Give Me Gmail!

For several months, e-mail messages have been arriving in my inbox
with the subject line, “Give me Gmail!” I had put an e-mail link on my “Better Googling: Things You Didn’t Know Google Does”
tip sheet with that subject line and an offer to give folks Gmail
accounts. After all, these free 2.5 GB Web-based e-mail accounts were
available only by invitation, so that Google could control the number
of sign-ups. After giving away a couple hundred (at least), I got tired
of waiting for Google to open up the service. It now has. Sort of.

Instead of just opening an account at Gmail.com, potential users have to go to https://www.google.com/accounts/SmsMailSignup1
and register there for a code that will be sent to a cell phone of
their choice. It doesn’t have to be their own phone, just one they have
access to (say, a friend’s or a co-worker’s). A one-time, short string
of numbers will be sent via text message to that phone, which then has
to be copied and typed onto the Gmail sign-up page. Once that’s done,
you get a new Gmail account. Right now, this works only with U.S. cell
phones.

I asked Eileen Rodriguez, a Google spokesperson,
whether people would be wary of letting their friends use their cell
phones, since it might keep them from getting their own free accounts.
In an e-mail, she explained: “Using one mobile phone number, users may
sign up for up to three Gmail accounts. We decided to implement
this method to help prevent spam and other types of abuse. There’s more
information in the press release and reviewer’s guide (http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/guides.html).”

So
is it worth all this trouble to get a Gmail address? And what
about the fact that it serves up small text ads based on the content of
your messages (a husband’s e-mail to his wife, asking her to pick up
milk on the way home, might result in an ad for the local grocery on
the right side of the browser)? 

Here’s what I think. Gmail is not perfect, but it has several things going for it.

1. The 2,500+ megabytes of free space is quite useful (until recently, Yahoo and Hotmail offered less than 10 MB each).
2. It can search all your messages very fast.
3. It’s got good spam filtering.
4. It puts together message threads into “conversations,” so
   multiple messages about the same topic are lumped together in your
   inbox.
5. You can use keyboard shortcuts to deal with several message
   functions — save time and some mousing (e.g., just hit C to compose; F
   to forward and G and I to go to the inbox).
6. The ads don’t really matter. No humans are reading your e-mail; the
   ads are served up automatically based on the text in the messages.
   Besides, your e-mail, no matter what system it’s on, is being read,
   scanned and examined by machines all the time.

Here are some hiccups you will run into when using Gmail:

1. There’s no big “delete” button — or even a small one. Deleting any
   messages means two steps and two clicks (this is part of Google
   philosophy that you don’t need to delete messages if you have so much
   space).
2. It’s not easy to sort your messages by sender or subject line. You
   have to search by putting, say, “from:jane smith” in the search box to
   get every message Jane ever sent you.
3. The “conversations” mode is useful, but unconnected messages
   with simple subject lines, such as “Hello” will get lumped together. So
   it takes some getting used to (in at least two cases, I have forwarded
   parts of conversations I didn’t mean to).
4. It doesn’t use a traditional folder system, but “labels” that you can use to tag your messages. This is not intuitive.

Lee Gomes, the Portals columnist for The Wall Street Journal, had a good critique of this in a May 2005 article:

Like a hammer seeing everything as a nail, Google
seems to see everything as a problem to be solved by search. Thus, in
Gmail, you can’t create folders and subfolders to supplement your
inbox, the way you can in Microsoft Outlook (and, indeed, in most other
pieces of software).

Instead, Gmail just has a big inbox. When you want to
find groups of messages related to a particular topic, you search for
them.

I tell my students to get a Gmail account (or more than one), even
if they won’t use Gmail as their primary service. You could use it to
forward and store your “greatest hits” — copies of important articles
you write, PDFs of pages you design, scripts of stories you produce,
e-mail messages you want to keep — on your 2.5 GB of space and have
them all accessible from anywhere on the Internet. You could use it to
automatically forward and store a copy of every message to your main
addresses (if your other service allows auto forwarding). That way, if
you ever need an old message, you can find it fast.

I joke that having all your e-mail together in one place will make
it easier when the subpeona comes. But that’s no laughing matter for
privacy advocates, who worry about Google making it not-so-easy to
delete messages. As you may know, with almost any e-mail system,
deleting a message doesn’t mean it has disappeared forever. Messages
can live on in servers, hard drives and all kinds of digital places. So
always be careful about what you type into a message — no matter what
service you use.

To learn more about Gmail, see GmailTips.com and tips on how to use Gmail as your second brain or as a backup e-mail solution. Windows users might want to try the GMail Drive, which creates a virtual drive that allows you to save documents and messages right into Gmail.

Here’s
another Gmail tip: In some older browsers (especially in newsrooms),
Gmail might produce login problems. If that happens to you, don’t go to
Gmail.com to login to your existing account. Use https://gmail.google.com/gmail instead.

If
you’d like to try Gmail, but can’t deal with the cell phone method
described above, I still have some invitations to give away. Just
e-mail me at poynter@sree.net, subject line = “Give me Gmail!”

NOTE: This Gmail rollout is part of the new Google Talk instant messaging initiative. My Poynter editor, Julie Moos, is a fan of another Google initiative, the Sidebar, which is part of the improved Windows-only Google Desktop,
which also rolled out in the last few weeks. She says she is finds
it very useful, “especially the ‘Web Clips’ widget, which serves me
news headlines and blurbs on my desktop based on my browsing behavior;
seems like it’d be a boon for journalists.” In the weeks ahead, Jon
Dube or I will review these services in detail.

Now I am
turning to you. Please help your fellow readers — and me — learn more
about your experiences with Gmail (good and bad) by posting your feedback directly at this link. Or you can e-mail me at poynter@sree.net.