Comments on: Gmail

by: Tom

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 19:30:44 +0000

And I DO like the interface, although they should stop moving/renaming the delete-button, it confuses me!

Hear, hear! For a time I couldn’t even find any way to move conversations to the trash!

by: LoeZ

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 14:32:52 +0000

^^ What they said.

My main reason to start using gmail was to avoid having to delete e-mails on my hotmail-account every day (because of the lack of space in there). (And I know hotmail provides more space nowadays, but they were a little late with that)
And I DO like the interface, although they should stop moving/renaming the delete-button, it confuses me!

by: Tom

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 04:20:42 +0000

I love it for its conversation view that’s faster and more accurate than Outlook, which I’d be using if I didn’t have Gmail; and searching through my well-labeled e-mails is super-efficient.

by: Trent Townsend

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 02:57:37 +0000

Personally I find the GMail interface to be one of the least cluttered of the freely available email services. I never cared about the supposed exclusive nature of it, when I got my gmail account, it was simply the best service out of all available solutions I was aware of. The 2.something gigs of free space is pretty sweet as well.

Hotmail on the other hand, I have absolutely nothing good to say about. Worst service ever, and gets more irritating every time they change it. Cluttered, confusing, horrible spam filter, ads everywhere for things that I could care less about (like I need feminine hygene products for crying out loud), slow and buggy. And IMO ugly, ugly ugly.

by: Eugenia

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 22:02:43 +0000

Yeah, but Spymac and the other gazillion email providers out there did not have any leverage. Spymac was mostly focused on mac users (originally) and that put a hard stop on their success, as 95% of the internet users wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about macintosh. Google on the other side, was already the No1 search engine at that point.

by: Administrator

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 21:41:08 +0000

but the fact that Gmail was the ONLY provider at the time who was giving away 1 GB of space.

I already had a free 1GB SpyMac account before Gmail existed :).

by: Eugenia

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 21:34:27 +0000

Actually, Gmail’s interface is much better than its competition’s: Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo!. I have accounts with all 4 and I have been using Hotmail since before MS bought the service. Gmail has better usability, it’s more innovative because of labels, autocomplete and such, it gives you more web space, it has a spam filter that works (hotmail’s doesn’t work as well), and it’s not loaded with heavy ads.

So, given the competition, Gmail is much better, yes. Google tried to create a “different” web application when its competition simply tried to create a desktop email client using HTML and JS. That doesn’t work as well and Google knew about it. So they innovated in quite a few areas. And people liked that.

And the reason for the original hype was not the “exclusive” part, but the fact that Gmail was the ONLY provider at the time who was giving away 1 GB of space. They now give 2.7 GB.