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 ..."

Still can't open message in a new window

[freelunch]

I still don't understand why I can't middle click on a message to open it in a new window...

A one window view into my mbox is not sufficient.

Atom

[javabsp]

I saw the Atom link, but upon clicking on it, only a skeleton atom file is shown. It could be that I didn't have any unread mail...

Whither standards?

[kgbspy]

I agree with Dave Winer, the author of the RSS format. With RSS feeds becoming more and more popular across a whole raft of different applications (including tasty new integration with Firefox [mozilla.org]), surely combining the two formats (Atom and RSS) would be beneficial, lest we end up with another VHS/Beta or DVD+/-RW/RAM situation... Rather than have the two battle it out to the death, why not get the best of both worlds?

ATOM feed

[pridkett]

So I noticed the big red new features thing yesterday, clicked on it and saw a message saying they were adding new features, but nothing about them. I also had the mysterious ATOM feed as a button on my sidebar. I clicked on it and saw that it was a feed of new messages in my mail box. "This is a cool step in providing cool technology to the masses," I thought to myself.

Alas, it had one major problem. No API. So there was no way that I could actually subscribe. This is because the URL was non-descript and requires an authentication (as I would hope a feed of my new messages would). Today I went back to take a screenshot of the new sidebar and blog about my adventure in GmailAtom land, and the link was gone. Sad. Here's to hoping that it comes back soon.

Re:don't be greedy

[tommertron]

Wait a second... where in the article did I complain? Just a speculation. Hell, I probably would pay for gmail features if they added them, or restricted some of the ones they have now.

Too much fuss over gmail

[blackhaze]

Over all the fuss of GMail, I am actually very un-impressed by the Webmail interface google offers. If it was not for the 1GB of storage, I would rank gmail far behind a lot of other Webmail applications. A growing number of providers are offering 1GB+ accounts, so what does GMail have to offer others don't? I doubt very much gmail will open up with POP3/IMAP access - If they do it certainly will not be free. My summary, damm google has good marketing for gmail, but it's not that good!

The one feature that I would really like...

[Froze]

I just recently acquired a gmail account and the one feature that I have not been able to find anything on is permenancy(sp?). I would like to use gmail exclusively but without any gaurantee that I will always have my account it is a step that I am not willing to take just yet.

Get your Free flascreen whatevers here! [freeflatscreens.com]

Re:POP 3

[FiloEleven]

I used to be a POP kid. 'Course, I didn't have a laptop. I love the fact that I can get my mail anywhere, which you said was not a concern of yours.

The kicker, though, is the killer interface. Conversations are great, though they're missing some key features, such as a way to add new people to the conversation (present) and send them the entire contents of the conversation before they joined (not present). I have, of course, suggested this to the google kids.

It's also very nice to be able to find anything with one search, as I know that when I was using POP, if I didn't remember exactly where I put something it could take tens of minutes to find it.

Also, a wonderful feature is the [e-mail]. Now, if I *must* give my address to view or do something, I always put a descriptor afterward (such as [e-mail]) so I can easily track what comes from where - useful to figure out where spam is coming from, though none's actually made it past their filter yet.

Oh, and the 1000MB, but nobody really cares about that anymore ;)

Re:Atom

[Delta-9]

Here is the atom icon: I happened to post to another place about this. I have a screen shot as well, but that's kinda useless:

http://gmail.google.com/gmail/images/atom-badge. gi f

Konqueror

[Cranx]

When do you think gmail will support Konqueror?

Now if only...

[kneecarrot]

Now if only GMail would add a calendar and notepad functionality, I would dump Yahoo Mail in a heartbeat.

Re:Too much fuss over gmail

[blackhaze]

>1. Text-based ads instead of graphics or flash

Targeted ads that read my messages, gee, what a great *feature* !

>2. No taglines. Very nice if you want to send out professional emails.

No taglines as of yet. However, this still does not impress me as a 'feature'

>3. Excellent spam filter

Which free-mail services don't use Spamassassin?

>4. FAST CSS (might be wrong about that) interface.

Gmail uses Javascript to render most of the interface with XML for the message/content. Sure, the interface is light-weight, but all these 'new' features Gmail releases, have been around with other WebMail clients for a long time

e.g , Wow, Gmail adds a search feature to the addressbook! A new 'save' draft feature, OMG, isn't this unique? ;)

>5. Google search built right into your email inbox, archive, etc

The search feature is probably the only feature that's a bonus on Gmail. Apart from that, I'm unimpressed by the entire Gmail 'hype'

- Just in summary, for those people that don't have a Gmail account, don't hold your breath, it ain't that exciting!

Re:Subaddresses

[aussie_a]

This can actually be used to have multiple users have multiple accounts (if only during beta). [e-mail] gets forwarded to [e-mail] while [e-mail] gets forwarded to [e-mail]

They actually respond

[taylortbb]

It looks like they have actually responded to what I wan't. About 3 months ago I sent a request asking for more contact info, and here it is. (If you doubt me, I can post the message I got back from them about it). They actually listen to customers, its great.

Its too bad we live in a world run by corporations, its rare to get that kind of service.

I think we should be thankful we get 1000mb free, who cares if they charge to foreward?

Lynx compatible

[vijaya_chandra]

GMail sounds great but when'd it become lynx compatible!?

or atleast links compatible!?

