On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 14:17:23 -0500 Dan Drake <dan at dandrake.org> wrote: > I have a question about gmail: what's so great about it? Interesting timing, I just received an invite this morning. My initial opinions: 1.) nice interface, someone else mentioned this too. Webmail should be simple, I think my inlaws could even handle this. It also seems very quick (someone else mentioned client-side javascript). What I'm curious about is how well "alternate" browsers handle it. I currently use Horde/Imp for webmail (which is very slick) after using SquirrelMail for years. I can say though that this is one of the best. 2.) Conversation/threaded email is great for stuff like TCLUG. Not that this is a new invention, I get it with my current favorite MUA Sylpheed, but I think this is the first webmail client I've seen do threaded email "right" if at all. Someone mentioned annoying ML's like TCLUG (disagree on TCLUG's annoyance) and Samba (indeed very annoying). I think I'm going to subscribe my two favorite annoying mailing lists to my gmail account - Spamassassin and MySQL (extremely annoying). It'll be interesting to see if Spam related email in the Spamassassin ML is tagged as SPAM. 3.) Speaking of which, I'm not too excited about how gmail appears to handle SPAM. Doesn't seem like you can customize it too much. Then again I haven't been using it for very long (only an hour) so maybe I'm missing something? 4.) gmail blocks executables for anti-virus. This may be a good or bad thing depending on your needs. 5.) This morning the system was very slow and I received a message to check back in a few minutes. Hopefully it's only because the system is still in beta. 6.) You can run over SSL using https://gmail.google.com/ 7.) The Gmail-Notifyer program is only available on Windohs. My final thoughts? I don't know, it seems nice, but I also just have a weird and perhaps unjustified distrust of google. So I think I might use gmail for some high-volume mailing list traffic, but I like having control of my own email system where I can control every aspect of how my email works. I get threading using Sylpheed (though the Winders version is occasionally flaky), sophisticated searching using dbmail and my server suports ssl/smtpauth. What would be hella-cool would be if the gmail interface was open-sourced, but I highly doubt that. Josh _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list