Chronosynclastic Infundibulum

I got a Gmail account today!

It is being given out to all active users of blogger.com. I guess the users double up a beta testers.

Just browsing through their features and options. It’s far out! Very impressive.

This is innovation at work. Typically all web based email accounts were nothing more than email clients put on the web and displayed with HTML. But this is radically different. This is using what the internet and web search is capable of, and applying these to email services, what you have is an email service that is tailored to be used online harnessing the abilities of google search and web interface. This is an engineering milestone in online services. This is how email services should be provided online. There are bound to be clones of Gmail. But gmail was there first. With no uncertain terms, Gmail is going to revolutionize how online email services are provided, just like google did it to interent searching.

This “BIG” thing that was advertized about it was the 1000MB space, but that is only a small part of what makes Gmail unique. You need to use it and experience it to realize how laternal thinking can change the way things are done. This is going to become the benchmark for all email services. Spymac provides and email account with 1GB space, but it a far cry from what Gmail is set out to achieve.

Some of the cool features include:

• The highlight is 1000 MB of free email space
• No Folders except for Inbox, SentMail, Trash, Starred, Spam and AllMail. You cant create new folders either
• You label mails as you read them. You can retrieve mails indexed by these labels
• You can mark a mail as “starred” to view it in the “Starred folder”
• The best part is that you use google search to search through your mail
• You dont delete your mails, you just archieve it, and you can search for the mail you want through google search.
• The only web based email client with keyboard shortcuts, Yes! keyboard shortcuts!!

Look out for Gmail being publicly offered, it is worth paying for!

Here is an excellent review of Gmail from a beta tester.