gmail with broadband. I can't speak to the experiences that dial-up users will have.]
• The threaded view of mails (they call it "conversations") that Gmail has used is well implemented and is very effective. When you receive a reply to a message, the original message is shown with it, making it very simple to track the course of the conversation. I have found this especially useful with mailing lists. In fact Gmail is a great tool for reading lists, especially high volume ones, as threads of conversation are very easy to follow.
• The spam filtering still leaves a lot to be desired. It certainly works. I forwarded an older account that gets large amounts of spam, and probably 90% is caught. However, a good amount still sneaks through. Gmail incorporates spam training, but it is not clear what the filtering algorithm is. It would appear that they are using Bayesian filtering, but I have not found any references, and there may be other tools at work. [edit: I should add that the spam filtering works fairly well right "out of the box" so plainly more is being used than just the training that you give it. I also have not noticed a single false positive (ham marked as spam), though others have reported some.]
• Rather than use folders, Gmail archives all your mail into one large "Archive" folder. Then you can use Google search to find mail that you're looking for. This is surprisingly effective. You also have the option of applying labels to mail. This works like folders with the exception that one conversation can have any number of labels applied. This can certainly aid in organizing mails that defy easy categorization.
• Gmail also offers the option of keyboard shortcuts to speed movement around the interface.
• Reportedly there are more improvements underway, but I have not seen much to indicate what is coming. Certainly they will soon add the ability to POP (and possibly IMAP) your mail, which is lacking now.

And finally the privacy issue. Gmail does scan your mail for keywords and displays relevant textual ads to the right of your emails. They are fairly discreet and easy to ignore. I think cutting through the hype, the darker potential here is that by combining a reference of your emails with your searches, Google could potentially form a fairly good profile of you, if they were interested in doing so. These profiles could then be sold and you could become a target of advertisers. It's hard to guess how likely this is. To use the service, you need to be aware of this possibility. Conscious management of your cookies could probably minimize the potential risk to your privacy, but could also make Gmail more difficult to use. I have chosen to live with the risk for now to take advantage of the convenience.

Overall I think that Gmail is a great tool. I'm not sure that I will stay with it in the long run, but for now I'm very happy with it. If more improvements are indeed in the pipeline, it could easily become the dominant free webmail, at least once it is released to the public. But that could be another 3-6 months. Will people still be interested?

[Colin Dunstan]

Nice review!

So far I am not too concerned about privacy issues, mainly because I don't use my Gmail account for any "sensitive" e-mail transfers. I think Gmail is "good to have" for the reasons you just mentioned. A slick interface, a good search feature, and the 1 GB space make it very attractive.

Other people take the privacy issues more seriously: "Gmail is nearly immortal", "Google's policies do not apply", "A massive potential for abuse", "Inappropriate ad matching"...

[ignatz]

Update: I was out of town for the weekend and returned to find a few pieces of ham in my spam folder. However, they were all mailing list emails, and most were part of a single thread, so perhaps there was some keyword in them that caused the problem.

[ignatz]

It seems that spam control has improved, as I am now getting virtually no spam down from as many as 20 pieces a day. Don't know if the training finally took or what. I tend to doubt that and to assume that Google has improved general filtering on their end.