It’s been now two weeks I have started using my GMail account (thanks Christophe for sending me an invitation) as my primary email tool (I forward my oberle.org address on it).

Like most people I was very impressed. The interface is very responsive, often faster than Outlook I have to use at work. The labels are nice improvements over inflexible directories. The conversation view is very clear and the keyboard shortcuts are practical. The auto-fill in the address bar is just fantastic for a webmail application.

But there is a big problem: The spam filter. In the last two weeks I almost received no spam, but GMail marked many legitimate emails as spam. I end up having to always check the Inbox and Spam folder. Newsletters, mails from my blogs, out-of-office replies, etc got all flagged as spam. Apparently I’m not the only one with such problems. The most annoying thing, a bug actually, is that I have created a filter to label automatically some mails, yet these mails are still marked as spam!

Lately people were wondering where Google was going with so many services still marked beta. But this problem with spam completely justifies GMail still marked as beta.

Other usability issue: On a message view, there is only an “Archive” and a “Report Spam” button, but the “Move to trash” command is in a drop-down list. Now I understand that they want you to archive your messages, not delete them, thanks to the storage offered. But there are some mails, while not being spam, which I don’t want to keep as I don’t want them polluting my searches. Maybe they should over some customizability possibilities in the interface.

This review from May 2004 shows that some of the complaints of the time have been solved now. The review is also regretting the lack of HTML editor for mail, but I hope Google doesn’t add this.

Google strategy seems to be keeping GMail it in beta until it is perfect. Lately I have also been using Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, and both are regularly improving too. Will GMail be good enough to convince people to make the effort of changing their email address? Sounds like a risky strategy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 26th, 2005 at 1:09 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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