It seems like every blog author is talking about their experiences with Gmail. Right now I’m using gExodus 0.2 to archive a couple of years worth of mail and it is a most efficient program which I highly recommend. A lot of people are paranoid about their mail being scanned for targeted advertisements, others are freaking out because they think that their mail can never be deleted. Personally, I’m not all that paranoid. If you don’t think that your broadband provider has trails of everything you do and could dig up an e-mail you sent through their server in a heartbeat, you need to think about that too. Aside from one gigabyte of storage, Gmail is fast, the search features are excellent, and it’s bound to get even better once it’s released. Personally, I am happy to have somewhere to put my mail where I don’t have to worry about backing it up and burning it onto CD all the time. I wish this was around when I was an undergrad. It beats the hell out of Penn State’s Webmail.

Thanks to Chris Holland I have a Gmail account. He was nice enough to extend an invite to me and I thank him for that.

My first impression of Gmail is that the interface is so clean. The only image is the Gmail logo. It’s spartan, but that allows it to run fast. A webmail interface built mostly on CSS without the clutter of images and ads that’s UNHEARD OF! Yeah Gmail is currently running at lightning speeds. Let’s hope its infrastructure will be able to handle the influx of the rest of the world when it goes public. The other cool thing is the keyboard shortcuts. Ironically, I just started playing Legend of the Green Dragon (web based MUD) and that also uses keyboard shortcuts which I have become very fond of. At any rate, Gmail is definitely worth checking out. Yahoo and Hotmail will not be able to compete with 1GB of space. If they try to, their already slow interfaces full of ads will only get bogged to hell. Let’s hope Gmail takes out its competition swiftly.

So there’s all this madness about getting Gmail accounts right now because they are invite only. My boyfriend went begging for an invite last night and and got one. I woke up this morning to email from him - my first email from anyone on Gmail ironically. I’m jealous of course because by the time I get one, my email alias will be like 40 characters long (mostly numbers) reminiscent of my most recent Yahoo! endeavor. I’m sure I’ll eventually get a Gmail account and it will be wonderful, like I’ve died and gone to webmail heaven, but I can wait. There’s no point in prostrating myself in front of a bunch of geeks that will most likely berate me before they send me an invite. I’ll just be patient and wait.

Hot on the tail of Firefox, Thunderbird 0.7 was released today with significant improvements. It’s faster, a little bit sleeker and very much in alignment with Firefox development. When Watch out cause it might eat your profile, but if you’re an IMAP kinda girl like me, you’ll be all good. All of you people out there stuck with POP mailboxes should be shopping around for IMAP mail anyway.

When these two apps hit 1.0, they’re going to be major players. I know on the Mac with Safari being slower than a hot afternoon at Shady Pines, Firefox is poised to make a big impression. We’ll see what happens.

Anyway, tell me what Mail clients you use! I am interested in seeing how many of you guys are going to hold onto Mail.app with the grip of death even as other e-mail readers continue to leave it in the dust.

So I gave up on Mail.app. I know a couple of people who couldn’t wrap their head around why I would settle for Mail.app in the first place. In retrospect, I wonder the same thing. I guess Mail.app was less cumbersome, slow, and irritating when I started to use it. Maybe I thought it would be less burdensome to my old desktop which was already laboring under the weight of Jaguar which was really slow and cumbersome by itself compared to 10.1 and Panther. Maybe the competition was a bit sad then. Entourage is bloated and I use it for school and school alone. Eudora never felt quite right on the Mac to me. I guess a bunch of things back then pushed me to Mail.app, and I guess it was OK for a while.

Mail.app has horrible IMAP support and I guess that’s what is driving me away. All of the waiting and the errors for problems that don’t exist get tired after a while. I’ve moved to Thunderbird and I’m very happy. I started playing around with it on my iBook and it’s very quick to load, receive, and send messages. That’s what I needed and that’s what I got. I’m going to miss the Address Book integration but I won’t die without it. Address Book is more important to cell/palm usage than to e-mail. I’ll survive.

What client do you use? Feel free to share your experiences.