Gmail Adds Features

tommertron writes "Gmail rolled out a host of new features today. Big improvement in the contacts list, with the ability to search it and organize messages according to contact. Also, you can now forward all incoming gmail to any email account, but, according to Google, this feature is only 'free for now.' Does this mean gmail will start charging for some features? Meanwhile, Internet News is reporting that on Monday, some gmail accounts contained an Atom link for reading your email summaries in a news reader. Also meanwhile, my decrepit Hotmail account still hasn't given me that promised 250 megabytes ..."

Duh!

[(54)T-Dub]

Of course they are going to charge you to forward your email. Otherwise you could use their great spam filter and bandwidth without having to see their adds. And what do you expect from a Free email service. At least you can have some confidence that they won't sell your email address.

Queue bitching about targeted advertising.....

Does it work properly/completely with Opera yet?

[Propagandhi]

Opera is my browser of choice (I've found it to be more stable than Firefox, if not as full featured) and so far it hasn't been compatible with G-Mail. Does this upgrade improve support for my favorite browser?

Free now, pay later?

[hardlined]

Can they really think that giving out features and then charging for them later will really work? It's simply absurb.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Great...while it lasts...

[danielrm26]

Unfortunately the whole Google thing is starting to take on an ominous feeling for me. They are cool because they do so few things, and they do them so well. I think we are right on the cusp of them leveling out and heading down hill. I hope I'm wrong though...

POP 3

[Moo Moo The Cow]

I will always like pop 3. They just dont fill up, and even if you can only use them on 1 computer, I have a laptop, so i can just take it with me.

I've used GMail for a while now...

[Sheetrock]

While its features are more iterative than revolutionary, I believe GMail is the logical next step in how we all do e-mail.

We are all inundated with e-mail nowadays. Semantic parsing and bayesian filtering are commonplace, but no conventional e-mail client allows automatic grouping by subject in quite the manner of GMail. I enjoy the ability to search messages rather than arbitrarily tossing them into folders to be forgotten. Indeed, e-mail has called out for intelligent grouping for some time now.

It opens up some fantastic marketing opportunities as well. Already they exploit this with the excellent GoogleAds along the side of the screen that have relevance to the e-mail one is perusing; however, with the gradual acceptance of commercial e-mail by people and by legislation I believe there is a great deal of future potential in selling/buying general profiles of e-mail accounts using this same data. As search engines and e-mail combine, the quality of the search interface becomes a mute point; the most interesting information is pushed to the user based on relevance to their online lives.

The only real concern is privacy, but I'll bet it's possible to sell really general-type information without violating any policies -- thus using advertising to continue to deliver the kinds of features users expect without costing them a dime. If only they could do something like this with online backup/recovery as well.

Re:Duh!

[0racle]

Then don't use gmail, or did you not think about that?

Re:Too much fuss over gmail

[StevenHenderson]

so what does GMail have to offer others don't?

No new features?!?! How bout these:

1. Text-based ads instead of graphics or flash.
2. No taglines. Very nice if you want to send out professional emails.
3. Excellent spam filter.
4. FAST CSS (might be wrong about that) interface.
5. Google search built right into your email inbox, archive, etc.

I can go on if need be. You're nuts.

How about IMAP clients

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd use my gmail account a lot more if it supported imap clients. I have quite a few email accounts that I use daily; and it's really nice if I can access them all with the same client in the same session.

Re:Whither standards?

[prockcore]

With RSS feeds becoming more and more popular across a whole raft of different applications (including tasty new integration with Firefox), surely combining the two formats (Atom and RSS) would be beneficial, lest we end up with another VHS/Beta or DVD+/-RW/RAM situation..

Why not just have the readers support both? Firefox supports both RSS and Atom feeds. Although there are technically 3 different RSS formats because of the non-backwards compatible changes they keep making.

I hope they'll stick with RSS version 2.0 for a while.

