Google GMail: Desktop like Mail Client inside a Browser!
October 9th, 2004 Leave a comment Visited 57 times, 1 so far today
Google is making GMail more like Desktop Mail Client
The more I use GMail and Google keeps on enhancing this webmail service, the more I look at it as a replacement to desktop mail clients. I have been using GMail for my personal mails and I cannot hide the fact that I am loving it. It is fast, it is accessible from any computer with a decent web browser, and it behaves better than desktop mail client on various factors.
One of the major issues with webmail is the slow response time. Take for example Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. Opening various sections take so much time. And to add to the slow loading independent pages, there are so many big advertisements on the interface. GMail on the other hand works like a charm. First time loading is a bit slow, after that everything works fine. Composing and sending mail is fast and searching using Google’s own personal engine is excellent. The reason being the interface is made up of number of frames (independent sections) which are independently reloaded as per requirement and some other scarcely used web technologies like XMLHttpRequest object.
And the recent enhancement brings it even closer to desktop mail clients. The new contact tab in GMail interface fulfills one of the most common requests. Now composing a mail to multiple addresses is as easy as selecting the names from the address book. For convenience, there is a frequently mailed tab with the most popular mail addresses. Extremely thoughtful of Google. Another excellent feature added in GMail can be checked by clicking on a mail id in the contact list and GMail will show the complete detail along with recent conversations involving that contact! A feature that can come so handy at times and is available in many desktop clients like Opera M2 and Microsoft Outlook. I would love the readers to tell me if any other mail client or webmail does this…
Overall, I can safely say I love the GMail functionality over any other mail client I have used until now. Apart from offline accessibility of mails that comes handy with desktop mail clients, there is little GMail cannot do. On the other hand, availability of all your mails anywhere is something that desktop mail clients fail to offer. IMAP is an intermediate solution for desktop mail client users, but still it does not come close to GMail. In addition, if rumors are to be believed, Google would be offering IMAP or POP mail support as a paid option when GMail is publicly released. That would let users to access GMail from their mail clients. Some third party applications are already available online, which does this for free.
Here I would like to clarify that this is based on my personal experiences. I would love to hear your stories about experiences using GMail and how do you find it compared to the normal desktop mail clients. And if GMail was to support free pop mail importing, would you replace your desktop mail client with GMail? I would personally love to have the capability to choose my senders mail ID and use it full time. I am currently forwarding mails from my pop mail addresses to GMail.
There is one shortcoming in GMail however. It cannot compete with my hard disk capacity on storing mails. I have already used 10% of my GMail space (and it is still in beta!) while I still have around 95 GBs left on my hard disk to store mails in a mail client…
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November 15th, 2004 at 09:20 pm
[...] irst ones to be publicly deployed. Google already has implemented it in its hugely popular GMail service, which happens to be still in beta. And an Indian IT Compan [...]
October 10th, 2004 at 03:03 am
As someone who has multiple sites, I fully understand you and I don’t think you’re overstating. I use Mozilla, so having Gmail is like a dream come true. I just forward all my POP accounts there and download backups to my desktop.
I dream of the day when POP Gmail is available, and I’ll be happy to pay whatever it costs.
October 11th, 2004 at 06:06 pm
POP Gmail kind of defeats the purpose of having 1000 MB of storage though, doesn’t it? :) Although I’m sure someone will release a 3rd party utility like they did for Yahoo and Hotmail. There is also a utility for you to use your GMail space as generic storage space directly through explorer.
October 11th, 2004 at 07:57 pm
Select All should do just that – select ALL messages, not just the ones on the screen. I have many lists that I’m subscribed to and sometimes I just want to mark an entire list as read. Currently there isn’t a one step option to do that.
Otherwise I like it very much.
October 11th, 2004 at 10:33 pm
) Re: POP Gmail, it kind of depends on how much space you use. I can fill up 1000 Gb of online mail in about 4 months, even if I delete stuff – running several sites this doesn’t includes subscriptions or sp-am, just necessary mail.
Things I need to archive but not refer to, I’d love to download en masses. A POP version would help that. Plus if I’m offline but have computer access, like when I’m on a plane, I can compose messages to be sent when I log back on.
I have web version of each of my sites email systems – still no replacement for POP email. Gmail comes as close as you can though.
