Google's Gmail: First Impression

I logged into my Blogger account and saw this notification that said that they wanted me -as a Blogger user- to give Gmail a whirl. I don't know if I am among the lucky few that get a chance to use Gmail before the wordl does. I am glad though. I signed up and here are some first-deko impressions: 1) Gmail doesn't support Internet Explorer 5 or below. It only supports IE5.5 and above. I have IE5 at home. I find that irksome; I expect a company like Google to offer its products with reasonable backward-compliance. IE5 is reasonable. 2)Other than that I like the 'Contacts' feature that automatically stores all e-mail ids that you write to. No need to perform a separate task. 3) To reply to an e-mail you just click in the form below the mail; no need to click on Reply and wait for the form to load and all. 4) 1000MB of space: I love it, but I am waiting for the catch. 5) Though they say the ads that appear in your mailbox or memos are inserted by computers and not people, I find that as a serious privacy issue: computers can be manipulated by people, what the heck we build them. 6) The custom 'Label' feature looks good; you can create custom Labels and mark individual mails with them. It is a nice way to track mails (from a particular source). 7) The 'Compose' link is not grouped properly; I had trouble finding it. I expect it to feature under say, 'Inbox' and I also would like it to appear as a Button (I am used to Yahoo mail I guess). 8) You can also 'Star' your messages: An Yellow Star appears against a message. It is a nice way of marking important messages I guess. 9) Also, I'd like it if the Logout link appears in the left-menu. Most of the tasks have links from the left-menu; that's the logic. 10) Ah! finally you got simple keyboard shortcuts: o-open y-archive c-compose j-older k-newer. 11) I love the Show snippets ( of the message like Google web search!) feature. 12) Since Gmail is a new entrant and all its users are probably users of other e-mail service providers like Yahoo, Hotmail or a corporate e-mail account, it'd be nice to have Gmail send notifications to 'oft-used mail ids'. For example, I would like Gmail to send a notice about a new e-mail (with possible filtering capability like 'send notice for mails from John only'). Sounds weird but I think this idea has something to it. 13) What about Gmail-Blogger interfacing? Can I blog using Gmail? Something like, I give my Blogger username and Password to Gmail and it allows me to choose a blog and make a post to it? 14) You know my fiance and I have been exchaging mails for over 4 years now. We used Yahoo. Now, we want to archive the all ours mails but it is a cumbersome task... I would like a mail service to offer a feature like 'Download folder' or export folder to various formats (CSV, xls, doc, pdf, xml... )
write to me: suman at sumankumar dot com

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