My issues with GMail

As I mentioned in my last post, I've just recently recived that one most holy of blessing, the finest, purest form of Geek Gold in existance: a GMail invite.

Since then, I've had a chance to poke around a bit and I have to say that GMail is not my most favoritest application ever.

I've got a number of servere annoyances, not the least of which is the fact that GMail requires you to have the latest version of your favorite major browser, on your favorite major operating system, with cookies and Javascript enabled. Anything less, and the login prompt is replaced with a notice that your browers does not meet GMail specifications. While it does give you the option to sign-in anyway.. this just sends you to a static page that reads, in its entirety, Loading.... So far, I've hit this brick wall on a W98 box running what seemed to be IE v.5.5~ish and a Solaris running Netscape over CDE.

But I run WXP and use Mozilla FireFox on my home computer, so problems with Solaris and old versions of IE don't bother me that much.. what gets me is the lack of customizabiity. Google wants you to experience GMail in one, specific way, and if you would like to change this, tough noogies.

Click The Image on the right for a screen cap showing some of my main annoyances. First of all: The Text on both the main sidebar and the Ad sidebar is too small, if I didn't name them myself, I'd barely be able to tell what my labels were.. and as for the ads, what good are they if I can't read them? Sure, I can make it a bit larger by hitting CTRL++, but that'll just make my actual emails too freakin' Huge.

Next up, all HTML images are turned off by default. While this is a good tactic for preventing Spammers from going into the kill, when you read graphic heavy newsletters, or even newsletters that aren't that graphic heavy, like Lockergnome here, all you see is a bunch of broken boxes. They've got a link you can click and turn all images back on, but you have to click that link for every message, everytime you view it.

The obvious complaint to make is about the ads. I don't mind the ads themselves, but what I do mind is the CSS layer they use to display them. Everything renders fine when your window is expanded and your resolution is high, but if you're like me and you regularly surf around in a window that doesn't take up the whole screen, the Layers get confused and cover up the actual email content as shown in my screen cap. for added irony, I chose an email where the content being obscured was a Google Search form. To be fair, this isn't just Google's problem, this is a problem with every site out there that tries too hard to use CSS to define one, single layout for their pages.. but that's a rant for another day.

Of course, the main complaint that anyone who is used to nearly any other form of email is the lack of an adress book. GMail has no method of keeping your contacts handy at all. Not a real biggie for me, but I'm sure some office worker or mass-forwarding, 14-yr old, canadian girl is going to be fairly peeved.

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All these issues aside, it's still a free Gigabyte of storage space with advanced search capabilites included.. so I'm glad I have my GMail.

Now that I've got all this GMail-bashing out of the system, I can feel free to look at the more interesting aspects of GMail: It's really less of an email client and more of an.. interpetation of email itself.

It's really interesting from a New Media standpoint, and if I had any more experience in critical analysis of New Media than one quarter of one class here in UCSC I'd talk about it further.

for now though: Pizza.