For god’s
sake, it’s web mail with a really big quota!
I realize this would’ve been more timely a couple weeks ago when the
Google GMail hype was at its peak,
but people are still going on about this. Jeremy nails it in the
post linked above.
Didn’t we learn from Orkut?
7 responses to “GMail”
SOMEONE’S GIVING ME SOMETHING FOR NEARLY NOTHING! THE MINIESCULE CATCH IS THE GREATEST INVASION OF PRIVACY IN THE HISTORY OF EVER!!!! FOUL!!! FOUL!!!!
BUT IT IS BUILT ON AN INTERNET OPERATING SYSTEM
Wait, isn’t that just nu-speak for “distributed” and “scalable?”
But mendel! The ads in your mail will be “on-topic”!!
Nah. After a little while, I got boredom from orkut, but no knowledge.
What I find interesting (after, admittedly, only a quick scan) that a lot of the replies seem to be saying “but none of this stuff has been offered in a webmail app” (optionally pointing out that it’s free).
Um. so what? Oddly enough, I’m happy to have my own mail on my own machine, rather than storing it somewhere else. Am I nuts?
I’d like to point out that this would be a perfect situation for the use of Trackback, were it implemented here. At least, this is what I use it for ;)
The only thing that I can see GMail being good at for me is an email address I can depend on. Right now, I’m looking at leaving school next semester – far before I planned to before – and thinking “Oh crap. The email address I’ve been using as my main one for the past two years is going away.” There are times when I don’t feel comfortable using the forwarding service I have (LJ), don’t want to use something that’s associated with the name it carries (Yahoo/Hotmail), and don’t have a “main” email address I can depend on (UIUC). Gmail to me avoids the branding that the other services have recieved (Thus far, not that it never will). That would be my only use for it – being able to have an account where things can go (Bugzilla installs, and the like) and not worry about the address fading away.
That’s why you should use
pobox.
It’s funny you should say that — an address fading away is exactly why I wouldn’t use a free email service. I got tired of playing musical email addresses a while ago, and switched to using pobox (even before I knew freeside, whose baby pobox is), and a while after that I just got my own domain name and was done with it. :-)