Derek Bodner’s Blog

Gmail’s great. It’s free. Massive amounts of storage. Great spam catching. Taggable. There’s a lot that works very well.

But there’s just a few things holding me back.

First, tagging’s great. It’s far better than folders, from a conceptual standpoint at least. The ability to have e-mails in multiple “tags”, rather than in one folder, is great from an logical standpoint. I’ve always had e-mails that I wasn’t sure where to file them, then in 2 years when I need to look up that information, I invariably look for it in the place I didn’t file it. I’d be full-ready to give up the folder concept, if the tag’s were collapsible. But they’re not. Right now they just list them on the left hand side, in one level, ordered alphabetically. If anything tagging will increase the number of tags/folders I create, and after a while this will make the left hand list unmanageable if it’s not collapsible.

The second major problem I have is identities. Gmail can let you have specific identities, so you can send from the gmail interface from multiple different addresses. But this has it’s shortcomings. I myself forward my e-mail from about 6 different addresses to one account, so that I only have to check one IMAP account, and I get all my mail. I then setup Thunderbird to have different identities, and it grabs the TO address, and automatically sends from the right e-mail address. You can specify different smtp servers/authentication information for each identity, and have a signature for each. When you respond to an email from within gmail, it doesn’t correctly identify the identity, instead always defaulting to the main gmail account. You can change the address you’re sending from, but I shouldn’t have to do this manually. Furthermore, it doesn’t have the option to include a signature specific to that e-mail address, instead it simply uses your main signature.

Finally, I’d like to connect via IMAP. I’m old fashioned, and still prefer to use a mail client. I would love to use gmail’s webmail interface as a backup for when I’m at a different computer, and that’s really the use I have for a webmail client. I don’t want to be forced into using it solely. If the top two problems I listed above were fixed, I could probably get by without IMAP, and just setup mail-notification or something on my desktop’s, but until those two are resolved, I will continue to use gmail as a backup mail storage, and nothing more.