On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 18:48 -0700, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Erik S. Klein wrote:
>
> > I've got a dozen of the same and have the same offer.
> >
> > First come, first served. Just drop me an email with your name and a
> > contact email address (if different from the one you're emailing me
> > from)
>
> Are these in high demand or something? Of what benefit are they? Can I
> buy some on eBay?
I had this conversation with someone the other day. Far as I can tell,
all of your emails are essentailly treated as a flat-file structure
(i.e. no folders / sub-folders) - so the only way to find something is
by searching for it. I don't know about anyone else, but half the time I
find it much easier to find things by remembering where I put them,
rather than recalling enough of the content to be able to search for the
item I want (and not turn up hundreds of results)
Furthermore, I believe that gmail doesn't believe in you using any other
systems than their own - no import / export / pop3 access etc.
Spam filtering - I don't know, but I imagine you're stuck with what they
give you.
Then there were the privacy concerns - as google give you targetted
advertising there was the concern that some process somewhere is
'reading' all your emails and acting upon their content. Whilst that one
doesn't bother me that much personally (I expect google to be compentant
in areas of security) I can see why it got a lot of people upset.
Bottom line to me is that it's not worth it - I'd rather go with a
flexible service. Actually I handle all my mail on a local server -
currently with 13GB free on the mail spool drive, and I can always use
grep if I want to search for something :-)
(now having the option of using google's search technology in a local
environment on top of a traditional mail app would be quite nice)
cheers,
Jules
--
"We've had a lot of loonies around this place, but you're the first one
who thought the sunrise was made out of stale beer. Now are you going to
pick up your flute and leave, or shall I part your hair with this
crowbar?"
Received on Thu Sep 23 2004 - 05:47:10 BST