When they claim they don't show any graphical ads, they ought to support browser that can't display images.

(so consider plain links and discard the graphics mode of links)

Re:don't be greedy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah it is... Their heavy use of iframes is what makes it work with seemingly no refresh speed, and also probably part of what makes conversation view possible (although that can probably be done with divs). In general, though, after one quick glance at the JS, I looked away with disgust. I'd rather think through how they're doing it (which I've managed to do for the most part) than try and go through that awful mess of code (probably obfuscated to protect it, or shortened so it's *only* 300 KB of download :D ).

One feature GMail sadly lacks

[philipdl71]

I know I will probably get modded down for this one but it lacks the ability to take a message in your inbox and forward it to people in your address book while looking at it (i.e. using checkboxes for forwarding). You can type in their names and use autocomplete but there is no easy way to choose from amongst your address book who you are going to forward to.

I don't really forward emails off to a gazillion people but it apparantly is a very common thing these days which was the reason I could not get my Grandmother to switch to gmail (she's one of those people that forwards every joke email she gets onto you thinking you'll read it).

They do have this feature for sending new mail to people now, however.

Gmail doesn't let you sort!

[ccnull]

Gmail's biggest flaw is that you can't sort your messages by anything (i.e. there's no heading bar at the top of the mail listing that you can click, a la Subject, Sender, or Date). Yahoo Mail is seamless at this. With Gmail you get sorted by date, that's it.

Now you might say I could just search my inbox, but that's no good either. Why? The search results suck. I have 171 emails with the exact same subject line right now (running a promotion), and searching for that exact string gets me 68 results. Great... You also can't sort those results, either.

Love the interface otherwise, but the technology needs work and the interface needs sorting!

New Security Measures in GMail

[XsynackX]

I tried e-mailing a zip file today and gmail spit back a warning: "Sending of this type of file has been restricted to to security concerns." Anyone else notice this? Interesting . . .

we need a competitive open source webmail app

[astrashe]

The thing I love about gmail is the javascript client -- it's really usable.

I'd love to see an open source competitor. Maybe even something that does good full text indexing of your mail, and provides those nifty searches.

Then whether google was going to charge, or whether they'd provide IMAP, or whatever, wouldn't matter. Anyone could do whatever they need.

I don't have any idea how you'd write something like google's mail client -- I didn't know client side javascript was good enough to do something so usable. If anyone knows of any tutorials (books, web sites, etc.), I'd love to hear about them.

Re:gmail invites

[Anonymous Coward]

You people are all fucking retarded and turned this post into a GMail orgy.

Just get your GMail or dump your invites here:

http://isnoop.net/gmailomatic.php

Re:Whither standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Although there are technically 3 different RSS formats because of the non-backwards compatible changes they keep making.

Actually, there are 9 incompatible versions of RSS [diveintomark.org].

Re:Gmail doesn't let you sort!

[pkhuong]

Are you sure it's not showing you 68 threads? Some of your users could be doing something weird...

Re:don't be greedy

[PickyH3D]

It's really simple actually and quite ingenius for the bandwidth speed. For instance, if you go under IE and right click -> View Source, then you see some random looking gibberish. However, if you go under View -> Source, then you see it referencing a JavaScript file. Just look at the [obfuscated] JavaScript file and voila.

Re:gmail invites

[cookiepus]

Alright, two things.

First of all, google are fucking genius. Normally, sites ask you to 'refer a friend' and no one does it. But here, they made everyone all excited about it by making it a rare comodity! People feel like they've been gifted with 6 invites so they want to make sure they take advantage. Meanwhile it just builds up Google's userbase. Crazy how people get sucked into viral marketing (I hope that's a term I just made up) when their perception has been altered thusly.

That being said, I have a few invites and if you want one, write to Karma.Award at... Well you know @ what :)

Re:Does it work properly/completely with Opera yet

[Coryoth]

You need to have Opera ID itself as Opera. GMail uses ActiveX to display itself in IE, probably to avoid lots of complications from odd Javascript problems with IE. Since Opera is IDing as IE, GMail is assuming it has ActiveX support, which it does not.

Interesting that they had to resort to ActiveX. An interesting question though, is how long it will be before they'll detect Firefox/Mozilla users and have a powerful XUL interface available - if you could do a nice interface as rich and as fast as this [faser.net] GMail would start looking very impressive (and people would be moving very fast to Firefox to get it).

Jedidiah.

Re:OT: Wow!

[mewphobia]

I've done a fair bit of work in XUL. A CRM system, another database accessing interface and a user interface for an art project (basically a drawing app). XUL is cool. It's about as hard as learning xhtml + javascript (DOM) from scratch. The main problem as it stands is with lack of documentation. Also, XUL is a bit of a moving target - I've filed at least 2 bugs per app i've developed!

To give you an example, I was trying to load some valid xhtml into my document by inserting it directly into the DOM. All images and style elements in this document fragment weren't loaded! I ended up fixing it with something called XPConnect javascript but i needed to install my app for this to work.

A good place to check out is xulplanet [xulplanet.com]. It's probably the most comprehensive XUL sites out there.

As far as power goes, firefox itself was written in XUL - so anything you can do in firefox you can do in XUL. Well, if it's installed XUL. If it's just loaded like a webpage then it's got the same security restrictions as webpages ie. no access to local files/clipboard etc.