Re:Does it work properly/completely with Opera yet

[black mariah]

Firefox crashes about three times a day for me. This further illustrates that anecdotal evidence means dick.

Re:I've used GMail for a while now...

[groomed]

Threading of messages has been around for decades. Searching is easy and fast on modern hardware. Storage is perhaps not quite a dime per GB yet but that day is not far off. Spam detection technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years. The only benefit of gmail is that it's accessible anywhere you can access the WWW. That's cool, but personally I much prefer to SSH into my home machine.

I'm not trying to downplay the significance of gmail. It's a very nice application. Even if it wasn't, new sources of throw-away email accounts are always welcome. And it keeps Hotmail in check. But grandiose proclamations like "I believe GMail is the logical next step in how we all do e-mail", well, that's just liturgical bullshit.

Re:one in the hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just sent you an invite -- enjoy!

Re:Duh!

[foreverdisillusioned]

Maybe he's, you know, discussing his views on Gmail in a discussion forum FOR Gmail?

I, for one, am glad that there are people out there willing to share their security concerns, and I don't understand it they're told to shut up because it's an optional, free service. Free or not, we have a right to know and talk about these things.

Re:Say it with me now: H T M L

[dragonman97]

No one should advocate HTML mail - this is just crap, and the best way to inject all sorts of junk into e-mail. If a message isn't getting to you clearly in plain text e-mail, then the sender really needs to take a writing class. I think this .sig sums it up: (credit: Matthew Keller) "No one ever says, 'I can't read that ASCII E-mail you sent me.'"

Re:Duh!

[gmuslera]

Forwarding all your mail still needs you to have 1gb to store it in somewhere else. You will not have its search engine, its conversation mode, and even its labels (thing you can get thru imap, afaik). Gmail package is not just spam filter, 1gb capacity and so on, is all the features combined. Even the targetted ads is potentially a feature.

Using gmail just because its spam filter is like buying a Ferrari just because it looks nice. Is the whole engine that worths.

Re:Say it with me now: H T M L

[hughk]

HTML is a convenient method of markup which is cross system. Yes, it can be used to inject crap, but you don't have to allow that. Markup gives a way of structuring texts visually and logically to make them easier to understand. For example, I may have a list of ten events, but each event has something like a paragraph. Not so easy to work with on the screen. Providing a simple TOC with each item linking to the description later in the page is an easy way to represent this.

Btw, I know this from past experience when I was running a newsletter for some six hundred or so members of our ski-club. We would send the full newsletter out as a pdf attachment. However before meetings we would send out a reminder without attachments. A lot of people, and for good reason, object to Outlook-style rich-text. HTML is a reasonable alternative and gives the ability to organise the information.

If HTML is allowed, then either you have no support for automatic following of external links (like IMG) or the ability to disable it based on contact.

GMail Contact list BLOWS

[chriskzoo5]

One question - why can't you group contacts yet? When I want to send an email to a group of friends, family, etc you have to pick EVERY contact individually.

Re:don't be greedy

[Yakman]

I would say that with the amount of smart cookies working for Google, someone managed to write a script that takes a nicely commented and well written javascript file and removes whitespace, comments, shortens variable names and spits out the result. This means they can have a smaller download for end users and a maintainable source file for developers.

It wouldn't take too long for someone who really wanted it to "un-obfuscate" the source. At least the formatting part you could do via a script and then rename variables when you work out what they're for.

Re:Whither standards?

[Quantum Jim]

...surely combining the two formats (Atom and RSS) would be beneficial, lest we end up with another VHS/Beta or DVD+/-RW/RAM situation...

That's actually why Atom was first proposed. After Netscape lost control of the standard, RSS spintered into seven incompatible versions [diveintomark.org]! Atom is an attempt to merge and stabilize the best of "Really Simple Syndication", "RDF Site Summary", and everything in between. The reason Google uses Atom, is because Blogger is a major sponser. Personally, I think Atom has an impressive design (although some is still a little clunky). Note that the final draft has yet to be published, as Atom isn't even 1.0 yet!

