Posted By Ian on Jun 21, 2004 |
Something’s growing outside and making my allergies horrible. Washing dishes is the worst possible thing to do while sufferring from allergies. I went out and got a brand new pack of Tylenol Allergy & Sinus. Hasn’t kicked in yet.
I got a new pair of K2 inline skates yesterday. They were on sale at SportChek for $139.99 (from $249.99). Part of moving to Guelph is going to be able to have paths and sidewalks and roads which aren’t all made of gravel. So, I had planned to get a decent pair of roller blades. Not necessarily roller blade brand, but y’know. Anyway, I ended up getting a much awesomer pair than I ever would have gotten. They’re nice and light and have an awesome warranty. Anyway, so I went out last night with Cricket running along side. It was pretty good.
Cricket’s not used to running on pavement, so I think she got a blister on one of her feet. Today when she ran out on the lawn, I think it popped and she was a limping along. So while I was out getting some magical decongestant, I also picked up some gauze and expensive vet wrap so that we can let Crick’s paw heal. She doesn’t like the wrap and hops around like she’s only got three legs. It’s pretty cute and slightly pathetic all at once.
I got my first round of 6 Gmail invitations today so I invited all of those who were a priority on my list. I find Gmail is pretty cool, but there are lots of features that it’s missing. I’m considering adapting my TSNetworks Email program to take what’s good about Gmail and make it better.
| Gmail Pros | Ways to improve |
- “Conversations” are excellent ways to store message threads rather than messages, the only reason that works is that you can search the data to find what you’re looking for. To search IMAP mail, the program would have to use down time to build indexes.
- Currently TSNetworks Email can’t send attachments. Along with a terific auto-complete Gmail does everything that I wanted to accomplish. Including contact lists, MRU lists, etc…
- Labels are an excellent alternative to Folders. You can have unlimited labels per message. I don’t know how many times I’ve had projects that fall under more than one folder.
- Constant refreshing of the title tag so you know when you’ve got new mail is a great concept, but it has to be closer to the beginning of the bar. When I have 10 windows open I can’t see the (1) next to the Inbox.
| Being a free service, Google has concentrated on making things work effectively instead of making things amazing. The following would make Gmail incredibly useful.
- Sending profiles
I have 2 work accounts and 1 main personal account. I want to be able to send from each independantly. Even with Outlook you can’t maintain a different default signature for each account.
- More storage
Sure, 1,000MB is a lot of storage for most people. Currently I have more than 1,794MB of email stored in my two imap accounts and I’m only going up from here.
- Redundancy
I want to be able to access my email not only from a webmail interface, but also from any IMAP mail client. Adapting the label concept would mean a default label, named after the folder the message is in. (Like the “Inbox” label in Gmail.)
- Spam Filters
Gmail‘s spam filters aren’t much better than mine, what gets through mine, often doesn’t get caught by Gmail‘s either. Not too worried, since the last SpamAssassin update, things have been obscenely quiet.
- Cost
While Gmail is free, one would assume that anything I developped would have to cost money once completed. There’s too much uproar about Google’s indexing of messages to build content driven ads, that it’s not worth getting into. If people pay for their storage, (one time cost for my hardware upgrade and service) and a nominal fee for bandwidth, it could be the best for-pay service out there.
- Above and beyond
Out of office replies on a per-profile basis (all would probably have to be forwarded the same account for this system to work though) and the ability to forward all mail (and perhaps keep a copy) would be totally cool. That way someone could just set up a basic account to take advantage of the spam and virus protection.
- Reply profile automatically selected based on label
I know it’s a small thing, but the only reason I have two IMAP accounts set up is that I can’t automatically reply with the correct profile based on what folder I’m in. If I could I’d set it up so that I’d have three main “folders/labels/whatever” and all messages would fall under one of those, if I reply to yours, whichever main label you’re under (unless you’re under more than one) it would automatically send out with that profile. (Profiles consisting of From name, address and a signature.)
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I’m still going to fill out feature requests and bug reports. If Google implements all of my ideas, then I would be able to use them for everything anyway. I doubt they’d go as far as I want to though, after all, they’re in it for the advertising dollars.
I’ve had a headache all day and all of this thinking is making my head hurt. Time to settle in for a long spring’s night.
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