Gmail Goodness
Well, I was pretty leery at first — I’m not a big fan of web-based e-mail, and I really didn’t expect “Gmail”:http://www.gmail.com/ to be any different. Sure, it’s made by “Google”:http://www.google.com/, but that shouldn’t really make all the gripes about web e-mail go away, should it?
Well, the thing is, yes. Yes it does. I don’t want to be a massive technowanker about this (because apparently people have “complained”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/xraystar/23636.html about it), but I’m really happy with how Gmail works for my messages. It’s organized intelligently, it’s fast, and although the UI isn’t perfect (the loading sticks sometimes and the pages never seem to 100% load) it’s pretty damned good, and by heaven is it fast.
Anyway…
I’m actually at the point where I’d suggest getting Gmail just to forward all your other addresses to it, and access them all in one place. It’s what I’m doing, and I love it.
yep, combined with gmail notifier, i hardly use a mail client anymore… love it.
Chris:
I was mulling over the possibility or making a desktop email search facility that looks like GMail. The closest thing that I came across is Zoe, but it really is rather strange. But it might be a good starting place if the license allows forking.
Looking at the Zoe forums I see that you have at least thought about doing some development on Zoe, but that you got stuck on the funky project organization. Did you ever make any progress?
Don.
Regrettably not. I wasn’t ever really given enough useful information to take real steps in understanding the project setup, and school pretty much wiped out the rest of the time I might have had to study the project org.
I might yet get back to it, because Zoe was a hell of a concept, but as it sits right now GMail itself fulfills all my mail needs. What I want to see is something that looks like IMAP sitting on top of gmail with proper folder views. Labels, etc… Which is what you’re thinking of, I imagine, although detached from the GMail central server. Are you looking at developing this in Java, or something else?