Re:Say it with me now: H T M L

[Quantum Jim]

No one should advocate HTML mail - this is just crap, and the best way to inject all sorts of junk into e-mail. If a message isn't getting to you clearly in plain text e-mail, then the sender really needs to take a writing class. I think this .sig sums it up: (credit: Matthew Keller) "No one ever says, 'I can't read that ASCII E-mail you sent me.'"

Full HTML may be a bit much, but what about allowing parsing of the few XHTML core modules [w3.org], like the text, hypertext, and list modules? This is basically just HTML without images, styles (except for the email reader's style sheet), or other multimedia. This would make it infinitely easier to quote other emails and to link to sites on the internet.

At the same time, robot searchability would be improved while the "crap" you dislike can't be transmitted easily. I gather that you don't object to the semantic data exchanged via HTML email, just the (usually poorly done) multimedia.

Finally, as XML uses UTF by default, languages that contain letters not found in the English alphabet can be exchanged. ASCII is arguably an anachronism in an age of global text transmission.

Re:Whither standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here:

• 9 incompatible versions [diveintomark.org] are a problem for writing clients.
• ASCII only means RSS2.0 is no use to the non-english speaking world.
• Dave winer being a loser is also a problem.

Besides, pretty much every library for RSS also supports atom. And if you're using an aggregator which doesn't, switch.

Still top-posting

[chrysalis]

It's nice to see Gmail add features, but it still lacks an obvious one: the ability to properly quote emails when replying to them.

The raw copy of everything with "--original message follows--" is really lousy. How can you quote pats of the message that way? How do you insert answers to different questions of the original mail?

I would love to see Gmail do better than this Outlook brain damage.

Re:gmail invites

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd agree with you were it not for the fact that google is already completely ubiquitous and gmail so heads-and-shoulders above the competition. If all they wanted to do was market gmail, they only needed to write a single line of text at google.com describing its features and providing a link to the service. As another user commented, the "invite" system provided a good way to scale the service - and perhaps create buzz for the "google" brand while they were doing their IPO - but was totally unnecessary in terms of getting the message out to the public about gmail.

The "bloat" discussion, and more.

[hkmwbz]

"What on earth happened to the accusations of bloat?"

"Bloat" is very subjective. Mostly, the word seems to be used as an argument to put down another program. Opera is "bloated" because it is feature-rich. Firefox is "bloated" because it's a bigger download than Opera. It's almost always used as flamebait when browser zealot are fighting each other over which browser is better...

"Bloat" doesn't matter much, since Opera runs just fine with all these features included. They don't slow Opera down, and the latest UI is toned down so you won't get all features thrown in your face at once.

"As for stability, I have found that Opera fairly often when fed very bad HTML."

Then Opera would always fail. Most sites out there have very bad HTML. If a page crashes Opera, just report it to them so it can be fixed. Same with Firefox really.

"It also has some bugs, like making duplicate emails."

I've never seen this, ever. Not on my own PCs, and not from other Opera users. I have seen servers going mad and changing stuff so the email client downloads everything again, but that's a server problem. Opera itself does not duplicate emails. Maybe you are mistaking the fact that Opera has everything stored in one place and one email can show up in any number of virtual views, with duplication?

Re:Duh!

[Disevidence]

Fair enough. Personally I have little interest in things that are of no concern to me, so I just found it curious he was complaining about a service he will not use.

Re:Duh!

[Threni]

> Google is good, but they're not that good

I'm going abroad next week and will generate hundeds of megs of digital photos. I only have 256mb of storage on me. I have 2 gmail accounts. Can you guess what I'm going to use them for? Perhaps you can explain to me what i'd do without them. Don't tell me - get 50 hotmail, yahoo etc accounts, right? Or pay for some server space?