freemode.net

The horizon of coolness    [ Rants ]

Every so often, you come across something that makes you go "wow!" and appreciate an elegant design, really good coding, or a system that Works Properly.   When you spend upwards of 40 hours a week working on a government IT contract, you might not see that so often, so that makes Gmail all the more impressive.

I got an invite from a coworker who's been using Gmail for a few months now (he had an account on Orkut and got a free invite to Gmail) and has moved all his mail over.   I've read a fair bit about Gmail in the geek-news press, but I'm just blown away by it - It Just Works.   Spam filtering works really well (so far, knock on wood), you can use keyboard shortcuts (this is great, coming from mutt), the searching features are great... I've only been using this for a little bit now, but even for being in beta, this thing feels more solid than most other webmail services out there.   It doesn't suffer from the blind-your-eyes-with-adverts approach of Hotmail and Yahoo - the text ads are really pretty unobtrusive.

Google's nailed this on the head.   Microsoft's got a real competitor here, not just for Hotmail, but for Outlook - why deal with all the client-side virii/worm mess plus abysmal search capabilities (yes, I *do* want to search through my Inbox plus my archives for this - why do I have to open up 5 different search windows?) when you can just use Gmail?