Google has a winner in Gmail. Review on Gmail.com

Disclaimer:

I don't know anything about the technical aspects of the internet. My review on Gmail is going to be from a layman's point of view because at the end of the day, all this technology talk should translate to something meaningful for the end-user. Otherwise it is not a sustainable or practical system.

What?

Gmail is an internet email service from Google. Before you write it off as Yet-Another-Web-Email-Service, I suggest you take a look at the remaining part of this review.

Where?

Gmail is available at https://gmail.google.com. However right now it is still in the Beta testing phase. So the registrations are restricted. You can join only if you get an invite from an existing gmail user. The existing gmail users do not have the luxury of inviting unlimited users to Gmail. Hence getting a Gmail account is actually very difficult. You can find Gmail accounts for sale on auction sites such as eBay and Bazee. (On Bazee, be prepared to shell out at least 300 rupees if you want a Gmail account.)

Why?

Of late the world has been divided into two parts - those who have a gmail id and those who doesn't. It has become kind of a status symbol these days to have a gmail account. By no means I am suggesting that this is the only advantage of Gmail. However this sure is one of the perks. Whenever I send a mail from my gmail account, the recipients are astonished. They beg me to send them an invite. Sigh! If only I can...

Gmail is an ultra cool email client. The interface is top-notch without being too heavy on the bandwidth available. A simple text based interface and hence loads faster. It offers 1000 MB of space. So you don't have to delete a message at all. (There is no delete option in Gmail!)

Every message can be flagged, put on a star dias, or archived permanently. When a message is archived, it is deleted from the inbox but is retrievable using the great Google search engine. This needs no further introduction. Google has extended its signature searching technology to Gmail. Finding a message is now a snap!

For more information on Gmail's features, you can access the aforesaid webpage. I will talk about my personal experience with Gmail here. The page load times are pretty fast compared to Hotmail and Yahoo. For instance, you can click on the compose option to instantly open a blank email. The request does not travel all the way back to the servers and come back. Since all the information required to create a new mail form are available on your client, gmail does not go back to the server at all to come up with the new mail window. Hence it instantly appears on the screen. The same thing holds good for replies and forwards. This is where gmail scores heavily over Yahoo/Hotmail. I had always wondered why Yahoo/Hotmail had to go back to their mail servers to create a reply form though all the information to create it are available on the current webpage itself.

The address book is quite cool. You go on typing the first few letters of the contact and gmail automatically displays all the matching results from your address book. Though Yahoo also has this feature, gmail scores because it is integrated with the core application and is not a separate download that you have to install on your PC.

The messages are grouped by the thread. This makes your inbox clutter free and allows you to read all the messages of a particular conversation at one shot.

I have always resisted being a webmail user just because I had to use the mouse quite often on web interfaces. Gmail took care of this too. Everything and anything has a keyboard shortcut. Type O to open a message, Y to archive a message, C to compose a new message etc. It is like a big gift :)

Alright.. I think I have ranted enough about gmail. The only drawback of gmail is the initial load time. It takes a while to load the inbox after you log-in. However once the inbox is loaded for the first time, it is much faster than any other web email programs.

I will update this if I have any new information about Gmail.