The day I broke Gmail

Like many other geeks, I’ve got­ten a Gmail account but unlike most peo­ple, it took me less than 48 hours to ren­der unop­er­a­tional (and this time, it’s not a joke).

First of all, let me say that while it is an inter­est­ing pack­age, it is not with­out flaws. For starters, the lack of indi­ca­tor when the Spam folder and/or trash have stuff in them is a bit dis­turb­ing. Sure, it’s not that much of an issue when you have a giga­byte of space but, for those of us who are par­tic­u­larly clean when it comes to online oper­a­tions (I gen­er­ally try to keep my vir­tual trash rel­a­tively empty), it’s a bother.

On the spam block­ing end, Gmail does an OK job but is nowhere near as good as sim­ply using Squir­rel­mail with Spa­mAs­sas­sin, or using the spam­cop black-list. On the good side of this is the fact that, in the course of a day of use (about 600 mes­sages, most of them spam), Gmail had no false pos­i­tives in terms of tag­ging things as spam. On the bad side, it failed to tag hun­dreds of mes­sages as spam. I’m assum­ing that Gmail has a learn­ing curve, like other email pack­ages, so I wouldn’t fault it yet on this but, look­ing at other pack­ages, it does not pass the test in terms of being an effi­cient spam-blocker.

The con­cept of con­ver­sa­tions is an inter­est­ing one and I can eas­ily see how this kind of inter­face par­a­digm rep­re­sents the next step in the evo­lu­tion of email inter­faces. It is clean, sim­ple, and adds tremen­dous value, espe­cially when track­ing dis­cus­sions across mail­ing lists. Com­bined with label­ing, it could become a good way to man­age mail.

Speak­ing of label­ing, I was dis­ap­pointed to see that every non-spam email lands in the inbox. If I set a label and/or rule against a piece of email, I would like to see that view move to a dif­fer­ent view/folder than my inbox. Once again, under the edict of keep­ing things sim­ple and clean, I gen­er­ally pre­fer to have a rel­a­tively unclut­tered inbox, with emails being fil­tered left and right into dif­fer­ent folders/views.

Another thing that annoyed me with the inter­face was its heavy reliance on JavaScript. There should be a Gmail Light ver­sion which does not require those tricks. This was most painful when I tried to access Gmail via my Treo 600. Since I don’t always sit in front of a full fledged PC, I can’t always use JavaScript and this means that, until Gmail offers either a way to access mail via pop3/imap or a non-JavaScript browser, my Gmail account will not be the pri­mary one. The other prob­lem with this is that cer­tain browsers, like the pop­u­lar Safari browser, are not sup­ported. That’s a prob­lem for those of us that do not believe in stay­ing with one plat­form and/or browser. I tend to use Mozilla when on a PC (kudos to the Gmail team for their sup­port of that browser), Safari on the mac, and Blazer on the Treo and in this day and age, I expect web sites to work on all three.

All and all, Gmail is an inter­est­ing email pack­age but I expected more. Maybe it was the hype; maybe it was because it’s a Google prod­uct. Either way, I’ll be fol­low­ing its progress over time.

mov­ing for­ward, I’d like to see the Gmail team develop an API (using SOAP or XML-RPC) so a devel­oper com­mu­nity could start adding fea­tures or build­ing on top of Gmail. It seems that this is another area that Google should investigate.