I like Gmail, like a lot of people. I decided to give Gmail a whole month of my total attention. I forwarded all of my mail to Gmail, and used only Gmail for about a month. I dug all of that AJAX goodiness. And now, I’m going back to the Mac OS X Mail.app.
Mail.app has it’s drawbacks, but the filing mechanisms that I’m used to (nested folders) work so much better for my brain and work than the label system that Gmail uses. And, OK, I’ll admit it, I’m not liking so much some of the ads that have showed up next to emails from my SO, or my friends. Who wants advertisements for cough suppressants, or sleep aids, or … well, you can guess.
Mac OS X Leopard is supposed to include a major upgrade to Mail.app. So, perhaps some of my issues with it will be dealt with. Who knows.
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I’m still stuck on Outlook and while I have a gmail account, I just never invested the time for the switch. So, now I don’t think I’ll bother.
I use gmail (fiddledd at) and kmail (the latter with folders and about 100 filters). Don’t have a suggestion for the sometimes-yukky gmail ads, but my suggestion for improving the gmail label system is not to use it. I just leave everything in gmail in one unsorted pile (about 4100 messages at the moment), and I’m generally more successful searching there than in kmail. (In this case I’m talking about searches that start from scratch, where I have basically no idea which messages, if any, apply.) And search is so much faster and more convenient in gmail that it makes a qualitative difference. (I have about 4GB of messages in kmail; searches that span many folders are slow, so I don’t do them.) The most frequent problem is “too many hits;” it can be difficult finding the right terms to winnow down results.
I still don’t think I’m using gmail to its best advantage. For one thing, since my it’s not my main account, I don’t really get the benefit of the “poor person’s IMAP” effect. (For example, my main desktop went down almost two weeks ago and I’m just now getting the replacement host set up. I’ve been limping along on a temporary laptop and will have to manage merging my kmail data by hand. gmail has been just toolin’ along.) For another, I’d be better off putting all my email list traffic into gmail and reserving kmail for lower-volume, higher priority stuff. (What I do now is use gmail for my NPO related mail and my main account for “work” mail.) So anyway, while there’s plenty not to like about gmail, I think it still offers value if you figure out how to fit it into your overall email strategy.
Well, my problem with either the label thing, or with not using them, is that, basically, my inbox is a very important part of my to do list. And so a compartmentalized inbox means that my to do list is compartmentalized (by project, or community, etc.) Without that, I’d have to radically change my own workflow. I could do that, but I guess it’s because I’ve been using email clients with nested folders and filters into folders for … probably more than 10 years (when was Eudora 1.0?)
Basically, at this point, since GMail does have, by far, the best web mail interface that I’ve seen, I’ll be forwarding my mail there when I travel. But when I’m home … Mail.app it is.
After reading your post, I realize that I don’t like those things about gmail either. Mmmmmmm. A little knowledge…..
I’ve never tried Thunderbird. Have you?
I have. It’s a bit clunky, but I like it on Linux. I think it’s a good option, in general, and pretty straightforward to use (my non-techie partner uses it on windows fine.)
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