February 24th, 2009
Google are great. Great but not perfect. I love GMail, it singlehandedly made webmail a viable alternative to the traditional e-mail clients such as Outlook and Pegasus. I also use Gmail for my own domains, it gets around any hosting e-mail limits and provides a much more elegant webmail solution for clients, even going as far as being very Blackberry friendly.
On the other hand when Google do have a problem it can be a real pain in the ass. For example GMail is down again today.
October 31st, 2007
A large part of my day is spent checking and answering e-mails, I suppose in an average day I probably get about 50 genuine messages and maybe 3,000 spam mails! Yes you read right, about 3,000! However e-mail is so time consuming for me for more than just the spam reason, I work in 2 locations, I have a home setup and an office that I work from most days. This can make managing my multiple e-mail accounts a real pain, especially as I like to use Outlook and GMail (Gmail has the most effective spam filters for any free e-mail account I’ve found to date, and I’ve tried a lot).
Up until the last few days I accessed my primary work e-mail from the office using Outlook and used the GMail web interface when I was out of the office. Of course this means that I have to go through and mark-as-read messages that I’ve already dealt with. This is all just a long winded way of saying that POP3 is rubbish if you work from multiple locations or work stations. Google have just answered my prayers though, GMail are to become the first free mail system to roll out FREE IMAP SUPPORT. This is huge, it’s bigger than huge, it’s immense. IMAP allows your e-mail account to be fully synchronised automatically, reply from your mobile and it’s there in your outlook, delete something in outlook and it’s removed from the webmail interface. To mobile professionals or just people that only like to do something once this is an epic step forward in free email.
The scary thing is I have no idea how they can do it. The problem with IMAP is that you have to maintain a connection to the server in order to synchronise, this causes heavy strain on the server and limits the number of users you can have. How Google have scaled this with the millions of GMail users out there I don’t know, if it works it’s going to save me probably 25% of my daily e-mail time so I don’t care. The question is now what to do with all that extra time?
