marteydodoo.com

I had previously made a private oath to myself, that I would only move to GMail once they had implemented mbox importing, which would allow me to move all of my old messages to GMail. As the title makes clear, I have broken that oath.

I actually wish I had switched earlier. While I had previously noted the positively wonderful user interface, my appreciation of it has increased with daily usage. And while I do not often check my email on other computers (because of security\privacy considerations), it is good to know that I could.

If this was a proper review of GMail, I would be required to have at least one screenshot of my inbox or something. However, this is not a proper review, and inbox screenshots are not interesting. Also, when switching, the layout did not bother me as much as the fact I could not import my old messages.

I like the fact that importing messages is now one of the features on the GMail suggestion page because I hope that means that the development team might be working on it. I have a couple hundred megabytes of messages stretching back to some of the first emails I sent back in 2002 (archived from my old Hotmail account from back when I used Outlook Express). It would be nice to have them all together in one place, without having to worry about whether it is backed up, with near-instantaneous searching, and the ability to access them from any computer.^[1]

Of course, there are several things wrong with GMail. Here are some of them, as compiled by a close friend:^[2]

• Conversations are all well and good when your email communications occur with only one person. Normal email programs, that separate conversations into the atomic form of individual messages are more useful when The threaded model of email came into prominence because it made reading "conversations" from active mailing lists easy. In GMail, long threads are appear as part of one conversation, making it hard to distinguish between individual trains of thought.

  It is also impossible to delete or separate parts of conversations. If I forward a message from a public mailing list to a private list, all of the messages still appear as part of the same conversation.



• Speed. Yes, GMail is about fast as Thunderbird using an IMAP connection. But when you move from a prestigious Northeastern university's connection to that of consumer hi-speed cable, accessing messages through the Internet becomes noticeable slower.


• While the keyboard shortcuts in GMail are plentiful, there are still a number of omissions. There is no way to delete a message or move it to the Trash without using the mouse.^[3]


• Although the spell checking is reasonably fast, there is no personalized dictionary. I am tired of seeing "Martey Dodoo" marked in red in my email signature. It would also be nice if the spell checking happened as you typed messages, like in Mozilla Thunderbird.


• Lack of support for email encryption. Maybe it would interfere with the advertising?

One good thing about GMail is the ability to jump ship. If I ever decide that I do not like having my mail stored in GMail and want to switch to another provider or a homebrew solution, I can just download all of my messages and never look back.

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^[1] Theoretically, I would enjoy most of these benefits if I kept all of my mail on marteydodoo.com: Dreamhost would automatically back it up, Thunderbird's searching is slower than GMail but still reasonably fast, and I could either SSH in and use mutt or install some type of webmail package.

I was about to try this, but two things happened.

1. I realized that GMail's user interface was nicer. Especially labels, which bring the joys of taxonomy to email.


2. I realized that it was going to be impossible to keep all of my email on marteydodoo.com without categorizing it into dozens of folders. A Dreamhost tech support representative suggested that I keep individual email folder under 1000 messages, in order to avoid performance hits. This was after I had moved more than 7000 messages into one folder.

^[2] Yes, that's right. You too can affect what I post about by spending large amounts of time talking to me online.

^[3] One would assume that the "delete" key would work. It does not.