Google bans Gmail swaps and sales

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Gmail isn't stable enough for regular use yet. It's still in beta testing!

I have a gmail account and I use it only for testing and reporting bugs and suggetions. There are many issues to be settled before it is as usable as other services. On the other hand, when it becomes ready for regular use, I think it has several advantages that wil make the competition have to respond: not by raising quotas, but by providing equivalent functionality.

My wife got a gmail account and she cannot use it because gmail currently does not render much of the email she reads correctly. In her Hotmail account she has no problem reading the same email. It's not exactly Gmail's fault: they've done a good job with standards copliant email messages. But the fact of life is that a lot of email composers compose email that is not 100% standards compliant, and an email user doesn't want to lose email just because the sender's software is not standards compliant: you're not going to educate your boss, you cannot educate the businesses you buy from, especially not the very big ones, and you better not try to educate your spouse. So you need an email reader that can tolerate what they send. The older services have years of experience and had solved most of those issues. Gmail will have to learn and it would take time.

So I suggest to anyone looking for a gmail account to consider the fact the gmail is still in beta, and probably will be so for quite some time, and for a good reason: it is not ready to go public yet, and users use it at their own risk. The deal is: Google let you have an account. You pay them by providing feedback. If you don't want to provide feedback, you have other options: spymac.com gives free 1GB accounts. Mailsnare, runbox and fastmail.fm give big mailboxes if you pay them, with much more than what you get from gmail right now, such as email client access.

Personally I'm continue to use my fastmail.fm account and since I got my gmail account I upgraded it to make it work with my own domain that I bought from namecheap. It's a much more mature system than gmail, and it let's me do what I want with my email, as opposed to gmail that let's me use my email in only one way (though very innovative. I look forward to seeing how it would impact the rest of the email world, in terms of search features in webmail and desktop clients). I know some fastmail users use a gmail account as an "email dump": a copy of each email message is automatically redirected to a gmail account and archived there. This way all the FastMail.FM email features can be used, and the email archive can be searched using Google technology.

http://www.fastmail.fm/mail/?STKI=83998

Posted by: hadaso   Posted on: 07/02/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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