Gmail is Good

Years ago I worked on programming, administrating, and maintaining email services, including webmail, for a medium-sized company with a lot of clients. The problem is I was one man on a small team that had no business trying to deal with the massive amounts of complexity associated with electronic mail. While I have a fair amount of expertise on mail protocols and formats, I simply did not have the time or the resources to do any more than a "decent" job. And yet I was continually forced into migrations by managements and some of our larger clients, but those stories are for another day ... and now there's Gmail.

Gmail used to suck. It's possible my initial bias when I saw it years ago owed to the fact that I and my employer saw it as competition. Still, I recommended friends and family stick with Hotmail or Yahoo. My biggest complaint was the lack of folders and the new-fangled label-based organization which works fine if you're into that kind of thing, but hierachy freaks still enjoy their folders. Their anti-spam system filtered poorly and for some reason accounts people never published anywhere started to get lots of spam. Finally, the thought of getting another email address to keep track of simply exhausted me.

Well, I'm warming up to Google's mail service in a serious way, and I'd like to give you some reasons why you should give it a try. I highly recommend it to small companies looking for cheap and reliable email with a modest amount of features, sole entrepreneurs who want to consolidate multiple addresses under one private address, and people who prize the portability of their data to prevent proprietary lock-in.

Centralize Your Address Book

Entering your contacts' information in multiple systems, websites, etc. is boring and error-prone. Inevitably you forget someone, mess up a number, or miss particular piece of information. Gmail's contact system can be accessed through Google Data API's and there is an excellent piece of software called GCALDaemon that utilizes this to provide a local LDAP server. Basically LDAP is a protocol designed for standard access to directories of users and other objects, so a lot of email software can use such a server as a veritable global address book.

Consolidate Multiple Accounts

If you buy a domain name and put a website up on it, generally you also want an associated email address as well. For example, you buy "foo.tld" and you want

webmaster@foo.tld

for email related to that website. Up to this point what I've done is setup a new mail account on DreamHost and then either have it forward to another email address or check it periodically. The problem with forwarding is I can't reply as that email address, so the sender ends up getting a response from an address they didn't send to! The problem with a separate mailbox is forcing myself to diligently maintain it, something that becomes an absolute nightmare as the number of sites goes up.

Today I found Gmail's "Send mail as" feature and it blew me away, to the point where I started this blog post. It's so simple and yet it's something I've been wanting forever. All you do is click "Add another email address", type in the information, it sends you a verification message to that address, and finally you enter in the code you received. Brilliant, now you can forward all your mail to personal address, keep it private, and customers/clients/users receive responses from an expected source.

IMAP / Exchange-Like Access

IMAP is a protocol designed for hierarchal access to email, e.g. folders with nested folders and such. It's specific to messages whereas LDAP is more about a directory to find things like users, machines, etc. IMAP can basically be thought of as an alternative to POP3, because it allows you to get your mail from a remote server. However, the big difference is generally you'll leave the mail on the server rather than downloading it to the local machine. Gmail added the ability to access your email through IMAP a mere few months ago and has ironed out many of the problems early users faced.

What's really great about IMAP is you can interact with your data through a "fat" client like Thunderbird or Outlook (even Outlook Express) and still use the web interface as well. Additionally you can hop on another computer and setup the synchronization in minutes without having to download your entire inbox every time you "get mail". Importing and exporting large lists of email is as simple as dragging and dropping them between a Gmail IMAP and another similar-type account (IMAP, Exchange, etc.). Finally, and this is key, all of the network transactions are encrypted (SSL) so you actually get better privacy/security than when you're using the web version (assuming you're on an unsecured wireless network, like the free WiFi offered at various coffee shops and libraries).

You Control Your Data

I wasn't sure what to call this feature, but the simple fact is this and many other Google applications allow you to access yoru calendar and contacts through their Google Data API's and email through IMAP. This isn't to say the data is public, but rather you have programmatic options available to you for using your stuff. This is important to me and many others, because it prevents you from being locked into their platform. Any capable developer can write any number of applications to pull your data out, put new data in, or whatever.

Filters

Power users rejoice, these filters are simple and powerful. They can also be a bit of a security hazard when implemented improperly (that particular issue has been fixed), which remind me of the days of office macro viruses.

Label/Folder Hybrid

Organization systems are really a preference of the user and with IMAP support, Gmail has finally handed that power back to where it belonged. The web interface still uses labels and I'm using them more and more, but through IMAP you'll get to access everything in folder hierarchies which makes for an easier transition if you, like me, had everything logically sorted at previous services.

The inbox of Gmail deserves a special mention here, because all messages exist there as well as under whatever label you've given them. This means it can be used as something of a "RSS feed" for your email. Anytime any message comes in, you'll see it there first. Understandably this is a bit of a pain if you're subscribed to any mailing list and that's where the filters become especially handy in automatically marking those things as "read" before you even touch them.

Cons

As in anything, Gmail isn't perfect and I'll be the first to admit that. After all, criticizing software is something I do regularly. Therefore do consider all the cons and caveats carefully before leaping head first into storing everything on this platform. I've been trickling onto it slowly, dipping a toe in here or there before letting my balls anywhere near it.

• Signature Support is limited to a mere block of text and is fixed regardless of what address you'd like to send from. I'd imagine tacking an identity handler onto this would require changes to the UI, but as someone who enjoys making these things I'd love to see it happen.
• Corporate Reliance is a turn-off for many people so it deserves a mention here. You're relying on their servers to be up, for them not to look through your email, and for them to keep your information secure. On a side note, being a public company, it behooves them to do all of these things lest they feel the wrath of bad publicity.
• Context Advertising and Privacy are a touchy subject, because they are being served based on keywords in your messages. This won't be much of an issue if you use IMAP exclusively, but those of us meandering into the realm of AJAX may feel the vulnerability.
• Inline Images can't be inserted using the web-based RTE (rich text editor)! I know, it's a weird complaint, but it's something that I encounter a lot and is quite bothersome.

Conclusion

It's worth your time to at least try Gmail, and if you already have: did I miss anything?