Community Access Internet

Can an online email application really compete with the best desktop applications? Prior to using Gmail I would have said no. I’ve had a Yahoo Mail account for many years, which I found useful for testing purposes but never considered using as a primary email application. I still use Outlook for my business emails, mainly because of the archive of messages in it, going back to 2002. About a year ago, I set up a Gmail account to receive personal mail sent to my falken.name domain. It has worked well enough that I have since recommended it to several people and businesses for use as their primary email application.

Gmail was designed from the ground up to be an online application and the programmers at Google have played to their strengths. They came up with the first usable interface for grouping threaded emails together (Outlook 2003 is horrible at this), which they call Conversations. The screenshot below shows 5 messages received today that belong to the same thread. I can easily move between them and respond to any one or all of them.

Yes, those are ads on the right and you know what, I don’t even notice them any more. It’s actually kind of interesting to note the ads that Google thinks are relevant to my messages.

In another example of their clean-slate approach, Gmail doesn’t use folders for organizing mail. Instead, you define and attach “labels” to mail messages, which are then used to group similar messages together and to aid in searching.

In the Gmail system, there is only a single copy of each message (which is actually stored in “All Mail”). Labels are simply a convenient way of referencing messages. Of course, being Google, you can search your mail six ways from Sunday.

A common refrain among Gmail users is, “it’s hard to explain; you just have to try it”. An early review at A Whole Lotta Nothing put it this way:

I can say that after using gmail for a few days I finally get what everyone is raving about. On first glance there’s nothing impressive there. To see what it is capable of doing well, you have to use it: get a few email discussions going with folks and the more you use it the more obvious the benefits become. I bet you could say the same thing about blogging. Show a blog or the Blogger.com app to someone that has never seen it or heard of blogging. I’m sure they’d dismiss it as nothing special, one page being some sort of boring public diary, while the app itself is just a giant form and a button marked “post and publish”, whatever that means.

Gmail is pretty incredible about tracking discussions. I’ve tried several email packages that offer threading and gmail’s is simpler and more straightforward. It automatically trims replies and shows email threads as top-down discussions, so it’s easy to keep track of where people are in a discussion. Replying to email is really easy, you just start typing in the textarea below a message and it automatically starts a response.

Here are a few Gmail tricks that I’ve learned in the past year:

• If you have forwarded your mail to Gmail from another account, you can add that account under “send mail as…” in Gmail. When you respond to these messages, they will show the return address of the account from which they were forwarded.
• You can create a local archive of your Gmail messages by installing Google Desktop and indexing the mail in your Gmail account. This will also allow you to read your Gmail messages offline.
• There are several “notifier” utilities that will alert you when new mail arrives at Gmail. I use two: Gmail Notifier for Firefox (on my laptop) and GmailGeiger for Yahoo Widgets (on my desktop). There is also one available from Google but I haven’t tried it.
• You can display cute little quotes of the day, news tickers, etc. above your inbox but more importantly, you can turn them off. Look in Settings under Web Clips.

Email is one of the must-have applications on any modern computer and I do not hesitate recommending Gmail. It even works surprisingly well over a dial-up connection (when doing so, I’d suggest either the “Standard Without Chat” or “Basic HTML” settings). However, to take full advantage of Gmail’s integration with other Google applications, you’re going to want a broadband connection. More on those in another post.

Much has been written about the increasingly blurry line between the desktop and the web. I find that more and more people don’t care, and don’t need to care, where their computing is taking place. People like my mother, who thinks of Yahoo! Mail as “her” email program, even though it’s located on a server hundreds of miles from her home. I’m writing this document using Google Docs & Spreadsheets (who’s in charge of naming things at Google, anyway?), not because I don’t have a perfectly good word processor installed on my laptop but because I want to be able to edit it later on my work computer and the whole thing’s going to end up online in Blogger eventually anyway.

So, I thought I’d start an occasional series of posts about the online apps that I personally find useful. I like to experiment, so I’ve used quite a few of them but most quickly become more trouble than they’re worth. To qualify for regular use, an application has to meet a need and not add to my workload (I don’t multi-task all that well). Oh yeah, and they almost always have to be free.

First up is Google. Most of you know it’s not just a search engine anymore. In fact, the number of programs that come hurtling out of Google Labs is pretty astonishing. Let’s start at the top, with the Google Home Page. The classic Google Home Page is a model of simplicity:

By selecting Personalized Home, you can customize the home page, not just to look different, but also to serve as a launching pad for many online applications. Here’s a condensed screen shot of my home page:

From here, I can access the big 3 of personal information management: email/contacts, calendar and the todo list. Two of these programs – Gmail and Google Calendar – are native to Google and the third (a task management program called Remember the Milk) integrates with the Google home page using a widget. This combination gives me 80% of the functionality of Microsoft Word and Outlook, accessible from any computer with an Internet connection, anywhere in the world.

To get started, go to the Google home page and sign in. Strictly speaking, you don’t need an account to create a personalized home page but you will need one to use any of Google’s other services, like Gmail and Calendar. If you don’t have a Google account, you can create one from the sign in page. Then, click the Personalized Home Page link and start adding stuff (really, the link is called “Add Stuff”). Experimentation is the name of the game and it may take a little while to find a layout that works for you.

Next time I come back to this topic, I’ll talk a bit about Gmail and Google Calendar. BTW, I recently read that Gmail no longer requires an invitation to sign up. It’s open to everybody, even though the logo still says beta.