Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Does Gmail Stand for Great Mail !!!!
I have seen the light and it's the Googleicious Gmail.... I know I'm just catching up with the rest of the planet here and some of you probably heard about the relief of Mafeking via gmail.
As regular readers will know I have been out and about a lot this year and have needed 'email to go' , my initial solution was to leave my office pc running Outlook , which downloaded my pop emails then inboxer & popboxer zapped the spam and forwarded the good stuff onto another pop mail account which I retrieved using the external accounts feature in my contenlo.net mail address on a paid email service I had set up with lycos a while ago.
This was working reasonably effectively for most of this year , inboxer and popboxer are very effective and recommended for mobile phone or blackberry use, the lycos web client is a bit slow and clunky with lousy spam filtering, and the retrieve on external accounts only works once each time you log in, but it works or at least it did until I renewed my subscription - I was a little late renewing due to the fact that they sent the mail reminding me to the admin account (yep the one you're not likely to use on a daily basis) without copying it to my main lycos one or my main email account. Anyway they renewed my service , but didn't renew my contenlo.net domain - the excuse being 'there's a backlog as we're switching from network solutions to united domains'
So any emails replying to my contenlo.net address bounced which was irritating , It occured to me to see If I could get a google mail account (partly to see what I was missing as a 'non-favoured netizen' , I have used Google for years and years and was onboard with adwords from the start yet no invite ..... I'm not bitter though!) , so I went to bytetest and using their googlemail inviter and was up and running in minutes .....
.... I have now configured my system very simply , on my main email domain , I simply forward to my gmail.com account , and then pull the gmail.com stuff down into outlook in the office or use the web client on the road. What the previous sentence doesn't even begin to say is that the process is very quick , the web client is amazingly easy to use and well thought through (The conversation metaphor , lots of records on a page , and the nice auto-refresh) , the spam filtering is top notch, you get nearly 2.5 Gigs, pop3 download and its FREE , I was paying more than $50 a year for the lycos service which apart from offering 10GB was inferior in every respect. Some people whinge that it doesn't support IMAP , but I have yet to see any use for IMAP that can't be achived more easily with webmail , I like to have an up to date copy of all my email on my laptop at the start of the week (synced from exchange) and then keep up to date via gmail.com.
I know it's fashionable in some circles to knock Google , but frankly in this case they have innovated everyone else out of the ballpark , not to mention delivering on the service , the only reason it is still in beta must be that everyone using email would want an account!!
Ps. If I get any gmail invites I will be passing some back to bytetest.
As regular readers will know I have been out and about a lot this year and have needed 'email to go' , my initial solution was to leave my office pc running Outlook , which downloaded my pop emails then inboxer & popboxer zapped the spam and forwarded the good stuff onto another pop mail account which I retrieved using the external accounts feature in my contenlo.net mail address on a paid email service I had set up with lycos a while ago.
This was working reasonably effectively for most of this year , inboxer and popboxer are very effective and recommended for mobile phone or blackberry use, the lycos web client is a bit slow and clunky with lousy spam filtering, and the retrieve on external accounts only works once each time you log in, but it works or at least it did until I renewed my subscription - I was a little late renewing due to the fact that they sent the mail reminding me to the admin account (yep the one you're not likely to use on a daily basis) without copying it to my main lycos one or my main email account. Anyway they renewed my service , but didn't renew my contenlo.net domain - the excuse being 'there's a backlog as we're switching from network solutions to united domains'
So any emails replying to my contenlo.net address bounced which was irritating , It occured to me to see If I could get a google mail account (partly to see what I was missing as a 'non-favoured netizen' , I have used Google for years and years and was onboard with adwords from the start yet no invite ..... I'm not bitter though!) , so I went to bytetest and using their googlemail inviter and was up and running in minutes .....
.... I have now configured my system very simply , on my main email domain , I simply forward to my gmail.com account , and then pull the gmail.com stuff down into outlook in the office or use the web client on the road. What the previous sentence doesn't even begin to say is that the process is very quick , the web client is amazingly easy to use and well thought through (The conversation metaphor , lots of records on a page , and the nice auto-refresh) , the spam filtering is top notch, you get nearly 2.5 Gigs, pop3 download and its FREE , I was paying more than $50 a year for the lycos service which apart from offering 10GB was inferior in every respect. Some people whinge that it doesn't support IMAP , but I have yet to see any use for IMAP that can't be achived more easily with webmail , I like to have an up to date copy of all my email on my laptop at the start of the week (synced from exchange) and then keep up to date via gmail.com.
I know it's fashionable in some circles to knock Google , but frankly in this case they have innovated everyone else out of the ballpark , not to mention delivering on the service , the only reason it is still in beta must be that everyone using email would want an account!!
Ps. If I get any gmail invites I will be passing some back to bytetest.
