I’m stubborn. That’s the first thing you should all know about me. I also hate change (I guess that’s the second thing). You know how your grandparents didn’t want to learn how to use a DVD player because it was too confusing and they would rather rewind VHS tapes with their external tape rewinder? Yeah, I’m like that with some things now, the most important being Gmail. Here’s a recap of my online, email client history and why Gmail is worse than any downloadable email client.
In the golden age of technology there were two things you could count on: the Ti-83 Calculator and Hotmail. Now, seeing as I’m 22 years old and most of you probably have no idea what these things are, I will explain them to you, and, as always, I will digress a bit. The Ti-83 Calculator was originally released in 1996 with Ti-83 Plus being released in 1999. The later is one of the most popular calculators to date and seemed to defy basic economic theory. Seeing as I am an engineer and have taken one high school economics class, I know everything there is to know about the economy and should therefore be trusted about my economic theories. This calculator has never gone down in price, which does not make any sense. It sports a black-and-white screen with resolution worse than the original computer punch cards and is about the size of a brick. Many calculators superseded the Ti-83 (such as the Ti-89) and yet it remains at $99.99. This brings me to the first point of my post: FUCK the Ti-89. To me, Ti-89 users are like parasites; they see that you are using an “inferior” 83, are forced to tell you how much better the Ti-89 is, and then look down upon you when you say you are happy with your current calculator (side note: replace 83 with PC, Ti-89 with Mac, and calculator with computer and you have every Macintosh user in the galaxy). Like your sweet old grandmother, I don’t want to learn how to use a Ti-89 calculator even though it can solve a system of equations and makes it is easier to write programs and does whatever the hell else it actually does. I am happy with my Ti-83 just as your grandmother is happy with her VCR, or Betamax player if she is a badass and likes AKs and energy drinks and shit. What the hell does this have to do with Gmail you ask?
FUCK Gmail (my second point of this post). Like LA Gear, most of you have probably never even heard of Hotmail, but like LA Gear, Hotmail was the shit. Hotmail was a free, online email client launched in 1996 that let you get your email from any computer, which at that time was a luxury. It sported pretty much all the features you needed and was, for the most part, stable. In my mind, Hotmail was the best online email client and straight up shat on ISP-based clients such as AOL and Netscape’s email thing and all that other garbage. Hotmail was doing very well until 2004 when Gmail was released to the public and everyone lost their shit.
Gmail, as it turns out, swept the world due to its easy-to-use philosophy and all of its add-ins like Gchat (whoa…Gmail, Gchat…seems kind of like iPhone and iMac only with a G). It also gave you tons of online storage space (currently ~7 GB), which was awesome if you were getting 100 emails a day with 30 MB PowerPoint presentation attachments…which no one does. I am currently using 0% of my Gmail space (54 MB). Yes, I use Gmail even though I think it is the worst thing ever. In the summer of 2007, I caved and snagged myself an @gmail.com email address due to peer pressure and the need for an alternate email address other than my school address (I stopped using Hotmail because my Hotmail account got way to much spam). The good thing about Gmail was that it grouped your emails into “conversation” so you could see the email history chain without having to search for past emails. And that was the end of Gmail’s positive aspects.
Have you ever wanted to add the sender of an email to your contacts? Initially it was automatic but that was soon changed after people got pissed that Ticketmaster made its way to their contacts list. Now, to add a contact, you must copy the email address, click contacts, click add a new contact, type in their name, and paste in their address. Why is there not an “Add to Contacts” button in the actual email? This would make it easier and not require you to change the page you are on, which is another big problem. Any downloadable client lets you open multiple email messages without reloading the page (fuck pop-out), lets you preview emails, add senders to your contacts, drag and drop attachments into emails, and organize your inbox into separate folders. I don’t want Gmail’s stupid labels; I want to open multiple folders simultaneously to look at my emails. Want to send someone an email with a prior email as an attachment? You can’t. Want it to send a return receipt when the recipient reads your email? You can’t. Have you ever tried to use the spell check? It sucks.
Is there a solution to my problem? No. If I download an email client like Thunderbird and link it to my Gmail account I can’t use Gmail’s only good feature, the conversation grouping. For now, I’m stuck. I don’t want MSN Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail and I don’t want Gmail. At this point I’d rather just send my messages the old fashioned way, through snail mail and the mighty, multibillion-dollar losing USPS. Nowadays, everyone is pretty much stuck using Gmail as their client even though some people may hate it. People are also stuck using iTunes as their media player, which is almost great but also sucks, and yes, I will rip that apart sometime soon.
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Its easy to hate on something. Lets see you create something as slick as gmail.
I don’t think this blog or supertrunks measure up.
You wan’t to go old school, fire up some juno. That was a whole generation introduction to electronic mail.
I have gmail. And I think it totally sucks. And there is no easy way to tell them the problem. If you have an easy contact there to fix problems that would be great!
Fuck gmail!!!
wat that’s derp logic. Out of all the email clients out there you hate on Gmail? Gmail is the slickest email interface you can get (unless you use MS Outlook) and it’s linked to more than just your email, so you can use the same user and pass to access Jewtube, Picasa, and a host of blog sites when you subscribe. Hate on hotmail or Comcast mail instead because they REALLY suck.
Anonymous, I agree with you. Hotmail and Comcast mail suck even more (I have had both) and I’m glad gmail exists. However, gmail lacks certain functionality that other clients don’t, including an “add to contacts” button. Now you could say this is done automatically but it always finds a way to mess it up. Having the same username and password for other sites is great but that doesn’t improve the email client. That just promotes Google and its growing conglomerate. Gmail could introduce a downloadable application like Thunderbird that manages your mail that would also keep the conversations grouped. This would cut down loading and eliminate pop-outs etc.
Quote: “Its easy to hate on something. Lets see you create something as slick as gmail. I don’t think this blog or supertrunks measure up.”
He doesn’t have to create anything. Gmail, google, arrogant managers et. al. are not above criticsm. YOUR post tries to stifle free speech. YOUR post implies HE shouldn’t have written an article. Arrogant. Like gmail. Gmail is missing about 10 really basic functionalities that have been around in other software products for years. But instead they spend their time making it all “fancy”.