October 25th, 2004 at 05:26 am
GMail is the best webmail client, but saying you can’t wait for it to be a POP3 is really quite silly. If you use it for POP3, what client will you use to get the mail? Probably Outlook or Eudora, which makes it no different from any other POP3.
For instance, “Things I need to archive but not refer to, I’d love to download en masses. A POP version would help that. Plus if I’m offline but have computer access, like when I’m on a plane, I can compose messages to be sent when I log back on.” If you have computer access on a plane, then you have more then likely have your laptop, and are doing the same thing writing messages to be sent later when you connect (they just get stored in an ‘outgoing’ folder.) As far as downloading the stuff you don’t need, but would like to refer to, well, what you are really saying is, you need it. If you don’t need it, delete it. However, that being said, using it as a POP three you could still just choose to leave the messages on the server when you download and set to be deleted from the POP3 server when they are gone from your client inbox, stick them in you archive, and resync.
I like the GMail webmail very much, but lets not say it is inventing the wheel if they go POP3.
November 3rd, 2004 at 03:03 pm
Well, I’m a pretty new Gmail user. I think, gmail should be compared with Yahoo and Hotmail, and gmail seems years ahead of the other two. PERIOD. Gmail utilizes the web interface in the best nad efficient way I’ve ever seen. Everything happens lightning fast. Scores IMO :
google : 85 (needs to be finetuned)
yahoo : 65
hotmail : 40 (the dumbest spam filtering I’ve ever seen)
About POP; POP’ing mails is a technology from the past. Todays trend is POP’ing local mails onto the web. So don’t make me laugh; gmail giving POP support is like Ferrari giving coal burning support as fuel. POP is history. They are planning on moving desktop applications onto the web, Microsoft is losing ground, and you are saying, “I want my mail on my computer, I have zillion GB free space on my harddisk”. That is not the future, that’s the past! 1 GB space and 10MB attachment limits is just the beginning of a new era. Get yourself prepared. But I know that habits are hard to give away. You were connecting with 28.8k modems, and being online was very expensive. So you acquired the habit of downloading all mail to Outlook, and go offline and then read’em cheaper. POP is useless besides this advantage.
One advantage for the old-fashioned buddies : Who can keep your data safer, google or you, yourself? You have 5 year history of emails on your beloved harddisks, and one sector fails, and boom, there is nothing left, where did you backup your mails, if you actually did? And who can defend their systems against hackers and like, you or google?
Welcome to tomorrow’s tech. Desktop is not the reality; it is Microsoft way. Desktop monopoly is all they have, and the battlefront is moving to the web.
November 3rd, 2004 at 09:26 pm
I agree with mindblitz on most of what he said, in principle. I agree we need to move awy from desktop and local storage, and I’m sure Google is pretty good at protecting our information (however, you would also think credit card companies, amazon and all the other major sites out there for banks that have been hacked and info stolen would have been pretty good too), a big question comes into the personal privacy realm. Same deal with Google’s desktop search client beta they released.
I just think there are some privacy issues and various things that need to be worked out first.
January 5th, 2005 at 01:24 pm
hi i wanne make a g mail account but some one should invite me please help me or invite me tnx
January 5th, 2005 at 01:26 pm
hi i wanne make a g mail account but some one should invite me please help me or invite me tnx
April 8th, 2005 at 11:38 pm
Please, ali rezaie, don’t sign up with Gmail. Although it may look pretty, it is frankly not safe. It got an ‘F’ from consumer reports for privacy & Gmail won the Big Brother Award 2005! I recently deleted my Gmail account, so I can’t invite you. Even still, I don’t recommend Gmail.
PS: for all of you arguing about POP3 mail…Gmail already has it for free! so quit bickering!
July 19th, 2005 at 03:19 pm
pls allow me enjoy gmail
July 19th, 2005 at 03:33 pm
pls allow me enjoy gmail
July 22nd, 2005 at 02:11 am
I think that Gmail is the best email provider anywhere. I have ICQmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Gmail addresses and I’m glad to say Gmail now has over 2000 MBs space (and counting) and POP3. It is fast, reliable and suffice to say, safe! In case you want to know, I do not work for Gmail or its advertising partners but I am just standing up for gmail because it is, in my opinion the best. Anyway, I still have 47 invites left if anybody needs or just search for free gmail on google.com and you’ll get sites leading to free gmail accounts. I might donate some of my invites.